We left Cancun full of spirits following a successful mix of fiestas, food
and fannying around doing f all; the perfect combo. With just a 5 hour bus ride
to Merida, the first leg of our trip across the Latin American hotspot. Now 5
hours might seem like a lot by bus but the buses here are by far the best buses
or coaches I’ve taken anywhere, ever; and I took a coach to and from school
everyday for 6 years! Plenty of leg room, seats that recline insano and films
playing on flip down TVs, plus hardly ever full so can proper sprawl out and
space out.
Anyway so we arrived in this town, and what a town? Ill tell you what a
town, a really really shit town! Its about 500 degrees and has terrible
narrowed roaded grid system which means no wind and therefore no escape from
the heat, I sweated continually for 4 days, as in non-stop at all! The hostel didn’t
help, simply offering a fan instead of air con. The fan had 2 settings which
are explained in this handy manual:
Merida was massive but had nothing in it of interest, even building up to Mexican
Independence Day there was very little buzz about the place, even motorists
actually on the road were so bored that they were sleeping.
Not even humourous shops could wake him.
The food may have had something to do with it. Mexican food is nice, right,
if you can stand tortilla wraps or fried tortilla wraps in the form of nachos
for breakfast, brunch, lunch, tea, dinner, snacks and midnight feasts. However
Yucatan food, which is basically indigenous Mayan food is god awful. Extremely
vibrant in colour but more bland and stodgy than WWII rationing days – avoid with
immediate effect.
I would also like to add without sounding rude, that the inhabitants of
Merida are the worst looking collection of people I have ever seen, it was definitely
the worlds ugliest town. Men carried a perfect cuboid frame and women the same
but with two football socks filled with a golf ball hanging form their Duplo
block bodies; the ideal advert to avoid the local cuisine. Although I feel I have
been a little strong there; it is not cuisine, I mean to say local sloppy flavourless
pile of terrible!
Merida did have some plus points I don’t want to be totally negative, it
provided a base camp to go and see the much advertised and over sold
attractions. First on the list was Chichen Itza, one of the seven wonders of
the world! Such an impressive title led to a brew of unmatched excitement as we boarded a
bus for 2 hours to reach the spectacle, and when we arrived jack seemed
impressed.
The thing with Chicken Pizza is that that is literally it, there is a few
other little crumbled things but really not much else once you have walked
round and clapped at it a few tines to make it make a funny noise there aint a
lot else to do. Therefore your remaining time at this world heritage site spend
saying “no gracias” every 10-15 seconds as Mayans approach you offering
beautifully crafted artifacts. I wouldn’t have minded this quite as much except
all of them are selling exactly the same stuff, nobody has a USP! Once you have
seen 10,000 wooden masks you’ve seen them all IMHO.
Next on the list was the Flamingos in Celestun, a coastal town again just 2
hours away by bus. Flamingos are cool and everything and the boat driver backed
up Pat’s famed animal knowledge about there general pinkness.
However the show
stealer was the Lucozade water. We boated into mangroves and the water was the
colour of Lucozade Energy Original, I wonder if that is where they bottle it.
The next day we thought, lets leave this sweat ball and head of Palenque, a
town in the jungle with more sights but we hoped some sort of nightlife. However we
missed the first bus at 8:30am so had to wait for 11:50pm to catch the 8-9 hour
bus. To pass the time we embarked on a trip to see a Cenote. Cenote is
obviously Spanish for “super lush underground swimming cave”. To get there we
had a mini-trip on a modified scotter with what can only be described as a tray
on the front for people to sit and fly perfectly in unison from should the
scooter should it make contact with anything, almost like the worlds most eloquently
designed human flinging devise.
So we went to get the bus at 11:50… Fully booked! I have never seen a fully
booked bus! But I suppose that was our fault for not planning. This meant that
we had to catch the next bus… AT 8:30AM! So we sat in the outrageously
uncomfortable bus station for 9 hours before our 9 hour bus. Oddly though they
decided to switch off the air con at 12am but made the decision to leave the
arcade claw thing on which every 5 minutes would make some stupid space
laser blast noise! I was sat thinking if you have to switch something off, I’d
choose the item that nobody has used at all ever since the history of man, but
then again not everyone thinks like me. Anyhow I go on.
The bus came, we left, we got there; but I couldn’t help thinking isn’t it
funny how you can travel half way around the globe and toilet graffiti doesn’t change.
xx
DARTH VADER PENIS
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