Hello Again,

Since our last update we have been to Tulum, we managed to find ourselves a secure cabana for a few nights and spent our time visiting the Ruins and hitting the beautiful beach. We finally got bored of the beach (sunburnt & ran out of books) and got on our first overnight bus to Palenque.

The night bus is an interesting experience, not only do you have to cope with the snoring people (and they are very loud), the spanish films on full blast, the bus slowing right down every couple of miles due to the massive speed humps in the road, there is the worry about being held up by armed bandits for the last few hours when you cross over in Chiapas. However we made it and arrived at Palenque at 6am. We checked into a hostel with a pool which we would need as the heat and the humidity in Palenque pretty bad. It was around 38'C

We toured around the ruins in Palenque early in the morning and they are really quite impressive, these huge pyramids and temples in the middle of the jungle with the morning mists and howler monkeys having a party in the background. Only half of the ruins here have been recovered so you can wander around and see how they may of looked when they first discovered this area. After our exploration of the ruins we headed back to the hostel and spent the afternoon sat in the pool cooling down and had an early night as we were off to San Cristobel the next morning very early via some waterfalls and lakes on the way to San Cristobel.

The lakes were a beautiful aqua marine colour, and a local enterprising lad had roped together 4 logs and made a raft which he was charging 10 peso's for a trip around the lake on, so we decided to to this and the logs stayed afloat with our european lardy weights on it! The waterfalls were pretty impressive if you didn't know better you would have said it was some type of Walt Disney set - they were massive and in about 8 or 9 sections with probably half the normal amount of water running over them as the rainy season is just about to start.

We are now in San Cristobel De La Casas high up in the mountains, it's about 2200 meters above sea level so the temp here is similar to the UK spring it's lovely and sunny but not as warm as the Carribean coastal area

Since arriving in San Cristobel we have been horse riding in the mountains visiting the local indigenous villages where coke cola and other fizzy drinks are used as part of their religous cermonies to make them burp and expel the evil sprits!? Jon now has no evil spirits due to excessive beer consumption! We did a boat trip through the 1000 metre deep Caynon Del Sumidero and saw some crocodiles swimming around.

We are off to visit the lakes near to Guatamala tomorrow, there are 69 in total so too many to visit so we are hoping to visit around 6 or 7 and then on wednesday we are off to the Pacific coast on another night bus - joy!

We have uploaded more photos onto flickr if you want to have a nose the site is www.flickr.com/photos/kymandjon save us trying to get photos onto this site as its a nightmare trying to do both. Titles will follow on the photos when we have time!

Take care and more to follow soon.