Magico Mexicano

Ok. So I've been trying for weeks/months to sit down and put together a succinct and snappy account of our time in Mexico; but so far everthing I've written about it has sucked. The reasons for this are many, as are the excuses; but the time has come to churn out a brief and hopefully not-so-lackluster attempt to run through what's happened in the last couple of months... here goes.
        Our first port of call in Mexico was a little town called Sonoyta -- one of the smaller and less frequented of the US/MEX border crossings, south and a little west of Phoenix. Within 20 minutes of leaving the 'States and rumbling into Mexico in old Buie, we got pulled over for speeding. Just a casual 60 in a 20 zone. Neither of us had valid licenses on us (I'd lost mine in San Fransico along with my ATM card), and were forced to bribe the shotgun-wielding cops. The whole transaction was fast and terrifying. It was in this very instant that I realised that I was a long way from home and knew absolutely no Spanish whatsoever. Luckily, though, we managed to get away with a 500 peso bribe. Deep breath; change of undies. We immediately made our way hastily towards the west coast: where we hoped to catch onto a coastal highway of sorts and burn down as far as we could from the border in as little time as possible.
       Somewhat later that night we came across the "official" point of entry into Mexico-proper, only to be denied entry due to the paperwork of our little Buie revealing that she wasn't as registered as previously thought... not registered at all, as a matter of fact. So, in light of the revelation that we would not be driving through Mexico, we hightailed north a ways and found a sneaky place to crash for the night by some railway tracks. Our sad and lonely last night with Buie.
       The next day we cruised the last short distance back to Puerto Peñasco with the idea of trying to sell our car for whatever price we could get her for. In the end we managed it, in what could well be the dodgiest deal we will ever be involved in. The car broke down and I had to fix it, then we had interest from a guy who wanted us to use it to sling drugs to the United States for him. Thank Christ the car was too old-looking and ourt price too high to keep him in the chase. In the end, though, we managed to sell her off for 450 US dollars and 5 t-shirts to an old fella who ran a t-shirt shop.
       We got the feeliing we should scoot town pronto after all that madness, so we hopped on a bus and got out of town, bound for Hermosillo. We passed the border without stopping in a bus full of Mexicans and never got our passports stamped. Not much was going on in Hermosillo, so we ate some beers and drank some chips in front of the telly for the night and got up first thing to catch a long (22 hr) bus, all the way down to Guadalajara.
       We spent a few days in beautiful Guadalajara finally enjoying ourselves in Mexico, taking in the sights and generally just looking around at all the old churches and the beautiful girls and eating great food and drinking beers. It was beaut.
       In Guadalajara we met Pablo the Chilean clown. Pablo is a bro, and he turned out to be our travel-buddy for a while. He started us juggling. We all left Guadalajara together, with the idea to hitchhike all the way to Mexico City. We caught a ride out to the edge of the city, and then loitered around a petrol station until we eventually landed a ride with a really wealthy auto-engineer in his super flash and really fucking fast BMW. At times we got up to speeds of 180kn/h. We didn't quite end up in D.F., though. Our man's destination was a little Spanish town named Guanajuato. We got there in the middle of the afternoon and straight away fell in love with the place. It's like a little peice of old-time Europe superimposed amongst the hills of Mexico. Beautiful. We ended up stying here for ages: nearly two weeks. We walked just about everywhere there was to walk, did hours and hours of sitting and people-watching from the steps of the Teatro Juarez. In truth, we didn't get up to much. There was a fair amount of relaxing being done. We mixed it up with a bit of revelry: Chilean feasts, dancing reggae and salsa and meeting a couple of classy ladies, one of which, Briana, ended up taking a liking to Mikie and sharing the road with us further down the line.
Eventually, we got tired of our little hometown and gathered the gumption to get up and go forth to Mexico D.F., in the hopes of lining up some ork teachiing English. We had to leave Pablo behind, because he fell in love with all of the girls there, one Chilean girl in particular.
       We took the easy way out this time and caught the bus. Our couchsurfer host, Aura, and her boyfriend Christian picked us up from the station and took us in for a couple of nights. They really did look after us, taking us around to her friends house for dinner, and taking us out to try pulque -- a slimy alcohol made from the aguave plant. Aftter our short little stay there, we moved into a hostel downtown and set about trying to get jobs teaching English. We nearly succeeded, too. We were basically hired by a bloke, but the deal fell through due to him having some sort of vague troubles with the government or somesuch. I guess we'll never really know; but when the news came round that we were no longer going to get the job, we decided to get out of Mexico City. But not after having a pretty good time there. It was an insane place: home to over 20 million Mexicans. We josteled in the trains and took a ride on the serene boats of Xochimilko (Mexican Venice). We drank more Pulque. We took day trips out to the ruins at Teotihuacan and Tepoztlan (the latter being by far more beautiful and less ovecrowded). The best tacos in Mexico are in Mexico city. And then, we left for Oaxaca.
       Oaxaca city wasn't that great, really. Pretty and all; but a little uninspiring. Briana got robbed by the bloke who was working at the hostel. Her camera and ipod went missing and there was nobody else it could have been, so after some threatening and late night vigilance she eventually got all her stuff back.
Mikie and I were within a breath of leaving straight for Guatemala the next day, but the lovebirds decided that they liked each other a little too much to split up just yet, so we all decided to go to the beach together instead.
       We caught a minibus south along one of the windiest roads I've seen to Puerto Escondido. The road was so windy I was nearly sick. Might also have had something to do with the pigs-head tacos that I ate late the night before, though; but I managed to keep a hold of my guts, and we arrived at the beach just after sundown. We booked into a cheap hotel before wandering down for a night-time swim. The water was so warm -- man, was it great to be back in the ocean after over a year on dry land. In the morning we got up and had a walk up the beach to try and find one of the cheap bungalows we had heard about through Pablo's idiot Peruvian mate in Oaxaca city. After a hot and sweaty walk all the way up to La Punta, we found what we were looking for. A thatched-roofed cabin, right on the beach for 1400 pesos between the three of us for a week. It was a dream. We spent an entire week lazing about, swimming, eating healthily and hiding from the scorching sun. Time very well spent.
        The next week was even lazier, though. We booked in to another beautiful bungalow in possibly the slowest-moving town the world has ever seen... Zipolite. We arrived just in time for the towns annual festival... but, nothing really happened. It was beautiful and lovely and all, but a week here was probably overkill. We ran out of things to do pretty fast.
       We then made our way towards San Cristobal de las Casas, with a nice but fairly uneventful stopover in Tapachula. We hung around in San Cristobal for around a week, wandering the pretty streets and buying presents off the sweet little Mayans. Then came the sad time when Briana had to leave us, returning home to her life and her puppy in California. The end of the dreadlock gang, the end of an era.. A sentimental time, indeed.
       So, in the light of a new day, the two of us moved on and resolved to leave Mexico behind us at last. Onwards we rolled, into Guatemala...