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.
Thursday, 29 January 2009
Saturday, 17 January 2009
The problem with writing a blog (as opposed to emails) is that no one feels compelled to send me emails detailing the minutae of their lives. So umm feel compelled, I care I really do.
We're still in Mexico, and have made our way through Merida, Uxmal, and Campeche, and are now in Palenque. The most surprising thing for us in the last week is that it really does rain in Mexico some times, and it can actually be cold enough to wear jeans and a jumper.
Uxmal and Palenque both have extensive Mayan ruins attached, and are both so different to what we've seen before. Uxmal is quite a small sight but with just the big buildings from the ancient city all packed together, with a lot of building carving present and lots of long galleries, a nicely restored ellipse-amid, and a pyramid that was mostly just a man made hillock.
We went to Palenque ruins today (once the rain had stopped) and it had again something new to offer, The Palenquins (yes I did just invent the word) buried a lot of people inside buildings that they continued to use, so the site has a small tomb you can wander into, and a really well stocked museum full of all kinds of well preserved carvings and some of the paraphenalia of day to day life. All topped with a death-size replica of Pacal I's tomb with giganto sarcophagus and all the walls made out of transparent plastic and us wandering around the outside. Pretty cool setup me thinks.
Back in the Yucatan the have got all these sinkholes in the limestone (you knew the whole Yucatan is a great big flat expanse of linestone that got pushed out of the ocean a few millenia back, right?) called Cenotes. We have been to two, the first (Gran Cenote, Tulum) is the older shape where a river flowing throught the limestone hollows out a great big cavern and then the roof caves in and you've just got this random hole in the ground, although in this case you've also got some extensive caves that they use for training scuba divers, and a really short stretch of underground water that even a Matt can snorkel across between the big hole in the ground and the little hole in the ground.
The second one (Dzitnup, Valladolid) was the less aged configuration and the pool is still underground. Accessed via a stoopy little cave you come out into a cavern about 30 x 20 m filled with an enormous pool criss crossed by ropes as it is really really deep except at the very edge. The pool is filled with fish, from the wee nibblers that will suck away at your feet if you stop moving for twenty seconds, to the bigger ones about 15cm longs that quite like to try and eat the nibblers in mid nibble, which makes for a bit of entertainment. And then are a whole lot of bats flapping and squeking their way around the roof of the cavern and coming and going through the small hole in the ceiling.
When we were in China I gladly reported that the Chinese aren't nearly as short as reported, where as here I think 5'8" must be considered gigantic. The average mexican bloke is short but makes up for it with swagger, and quite often a healty movember offering that would put a lot of aspiring kiwis to shame.
We've gotten used to seeing folk with automatic weaponry or shotguns wandering around. As long as they're in uniform and no one else seems worried, we're down with it. They have 3 seperate branches of police here (Federal, State, and Municipal) and they all get to wander round town with whatever guns seem to be handy, add to that the occaisional army checkpoint on the highway (no idea what they're checking) and the macho hombre's that do all the cash transporting around here and there are a lot of guns on show. My favourite individual was one of our first sightings, a cash dude standing in the local Oxxo (convenience store) bearing a pump-shotgun, and pointing it back over the top of his shoulder so that everyone could clearly see the shiny brass of the round in the breach. The fact that the only people in the store were two staff and four pale turistas trying to work out the contents of the exotic part of the drinks fridge, didn't hinder him at all from exerting an enormous 'not-a-good-place-to-cause-trouble' field.
My Spanish is still very weak, Jacquie is doing much better but my brain seems to shutdown in the vicinity of 15 different ways to conjugate a verb. Luckily most Mexicans are pretty long suffering when it comes to dealing with foreigners that can't handle the español, and I get buy with a whole lot of nouns, some numbers (which I am finally coming to grips with), and a lot of please, thank you and sorry.
We're still in Mexico, and have made our way through Merida, Uxmal, and Campeche, and are now in Palenque. The most surprising thing for us in the last week is that it really does rain in Mexico some times, and it can actually be cold enough to wear jeans and a jumper.
Uxmal and Palenque both have extensive Mayan ruins attached, and are both so different to what we've seen before. Uxmal is quite a small sight but with just the big buildings from the ancient city all packed together, with a lot of building carving present and lots of long galleries, a nicely restored ellipse-amid, and a pyramid that was mostly just a man made hillock.
We went to Palenque ruins today (once the rain had stopped) and it had again something new to offer, The Palenquins (yes I did just invent the word) buried a lot of people inside buildings that they continued to use, so the site has a small tomb you can wander into, and a really well stocked museum full of all kinds of well preserved carvings and some of the paraphenalia of day to day life. All topped with a death-size replica of Pacal I's tomb with giganto sarcophagus and all the walls made out of transparent plastic and us wandering around the outside. Pretty cool setup me thinks.
Back in the Yucatan the have got all these sinkholes in the limestone (you knew the whole Yucatan is a great big flat expanse of linestone that got pushed out of the ocean a few millenia back, right?) called Cenotes. We have been to two, the first (Gran Cenote, Tulum) is the older shape where a river flowing throught the limestone hollows out a great big cavern and then the roof caves in and you've just got this random hole in the ground, although in this case you've also got some extensive caves that they use for training scuba divers, and a really short stretch of underground water that even a Matt can snorkel across between the big hole in the ground and the little hole in the ground.
The second one (Dzitnup, Valladolid) was the less aged configuration and the pool is still underground. Accessed via a stoopy little cave you come out into a cavern about 30 x 20 m filled with an enormous pool criss crossed by ropes as it is really really deep except at the very edge. The pool is filled with fish, from the wee nibblers that will suck away at your feet if you stop moving for twenty seconds, to the bigger ones about 15cm longs that quite like to try and eat the nibblers in mid nibble, which makes for a bit of entertainment. And then are a whole lot of bats flapping and squeking their way around the roof of the cavern and coming and going through the small hole in the ceiling.
When we were in China I gladly reported that the Chinese aren't nearly as short as reported, where as here I think 5'8" must be considered gigantic. The average mexican bloke is short but makes up for it with swagger, and quite often a healty movember offering that would put a lot of aspiring kiwis to shame.
We've gotten used to seeing folk with automatic weaponry or shotguns wandering around. As long as they're in uniform and no one else seems worried, we're down with it. They have 3 seperate branches of police here (Federal, State, and Municipal) and they all get to wander round town with whatever guns seem to be handy, add to that the occaisional army checkpoint on the highway (no idea what they're checking) and the macho hombre's that do all the cash transporting around here and there are a lot of guns on show. My favourite individual was one of our first sightings, a cash dude standing in the local Oxxo (convenience store) bearing a pump-shotgun, and pointing it back over the top of his shoulder so that everyone could clearly see the shiny brass of the round in the breach. The fact that the only people in the store were two staff and four pale turistas trying to work out the contents of the exotic part of the drinks fridge, didn't hinder him at all from exerting an enormous 'not-a-good-place-to-cause-trouble' field.
My Spanish is still very weak, Jacquie is doing much better but my brain seems to shutdown in the vicinity of 15 different ways to conjugate a verb. Luckily most Mexicans are pretty long suffering when it comes to dealing with foreigners that can't handle the español, and I get buy with a whole lot of nouns, some numbers (which I am finally coming to grips with), and a lot of please, thank you and sorry.
Friday, 16 January 2009
Wednesday, 7 January 2009
I am so glad we chose to visit Mexico in the winter, or at least I was until Jacq reminded me we are visiting Egypt in the summer. It is hotter here in Winter than back in the NZ in summer (and just as muggy as Auckland at its worst), but at least you don't seem to be able to get a hotel room that doesn't come with a ceiling fan or A/C. Not that our first hotel room didn't have its ceiling fan wobbling away at exactly 6'4" just to really perturb me.
Actually thinking back the first night here was pretty rough, not only was the ceiling fan set at an inappropriate height but it seemed intent to fall off if we set it moving past the lowest setting (Not that great when you want to leave it running all night and it is set directly above your bed). And the quiet hotel we had picked off the main street turned out to be across the road from a dusk till dawn house party with the music set to 10 all night (it really did shut down almost exactly at dawn).
So that was our first night in Cancun, new Mexican money sink for North Americas heavily laden. We were staying in town while the afore mentioned yankees, canucks and even a good number of mexicanos were ensconced in one of what must be about thirty five star resort hotels built along a narrow strip of land enclosing the lagoon and facing out into the open Caribbean ocean. We visited the strip (aka Zona Hoteleria) on one of our first days and found our way to one of the few public access ways to the beach. The water is perpetually calm and the beach very narrow where we were but you could tell the beaches in front of the big hotels must be fantastic for sun absorption (as long as you like close stacked recliner chairs). We even visited our first Mayan ruin there, pretty lame in our new post-Coba & Chichen Itza world, but we enjoyed the low scattered ruins, especially when we realized that a fairly reasonable percentage of the broken rocks were in fact iguanas lounging in the sun.
Cancun town itself is very different, it's still targeted at tourists but a lot of those tourists are mexican (or at least hispanic, I sure can't tell the difference), and the atmosphere is a bit more down to earth, there is a supermarket, a bus station, and a scattering of restaurants and bars. And street stalls that seem to be in any one place for a couple of hours each day where you can get a simple tasty meal for 5 NZD. Which should lead you to the conclusion that Mexico is just a hair cheaper than NZ. Food is about the same price (barring bottled water which is pretty much necessary), transport is cheap, and accommodation is sort of cheap for what you get but overall I am not feeling the joy of travelling through a developing country.
Which Mexico definitely still seems to be, although no where near to the extent of India, and is much better off than China on some counts which apparently is considered second world. But all I see are the street level indicators. Mexicans mostly drive rationally, there don't seem to be many beggars and the ones there are, are almost all old and/or disabled (unlike Vancouver where they are all junkies), they know how to queue and are extremely polite and honest (although this seems to fade as one climbs the levels of authority as the majority of office holders seem to be considered to be corrupt). So it really is just a bit of economic development they are lacking to pull up the working classes to a better standard of living, and make the place completely unaffordable for tight-wad travellers such as myself.
We've tried a few new foods and haven't even been offered a burrito (apparently an entirely yankee invention). Most of our experimentation comes at the supermarket where we can make a slow decision on whether to chance tamarindo flavoured soft drink (yuck) or jalepeño flavoured chips (yum). Restaurant mexican food is somewhat as you'd expect, lots of corn (and byproducts like tortias), lots of salsa's, acceptable amounts of beans and occaisional outbreaks of steak and chips (but with difficult to pronounce spanish names).
Most of the beer is fine as long as it got a lime in it, the exception being Sol which is just as rubbish as it is back home but much more pervasive. Maybe its the heat but Leon Negra does a fair impression of Monteiths Original.
Beer is pretty popular in the heat especially after a dusty afternoon spent exploring some 'ruins'. We've hit Tulum, Coba, and Chichen Itza with each being somewhat grander than the last. Tulum is built right on the ocean, and a lot of people take a dip mid tour. Unfortunately all of Tulum is roped off so you can't really get amongst it. Coba is a really spread out site set in the so called jungle (looks a lot like classic kiwi bush to me) with a medium and big pyramid, and some carved stele that are far far too weathered to be distinguishable, without the diagram beside them. The big deal at Coba is that you can climb the big pyramid. At 42 meters and what seemed like just over 45 degrees the climb up was fun, and the climb down was a bit unnerving. The view from the top was just a see of trees, broken by the top of the other pyramid and was pretty choice.
Chichen Itza is much more extensive and has the biggest ball court and the best restored pyramid this side of Teotihucan (my next big climb). Again no climbing and lots of roped off areas but the scale and ease of access to the site makes it a great mornings explore (as long as you avoid the endless tour groups). The numbers used in the pyramid are all terribly significant. 4 sides each with 91 steps plus the top platform adds to 365, and by the time they built the current layer of the pyramid onion (they reckon its 5 pyramids built on top of each other in 52 year cycles) the mayans were no longer content with getting the sun to come through a certain window at the solstice and instead decided to worship their snakey god by making a trick snake pattern appear on one of the stairways each solstice.
The ball court was enormous and much longer than it was wide which gave credence to the scholarly position that the game wasn't about sport all but just about finding some likely schmuck to sacrifice. That said it had some cool carvings and amazing acoustics. You could get at least 9 good rapid echoes from a loud hand clap.
While visiting the ruins was pretty enjoyable I can't help but think they could have accomplished more with their 2000 years running the yucatan, guatemala, belize etc. if they'd been a little less concerned with wetting their knives and capturing slaves to carry stones, and done a little investigation into such abstract concepts as the wheel.
Actually thinking back the first night here was pretty rough, not only was the ceiling fan set at an inappropriate height but it seemed intent to fall off if we set it moving past the lowest setting (Not that great when you want to leave it running all night and it is set directly above your bed). And the quiet hotel we had picked off the main street turned out to be across the road from a dusk till dawn house party with the music set to 10 all night (it really did shut down almost exactly at dawn).
So that was our first night in Cancun, new Mexican money sink for North Americas heavily laden. We were staying in town while the afore mentioned yankees, canucks and even a good number of mexicanos were ensconced in one of what must be about thirty five star resort hotels built along a narrow strip of land enclosing the lagoon and facing out into the open Caribbean ocean. We visited the strip (aka Zona Hoteleria) on one of our first days and found our way to one of the few public access ways to the beach. The water is perpetually calm and the beach very narrow where we were but you could tell the beaches in front of the big hotels must be fantastic for sun absorption (as long as you like close stacked recliner chairs). We even visited our first Mayan ruin there, pretty lame in our new post-Coba & Chichen Itza world, but we enjoyed the low scattered ruins, especially when we realized that a fairly reasonable percentage of the broken rocks were in fact iguanas lounging in the sun.
Cancun town itself is very different, it's still targeted at tourists but a lot of those tourists are mexican (or at least hispanic, I sure can't tell the difference), and the atmosphere is a bit more down to earth, there is a supermarket, a bus station, and a scattering of restaurants and bars. And street stalls that seem to be in any one place for a couple of hours each day where you can get a simple tasty meal for 5 NZD. Which should lead you to the conclusion that Mexico is just a hair cheaper than NZ. Food is about the same price (barring bottled water which is pretty much necessary), transport is cheap, and accommodation is sort of cheap for what you get but overall I am not feeling the joy of travelling through a developing country.
Which Mexico definitely still seems to be, although no where near to the extent of India, and is much better off than China on some counts which apparently is considered second world. But all I see are the street level indicators. Mexicans mostly drive rationally, there don't seem to be many beggars and the ones there are, are almost all old and/or disabled (unlike Vancouver where they are all junkies), they know how to queue and are extremely polite and honest (although this seems to fade as one climbs the levels of authority as the majority of office holders seem to be considered to be corrupt). So it really is just a bit of economic development they are lacking to pull up the working classes to a better standard of living, and make the place completely unaffordable for tight-wad travellers such as myself.
We've tried a few new foods and haven't even been offered a burrito (apparently an entirely yankee invention). Most of our experimentation comes at the supermarket where we can make a slow decision on whether to chance tamarindo flavoured soft drink (yuck) or jalepeño flavoured chips (yum). Restaurant mexican food is somewhat as you'd expect, lots of corn (and byproducts like tortias), lots of salsa's, acceptable amounts of beans and occaisional outbreaks of steak and chips (but with difficult to pronounce spanish names).
Most of the beer is fine as long as it got a lime in it, the exception being Sol which is just as rubbish as it is back home but much more pervasive. Maybe its the heat but Leon Negra does a fair impression of Monteiths Original.
Beer is pretty popular in the heat especially after a dusty afternoon spent exploring some 'ruins'. We've hit Tulum, Coba, and Chichen Itza with each being somewhat grander than the last. Tulum is built right on the ocean, and a lot of people take a dip mid tour. Unfortunately all of Tulum is roped off so you can't really get amongst it. Coba is a really spread out site set in the so called jungle (looks a lot like classic kiwi bush to me) with a medium and big pyramid, and some carved stele that are far far too weathered to be distinguishable, without the diagram beside them. The big deal at Coba is that you can climb the big pyramid. At 42 meters and what seemed like just over 45 degrees the climb up was fun, and the climb down was a bit unnerving. The view from the top was just a see of trees, broken by the top of the other pyramid and was pretty choice.
Chichen Itza is much more extensive and has the biggest ball court and the best restored pyramid this side of Teotihucan (my next big climb). Again no climbing and lots of roped off areas but the scale and ease of access to the site makes it a great mornings explore (as long as you avoid the endless tour groups). The numbers used in the pyramid are all terribly significant. 4 sides each with 91 steps plus the top platform adds to 365, and by the time they built the current layer of the pyramid onion (they reckon its 5 pyramids built on top of each other in 52 year cycles) the mayans were no longer content with getting the sun to come through a certain window at the solstice and instead decided to worship their snakey god by making a trick snake pattern appear on one of the stairways each solstice.
The ball court was enormous and much longer than it was wide which gave credence to the scholarly position that the game wasn't about sport all but just about finding some likely schmuck to sacrifice. That said it had some cool carvings and amazing acoustics. You could get at least 9 good rapid echoes from a loud hand clap.
While visiting the ruins was pretty enjoyable I can't help but think they could have accomplished more with their 2000 years running the yucatan, guatemala, belize etc. if they'd been a little less concerned with wetting their knives and capturing slaves to carry stones, and done a little investigation into such abstract concepts as the wheel.
Monday, 5 January 2009
Vancouver had collected the lions share of Canadas west coast snow allocation before we got there. 60cm of snow doesn´t disappear very quickly especially when the city its dropped into just isn't used to it. Our week there started with a trip into downtown for Jacquie to have a poke around, and we got to test out our super light (and super budget) rain coats. They proved to be resistant to rain, snow and a short burst of hail. The rest of the week brought more snow and the sidewalks were constantly shifting from easily navigable to covered in extremely treacherous black ice.
This was brought home especially strongly on the morning of the 2nd while we were enroute to my sisters house about 9am in the morning and a lady about 50m from us lost both feet out from underneath her on a patch of black ice and cracked her head on the pavement. Our first instinct was to run to help her but of course the whole area was actually all very very slippery and we could manage no more than a normal walking pace. I ended up being the one calling the ambulance when we realised that though conscious she certainly wasn't all there and that when she did try and move she left quite a patch of blood on the ice. One after the other the police, fire department and then paramedics arrived and all went through the same black comedy routine of:
Bystanders: "Careful its really slippery"
Emergency Services Person: "Oh it's really slippery, Aye?"
Bystanders: "Yeah"
Anyways the lady did promptly get carted off to the hospital and hopefully is fine, but Canada loses a lot of people to winter each year. The news was full of items like '8 dead in avalance' or 'old lady freezes to death outside of rest home'. Add to that all the people that die in car crashes in the often appalling conditions and occaisional bear mauling and Canada is right up there with Australia on the 'Not quite as safe as you might think' list.
Most of the reason for going to Vancouver was to see more family, which we only partially accomplished, but other members of my family wanting to visit at the same time my sisters wee 2 bedroom apartment suddenly seemed rather undersized so we decided to give couchsurfing a go. We had joined up to the couchsurfing website a few months ago and had hosted a few travelers from various locations in our spare room, but this was our first time on the surfing end. We sent out some requests for accomodation over new years and got a couple of yes's almost immediately. Both were near to my sisters house so were terribly convenient, and both were very positive experiences. It was great to talk to some 'ordinary' folks about living in Canada and meeting people is part of what travelling is all about. But I think I find the whole 2 day meet, chat, leave cycle we had going kind of weird. We will probably have another go when we get to Mexico City but it looks like we will be staying in hostels most of the time in Mexico.
We also got to the Aquarium while we were there which is worth the visit if your ever in the neighbourhood, lots of interesting jellyfish, archerfish (who spit prawns off the side of their tank and eat them), and some humongous amazonian Arapaima (fish almost 2m long are a little scary). And lets not forget the Beluga's, some of you might not be particularly surprised that my favourite part of the day was seeing the staff training a beluga to wiggle its melon (overgrown sonar emitting forehead).
We've moved onto Mexico now and are basking in some serious heat all of a sudden, but more about I'll have to write about that another day.
This was brought home especially strongly on the morning of the 2nd while we were enroute to my sisters house about 9am in the morning and a lady about 50m from us lost both feet out from underneath her on a patch of black ice and cracked her head on the pavement. Our first instinct was to run to help her but of course the whole area was actually all very very slippery and we could manage no more than a normal walking pace. I ended up being the one calling the ambulance when we realised that though conscious she certainly wasn't all there and that when she did try and move she left quite a patch of blood on the ice. One after the other the police, fire department and then paramedics arrived and all went through the same black comedy routine of:
Bystanders: "Careful its really slippery"
Emergency Services Person:
Bystanders: "Yeah"
Anyways the lady did promptly get carted off to the hospital and hopefully is fine, but Canada loses a lot of people to winter each year. The news was full of items like '8 dead in avalance' or 'old lady freezes to death outside of rest home'. Add to that all the people that die in car crashes in the often appalling conditions and occaisional bear mauling and Canada is right up there with Australia on the 'Not quite as safe as you might think' list.
Most of the reason for going to Vancouver was to see more family, which we only partially accomplished, but other members of my family wanting to visit at the same time my sisters wee 2 bedroom apartment suddenly seemed rather undersized so we decided to give couchsurfing a go. We had joined up to the couchsurfing website a few months ago and had hosted a few travelers from various locations in our spare room, but this was our first time on the surfing end. We sent out some requests for accomodation over new years and got a couple of yes's almost immediately. Both were near to my sisters house so were terribly convenient, and both were very positive experiences. It was great to talk to some 'ordinary' folks about living in Canada and meeting people is part of what travelling is all about. But I think I find the whole 2 day meet, chat, leave cycle we had going kind of weird. We will probably have another go when we get to Mexico City but it looks like we will be staying in hostels most of the time in Mexico.
We also got to the Aquarium while we were there which is worth the visit if your ever in the neighbourhood, lots of interesting jellyfish, archerfish (who spit prawns off the side of their tank and eat them), and some humongous amazonian Arapaima (fish almost 2m long are a little scary). And lets not forget the Beluga's, some of you might not be particularly surprised that my favourite part of the day was seeing the staff training a beluga to wiggle its melon (overgrown sonar emitting forehead).
We've moved onto Mexico now and are basking in some serious heat all of a sudden, but more about I'll have to write about that another day.
Tuesday, 23 December 2008
Penticton, BC has been unusually cold, it was -18 when we arrived, but is now up to a more reasonable -5 during the day. Super light fluffy snow has fallen pretty constantly for the last two days, if you look carefully you can actually see those perfect little hexagonal crystal shapes, piling up on the car windows. No doubt there will be another team driveway clearing exercise this morning. Which may even be followed by a bit of a stroll down to the lake front which must only be a km away.
Our days here have been pretty relaxed, its a day of cooking meals, reading, cable TV, and expeditions to keep the over-sized stove from emptying the over-sized fridge of over-sized food. I think the only thing that is the same size over here is the beer, you can get double decker 24 packs of eggs, 1.5l bottles of (what appears to be) decent wine, and 1 litre tubs of whipped cream. It may all stem from the size of the oven you need to cook a turkey twice a year. A 'normal' sized fridge might look strange sitting next to it.
Getting here was probably just as you'd expect. The 13 hour flight to Vancouver was gruelling, followed by the longest immigration queue you'd ever seen. It actually bought out a hint of sympathy in me for the parentals having to hold their kids while shuffling slowly forward for an hour. Trying to transfer to our internal flight also proved challenging as problems with the electronic ticketing system meant it took half an hour for the (polite and friendly) transfer lady to generate us a boarding pass to Kelowna. But this time we managed to avoid the snow storms on our way in and arrived at Kelowna airport at dusk with family waiting for us. Unfortunately Jacquie's bag didn't quite make the plane, but the (polite and friendly) lost baggage lady assured us it was reasonably normal in winter, and proved it by pointing out the 20 or so bags awaiting distribution to people who arrived yesterday. And far from the stories of woe I have heard from other airlines, a semi-scruffy (but polite and friendly) young man drove an hour through the snow to deliver Jacquie's ancient red backpack to its enthusiastic recipient. I do hope he wears a santa suit next week.
My Dad's new house is a 3 bedroom job in a 'senior's estate' (freehold homes off a right of way with a covenant limiting the minimum age of the occupiers) a short walk from one of the two lakes Penticton is nestled between. It's more than big enough for Pa, my step-mom and their enormous ginger tom 'Lion', but we're going to be stretched to the limit as one sister preceded us here, and two brothers plus a girlfriend are due in over the next couple of days. Its pretty sweet to be the longest travelling guests and score the second bedroom.
I find coming to a country like Canada can be more disorienting than more exotic destinations. Everything is sort of the same here but here when you see an over sized 4 by 4 cruising through the snow, it just looks appropriately safe. When we were out with the snow falling yesterday I swear only 20% of the vehicles on the road were car shaped, and you felt a little sorry for them. We visited a mall yesterday (had a Flight Centre, Body Shop, and a Michael Hill) it was much of a muchness except that every department store in Canada (and there are a lot) seemed to start off as something really specialized. London Drugs and the Bay (which started as The Hudson's Bay Company controlling the North American fur trade) seem to be pretty standard Warehouse analogues, while you can go to Canadian Tire for anything you might find at Mitre 10, Repco or indeed Beaurepaires back in NZ. And the one thing so far that does set off my obsessive compulsive annoy-o-meter is that they still have all those silly little coins here, but rather than ignore them, they force them on everyone by adding exactly 17.4% tax to the sticker price of every item.
Last time I was here I'm not sure I saw a single wild animal, but so far I have seen ducks, and swans both swimming in water that is valiantly trying to stay unfrozen, some quail running in the snow, and a small herd of California big horn sheep. I don't know if I'll luck out and see a wild moose or even a deer but here's hoping.
Our days here have been pretty relaxed, its a day of cooking meals, reading, cable TV, and expeditions to keep the over-sized stove from emptying the over-sized fridge of over-sized food. I think the only thing that is the same size over here is the beer, you can get double decker 24 packs of eggs, 1.5l bottles of (what appears to be) decent wine, and 1 litre tubs of whipped cream. It may all stem from the size of the oven you need to cook a turkey twice a year. A 'normal' sized fridge might look strange sitting next to it.
Getting here was probably just as you'd expect. The 13 hour flight to Vancouver was gruelling, followed by the longest immigration queue you'd ever seen. It actually bought out a hint of sympathy in me for the parentals having to hold their kids while shuffling slowly forward for an hour. Trying to transfer to our internal flight also proved challenging as problems with the electronic ticketing system meant it took half an hour for the (polite and friendly) transfer lady to generate us a boarding pass to Kelowna. But this time we managed to avoid the snow storms on our way in and arrived at Kelowna airport at dusk with family waiting for us. Unfortunately Jacquie's bag didn't quite make the plane, but the (polite and friendly) lost baggage lady assured us it was reasonably normal in winter, and proved it by pointing out the 20 or so bags awaiting distribution to people who arrived yesterday. And far from the stories of woe I have heard from other airlines, a semi-scruffy (but polite and friendly) young man drove an hour through the snow to deliver Jacquie's ancient red backpack to its enthusiastic recipient. I do hope he wears a santa suit next week.
My Dad's new house is a 3 bedroom job in a 'senior's estate' (freehold homes off a right of way with a covenant limiting the minimum age of the occupiers) a short walk from one of the two lakes Penticton is nestled between. It's more than big enough for Pa, my step-mom and their enormous ginger tom 'Lion', but we're going to be stretched to the limit as one sister preceded us here, and two brothers plus a girlfriend are due in over the next couple of days. Its pretty sweet to be the longest travelling guests and score the second bedroom.
I find coming to a country like Canada can be more disorienting than more exotic destinations. Everything is sort of the same here but here when you see an over sized 4 by 4 cruising through the snow, it just looks appropriately safe. When we were out with the snow falling yesterday I swear only 20% of the vehicles on the road were car shaped, and you felt a little sorry for them. We visited a mall yesterday (had a Flight Centre, Body Shop, and a Michael Hill) it was much of a muchness except that every department store in Canada (and there are a lot) seemed to start off as something really specialized. London Drugs and the Bay (which started as The Hudson's Bay Company controlling the North American fur trade) seem to be pretty standard Warehouse analogues, while you can go to Canadian Tire for anything you might find at Mitre 10, Repco or indeed Beaurepaires back in NZ. And the one thing so far that does set off my obsessive compulsive annoy-o-meter is that they still have all those silly little coins here, but rather than ignore them, they force them on everyone by adding exactly 17.4% tax to the sticker price of every item.
Last time I was here I'm not sure I saw a single wild animal, but so far I have seen ducks, and swans both swimming in water that is valiantly trying to stay unfrozen, some quail running in the snow, and a small herd of California big horn sheep. I don't know if I'll luck out and see a wild moose or even a deer but here's hoping.
Tuesday, 2 December 2008
Welcome to my shiny new blog, its first function will be to serve as a repository for my travel musings as my lovely wife and I spend the next year travelling the world.
Our plan so far is:
Our plan so far is:
- Christmas and New Years in British Columbia with the Murphy's
- January in Mexico; starting in the Yucatan and heading west to Mexico City
- February to Mid April in South America; trying to fit in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil
- End of April to Mid May; Portugal, Spain and Morocco
- Mid May to Mid August; we have a whole 3 months to do Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Turkey and then branch out to the UK or Eastern Europe or who knows where
- End of August in Goa; we spend two weeks relaxing doing nothing much and going to places we've already been
- September in South India; back to actual travelling exploring Karnataka and surrounds
- October to Mid November in South East Asia; a random assortment of Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos
- Mid November to Mid December in China; Jacq shows me round all the places in South China that she's always wanted to show me round
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