North of Tulum and more importantly towards Cancun Mexico changes character fairly dramatically, for a start the number of Mexicans starts dropping to Texas levels and the number of American tourists rises to compensate. As the collectivo cruised up the road to Playa Del Carmen we started to pass more and more giant US stores, cinemas and retail parks virtually identical to their counterparts in the USA. All this has been set up to attract the tourist dollar that...

The Ramblings of a Superficial Mayan Expert Following the Campeche debacle, we journeyed on to Merida (and later Tulum) to immerse ourselves in ancient Mayan culture by visiting three more famous ruins - Uxmal, Chichen-Itza and Tulum.We felt it was best to use Merida as a base and take day trips and given that we had already melted under the midday sun in Palenque, we rented a car so that we could visit the ruins at early in the day.This meant that we woke up ...

Exit Oaxaca and enter extremely early in San Cristobal de las Casas, our final mountain town (2000m+). Like all the best Latin American mountainous regions it has it own pseudo Marxist rebel group, the Zapatistas. However like the Shining Path in Peru the Zapatistas have been fairly inoffensive recently. Despite the exciting prospect of being robbed, dangled in front of us by the Lonely Planet, the most we saw of them were on the masses of t-shirts on sale in the...

We gladly left Acapulco and traveled to the surfers' paradise, Puerto Escondido which we found it to be a quiet, sandy stretch of street set across from the impressive Pacific coast.Walking down the strip for the first time, we relaxed to the sound of the waves crashing against the shore. But this was in the evening (when it was relatively cool) and like I said, it was the first time we walked down the strip. The next day it was hot with precious little breeze...

We made it out of Mexico City, people may have come to the conclusion from our previous blog that I wasn't that fond of MC - well you were right. The ride south to Taxco was sweet relief away from the smog and general decrepitude of the capital. Taxco was rumored to be picturesque and riddled with fantastic silver shops and restaurants but frankly I have heard it before so I was reserving judgement until we arrived. Turns out the town is exactly as described, ...