We have finally made it to Mexico City, did you know there are 20 million people in Mexico City and they are all shorter than me. I have recently decided that I am not paranoid and people really do stare at me as they walk past. Oh well maybe the Lucha Libre (Mexican WWF analogue) later this week will have some giants.

As I guessed Mexico City isn't nearly as intimidating as it might sound as it is just an enourmous medium density sprawl almost every building is 2 or 3 storeys and there aren't any hills so you can't really get much sense of just how gargantuan it is. We are yet to try our hand at the famous subway but our guidebook is full of safety warnings like: "(On the bus and subway) stay alert and keep your hand on your wallet and you'll be fine".

We've been through San Christobal de las Casas, Tuxtla Guiterrez, Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, and (as recently as this morning) Puebla. Everywhere except Puerto Escondido was another spanish colonial town with a Cathedral and heaps of churches, and a big regular grid of mostly one way streets, even now they are blurring together for me. One good thing about the colonial towns though is they have been uniformly in-land and at altitude which has made a great break from the heat of the low lying areas.

Getting to Puerto Escondido was like stepping back into an oven, a somewhat scenic oven with a nice beach and some good food, but still my body is telling me it does prefer the cool of the evenings once you get up high. It had a funny feel too, lots of surfers and loud american tourists and not many domestic tourists made me feel quite out of place.

Near to Tuxtla was one of our best experiences so far, we took a taxi out to a little village called Chiapa de Corzo, where they were in full fiesta mode. The town square was packed with all kinds of stalls and a travelling amusement park (with bumper cars and kiddie coasters and so on). It was all very festive, but the reason we had come was to do the boat tour up the Cañon del Sumidero which is a river canyon with cliffs almost 800 meters high. It was a pretty oarsome trip, as we spotted a wild cayman (crocodile) and spider monkeys on the shore line. And a lot of the way down the cliffs were completely covered in cacti, and aloes. On our return to Chiapas the party was in full swing and we were entertained by some mexican youngsters doing (what we thought was) a fairly convincing cook islands dance, on the side stage. I tried my look ordering an enormous margarita from a neon lit bar-stall but probably only drank half of it before its apparent toxicity started to get to me.

Our only recent ruin (or maybe they've already blurred) was yesterday at Cholula near Puebla, which was I kid you not the worlds largest pyramid (by volume). It's so big in fact that when the Spaniards arrived to the overgrown site, rather than tearing it down as they often did they just built their church on top of the nice little hill. We got to go through about 250m of tunnels through the pyramid which the archaelogists had dug through while investigating it. But there really wasn't much to see compared to the other sites we've been to, except for the gee whizz factor of a fairly decent little hill being almost entirely man made.

Anyways a week in Mexico City to go before we hit South America.