It took five long days before I finally decided to go visit our second hospital of the trip and after a rather ominous lie down, let us attach these electrodes, and listen while three doctors looked at my little heartbeat line, and occaisionally laughed (I think they were actually secretly talking about football with no nurses nearby to scold them) I had the altitude sickness prognosis confirmed. I was quite concerned that having got altitude sickness at 2500m there was no way I would be going to 3500-3800m where Cusco, Machu Pichu, La Paz, and pretty much all the rest of Bolivia are, but it seems that with some helpful drugs my body did get around to pumping out more than enough red blood cells to get me back up and going, and I can now proudly climb two flights of steps without needing to hold onto something afterwards.

Luckily Arequipa was quite a decent town to spend a bit of time in, lots of good food, and a few monasteries and museums to poke around in. Notably one museum in town had a whole collection of mummies that had been found near the peaks of near by mountains and we had quite an informative tour about the mummies, which were Incan child sacrifices purportedly for the placation of malevolent volcano deities.

We also visited the much less bloodthirsty Santa Catalina Monastery which was completely closed off to the world for almost 400 years, and housed a succession of extraordinarily wealthy nuns through out the years. Church authorities tried to reform the convent several times taking such extraordinary measures as limiting each nun to one personal servant each. Now days there are still twenty nuns living there in seclusion in the modern wing while the 5 streets of original buildings are open to the public and look quite like picturesque narrow streeted Italian villages.

After I had acquired an adequate number of red blood cells, we jumped in a lovely Mercedes van with a whole bunch of Peruvians, Spaniards, and one english speaking Pole and headed up to Colca Canyon. It get's its name from the wee tomb that the Incans built for some of their leadership way up the side of some reall steep cliffs, but the real draw was just the steep canyon scenery complete with pre-Incan terraces and the Andean Condors who we thought we would miss out on as at the start of our second day we arrived at the the Condor viewing spot to find it completely enshrouded in mist. We did a wee walk through the area and spotted a couple of Andean Rabbits but not a single Condor. We rolled down the canyon and stopped at a lay over rife with hawkers and had a wee look at their wares. Luckily soon after we arrived we spotted a couple of Condors flying down the valley and gradually they came closer and closer until one landed on the rocks near by and another continually buzzed the assembled tourists (probably waiting for one of the assembled tourists to die so they could scavenge them) and even continued to chase our van once we had to hit the road. We also got to enjoy soem hot pools (the rest of the world really doesn't have much geothermal acticity apparently) and the most random of all restaurant cultural music and dance evenings, that culminated with a dance that involved biting a lemon, passing out and being whipped by their dance partner.

Pretty soon after our return from the Canyon we jumped a bus and headed up to Cusco.

Lima was a somewhat charmless city, widely regarded as quite dangerous, we were advised to stay in the afluent Miraflores district, and visit the historic centre during daylight hours. Not that there was much to see there, although we did hunt down the somehwat infamous statue of a lady with a llama on her head. The story goes that back in the day the Spanish colonials ordered a statue of some saint-ess with a crown of flames on her head and didn't bother to resolve the dual meanings of llama in Spanish.

So anyways we got out pretty sharply and headed to Nazca, which thousands of years ago was grafitied (which looks a lot like gratified) all over by some pre-colonial hooligans. The lines are actually made by careful removal of pebbles in an area that gets almost no rain and so the pattern of light earth under dark pebbles has been maintained for around 1500 years. The way to see the lines is to take to the air, which we did in a wee six seat Cesna Centurion (both Jacq and I's first time in a light aircraft). The trip is only half an hour as you start circling the various animal and geometric shapes almost as soon as you've finished climbing. The real puzzle of the site is what the fairly primitive folk were up to making drawings that you can really only decipher from the air. One of the early researchers apparently tried to build a hot-air balloon from pre-colonial materials to avoid the whole thing attracting too many UFO nuts.

Another trip on a double decker inter-city bus (complete with ¿land hostess?) got us to Arequipa where I promptly succumbed to altitude sickness (at the lowest limit of the altitude range where you might possibly get it).

Whew, I am so far behind on the blogging I don't know where to start, so I'll start where any real man would the excuse: altitude sickness is lame, especially lame is when you get it at lower altitude than anyone else and have it for five days. It makes your brain and your muscles all melty and weak. But the good news is that I not half an hour ago walked maybe a kilometre and a half with an 18 kilo pack at 3500 m up Cuzco's streets and felt no iller effects than if I'd done this at home. So I declare myself cured and once again able to disperse my anecdotal wit.

Rounding out our (awesome) time in Mexico City we went a little tour mad and did three in two days. The second (after Teotihuacan) was our trip to see the Monarch Butterfly reserve, I'm sure we stopped somewhere on the way (as you always stop somewhere on the way) but I have no idea where. It was a 3 hour drive through Mexico City traffic and the surrounding area before we saw the first sign of butterfly activity when on a main hill highway the speed limit was suddenly reduced to 10 km/h and there was suddenly a (heavily armed) police presence to enforce it. After a couple of turns in the road it was fairly obvious why; as the road was flooded with monarch butterflies and if you went faster than 10k they would smear all over your vehicle. I don't really know how to describe the density of butterflies flowing down the hill along the road and to their favourite watering spot, but if you were invisible, and somewhat permeable to the air and stood in the road with your arms wide you would probably expect to be struck by about 6 butterflies a second.

We quickly scooted down the hill and checked out the butterflies drinking, and trying to eat the brains of English tourists. But we then ascended the mountain on horseback for the main event. The nesting trees of the butterflies literally dripped with the pretty little fullas. They would swarm several 10m trees to the extent that you couldn't see the branches any more. And when you could stop the domestic tourists from talking about football and making cell phone calls you could hear the most amazing noise of a million butterflies flapping their wings, much like trees rustling in a strong wind but more demure and fluttery.

The night tour that same day was a different as, well, night and day. We went to the Lucha Libre. Its yankee faux-wrestling but older and down with style (and many more masks). It was mostly three on three tag team action with plenty of big rope dives and truly athletic throws to pad out the lame slapping and 'coffee break' holds. The best event of the night was the truly unexpected midget-wrestling (I believe that's the correct term when talking about little people wrestling). Two teams of three had two little guys and one big guy. The big guy on each team was there to act as a human pommel horse for the truly awesome little guys to pommel flip their way around their body, or to throw one of their little guy at the opposing bug guy. It was sports entertainment at its finest and they run it three nights a week, every week, in Mexico City.

That was the end for Mexico and we winged our way to (now not so) distant Lima, Peru. The flight went via Panama City which looked incredibly shiny and sophisticated from the air, but on rushing to the transfer desk with about 20 minutes to spare we were told our connecting flight hadn't quite left Lima yet. So baggageless, and exhausted we grazed on airline snacks and found a somewhat comfy couch to not fall asleep on. In the end we made it Lima at 4am, and perhaps unsurprisingly the hostel pickup guy was nowhere to be seen, so we caught a cab into town (told the driver of course we have a reservation) and begged our way into a dorm for the night/morning.

Wow that's only 3/5ths of the way through my last post oh well the hostel we are staying at has 5 free internet PCs so I think I should be able to catch up soon.

I heard the sound of a million butterflies
I paid to watch masked midgets wrestle
I got a little bit stuck in Panama
I flew over the Nasca Lines
I ate a Guinea Pig
(in that order)

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).

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.

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.