Well I won the race to be the first one of us to be properly 'out for the count' sick, and I managed to do it while stuck in a dorm. But luckily my lovely wife remedied that situation by finding us a nice cheap clean hotel room and navigated us to our local hospital (there doesnn't to be much of a GP system here), and surprise surprise the hospital in question was actually on our tourist map because it is the oldest operating hospital in the Americas. It apparently was opened in 1524 to treat soldiers injured while fighting the Aztecs. It was pretty quiet, we didn't have to wait and they russelled up a semi-english speaking doctor for us, and it didn't even cost that much. I assume this is entirely unindicative of the Mexican medical system as a whole but we were pretty well looked after.

Feeling able to get around on Sunday (powered by new bestfriend Limonada Gatorade), we headed out to the Anthropology museum which was really good, but didn't have any of the details translated into English which was bit of a shame. But there were some cool old artifacts, some really good displays of burial thingies and giant olmec heads which I am moderately enamoured with.

The next day we took two trains, half way across mexico city (return trip cost $1NZD per person) down to Xochimilco where they still have some of the old canals and punt little barges back and forth for the amusement of tourists and enormous mexican family parties alike. We managed to find a bargeman that spoke pretty good english and spent the next hour and a half cruising the green waters. Mainly watching the parties on the other boats and all the other smaller service vessels, from the beer boat to the deep fried empañada boat all the way up to the floating mariachis and marimba bands.

Then yesterday I got another good dose of ancient ruins when we took a trip out to Teotihucan (all the locals just call it the pyramids). Got to climb most of the way up the temple of the moon and all the way up the temple of the sun which is the big and wacky one. Rather than having one regular wide central stairway, the stairs split, stop and alter steepness as you go up. But it was actually a lot easier than it looked from the photos I'd seen, and jolly good fun. The site actually has a lot less variety than most we've been to, but what it has is really really good, some original paintings and interesting buildings, and quite an obvious and smart city plan.

We are either heading to Equador or Peru in a couple of days, and we off to see a few billion butterflies tomorrow so still lots to do.

More of you should write (or start your own blogs and send me a link).