History
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Breakfast With Peacocks, Coca-Cola Burps & Drinking Pox: Tales From San Cristobal
Emerging somewhat bleary eyed from the overnight bus journey – although we both slept better than we thought we would – and blinking in the morning sun, the crisp freshness of the mountain air strikes us immediately. After several stays in humid locations over the last few weeks, culminating in the cloying air of Palenque, it feels like a completely different climate here. We are some 2,100 metres higher above sea level than we were in Palenque and it is instantly noticeably different. This is San Cristobal de las Casas, where evenings will be chilly and, if all goes according to plan, virtually the last point at which we feel…
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Mexico By Bus: Veracruz-Villahermosa-Palenque
Order a drink called “lechero”. Your waiter will deliver a tall glass with a generous measure of espresso coffee in the bottom. What you must do next is tap loudly on the glass with your spoon, and immediately a different, immaculately uniformed waiter will dash to your table armed with pots filled with hot milk, and flamboyantly pour it into your coffee from a great height, theatrically stopping just as your glass reaches the brim full point. Welcome to Gran Cafe de la Parroquia, Veracruz, established in 1808 and apparently serving their lechero in this extrovert style for over 200 years. We’d read about it before we arrived here and,…
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Veracruz & Boca del Rio: Baking Sun & Flash Floods
The very word Veracruz conjures up certain visions – romantic, exotic, dynamic – although maybe I’m swayed a bit by the fact that there’s a Santana song bearing the city’s name as its title which is all about falling in love whilst within the city’s conducive ocean setting. Consequently we venture there with a great sense of anticipation, eager to see it for ourselves. As it happens, we are about to be underwhelmed, and the reality is that Veracruz doesn’t quite meet those expectations. A near 6-hour bus journey from Mexico City sounds like it could be a bit of a trial but the ADO bus is extremely comfortable and…
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Mexico City: CDMX #2
Delicious smells from the city’s bakeries fill the air before we’re properly awake. Another day dawns and it’s once again time to climb on to the speeding merry-go-round which is Mexico City, there’s still so much more to see and do. Hernan Cortes and his cohorts may have taken the 16th century equivalent of a bulldozer to ancient history, but at least the period of Spanish occupation saw the construction of a majestic and beautiful city in its place; you only have to see the Palacio de Belles Artes, the Casa Ajuelos, the churches, even the Post Office, to love the grand architecture of this giant city. Yes, even the…
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Mexico City: CDMX #1
It’s fascinating how the sounds of a city can be a part of defining its character, it can be a charm or a challenge, a boon or a burden. Earlier this year we were in Cairo, where the constant ear battering of traffic noise and raised voices soon becomes tiresome. Mexico City, in contrast, though just as loud and just as constant, has a soundtrack which is for the most part one of carnival and music. Chatter and laughter fills the streets, music drifts upward from every corner. It’s the sound of fiesta rather than frustration, joy rather than jams, an immediately exciting and enticing environment where the wall of…
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Hola Guadalajara. Olé! Tequila!
Now and again something inside the grey-white cloud flickers like a fluorescent lamp behind a curtain, then a streak of lightning shoots sideways across the sky. A vertical bolt flashes directly to the ground. With eastward movement and night time approaching, there is a point where, from the aeroplane window, the orange sunset is reflected in clouds, yet the darkness of dusk is clearly visible further east beyond the colour. As we near Guadalajara, the thunder storm, at roughly the same altitude as the plane, just adds to this unusual scene. A few delays en route means a late arrival, so it’s morning before we get our first chance to…
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Rocks, Trees & Fault Lines: Back Into California
When you imagine temperatures of over 110F (43C), you picture blistering sunshine and the need to find shade, yet for a good part of our drive across the desert from the Grand Canyon to Joshua Tree, the temperature gauge is up there above that number yet the skies are consistently overcast. It even rains a couple of times. When we step out of the car for a break, we are hit by a wall of heat incompatible with the cloudy skies above. Leaving the Interstate 140, we drive south west through some extraordinarily barren country, miles of dead straight road through open land. Once past the salt flats at Amboy…
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A Ghost Town, Route 66 And Rock ‘n’ Roll: Yosemite-Barstow-Arizona
It’s not hard to work out why we chose the town of Barstow, and the Route 66 Motel, as our overnight stay on our longest drive of this trip. A Route 66 town? Route 66 Motel? Classic cars preserved in the motel grounds…why wouldn’t you?? The route from Yosemite to Barstow is ridiculously diverse: first the mountains of Yosemite, then the richly verdant fruit farm regions, then the flatlands as the world becomes more and more spartan. Once past Bakersfield, Spanish language signs reappear, something we didn’t see to the same extent in Northern California but are commonplace down here. Over the mountains we go, dropping next into the Mojave…
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San Francisco #2
For those of us of a certain age, the very words “San Francisco” evoke memories of 1960s music, flower power, the hippy generation and the 1967 summer of love. That entire movement, if movement is the right word, may have been synonymous with the wider city, but it was actually centred around the district of Haight Ashbury, just over a mile west of downtown. A district which was hit hard by the Depression and fell into decline during the 1950s slowly became a haven for the hippy counterculture during the 60s due in the main to the availability of cheap rental accommodation in a downbeat and under populated neighbourhood. Within…
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San Francisco #1
Where do we begin, to describe this exciting, unique city. What makes San Francisco what it is? Is it those incredibly steep streets which look like a tarmac roller coaster, is it the streetcars and cable cars we all associate with the views? Is it THAT bridge, is it THAT prison on its isolated island? Is it the amazing things you can do (and we did) here, is it the bars that just make you want to grab a stool and try all the beers? Chinatown? North Beach? Pier 39? Restaurants at the waterfront? Crazy shit like Lombard Street or Haight Ashbury? Or even the way the fog wraps itself…
