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Hola and Merry Christmas to all! Once again apologies for the long delay in update.. We have had one hellish week trying to get across Central America in time to spend Chrsitmas in Nicaragua! So I will catch you up from where we left off..
So we left San Cristobal De Las Cases on Sunday 13th December and took a day trip to The Palenque ruins. Before the ruins we stopped at two waterfalls, Agua Azul which is an amazingly coloured turqoise blue waterfall and then Misol Ha a really tall waterfall that has a lagoon in which you can swim in beneath it. Faye and i hadnt realised you could swim as we werent bloody told so didnt have anything to wear and opted for photos beside the waterfall instead. We then spent a couple of hours walking around the Palenque ruins which are a magnificant set of stone structures from ancient mayan era. These were definitely a more grand setting than Monte Alban and we got some pretty good photos. We were dropped off by the tour company in Palenque and spent a few hours wondering the small town before catching a night bus to Merida. Once again we were lucky enough to have two seats each so much of the 9 hour ride was spent asleep. We had read that in Merida they have weekend long fiestas every Sat and Sun which was why we decided to take a detour on our way to Tulum. We arrived super early however to a ghost town. There wasnt a soul in sight and we hoped that they were all stll sleeping from saturdays festivities... We took a taxi to our hotel just off the main square called The Aventura and it was the most characterless place either of us had ever stayed in! It was just a long corridor of green coloured rooms and the guy on reception looked high and spent most of the morning talking at the top of his voice. We eventually had enough and ventured down in to the main square. it was slightly more lively than where the hotel was but was no where near as bustling as Oaxaca or San Cristobal. After a couple of hours of wandering the streets aimlessly we decieded the only thing to do was get rat arsed! So we spent the rest of the evening and very late into the night getting hammered at some bar in the central square. At some point in the night a Mayan soul cleanser joined us at the table and Faye made him our new best friend. She even asked him if he could cleanse her soul which he offered to do on the Wednesday in his village if we extended our Merida stay. Realising that she prob had had a few too many margheritas (not to mention the shots we were fed by the owner through a funnel!!) I called it a night and insisted we get a cab. We woke the next morning with a hangover to rival Mexico Cityś and lay in our room dreading the thought of having to take a bus to Chichen Itza to yet again explore more ruins and then head on ANOTHER bus to Tulum. We contemplated laying in the room all day nursing our heads when we got a knock on the door and it was the bloody Mayan soul cleanser with a little singing turtle thingy that he had been playing the previous evening. We drunkenly said we wanted one and he had found our hotel and brought one. I hid in the bathroom and Faye had to stand there as he mortifyingly started playing this thing right there in our hotle room!!! She bought it from him and eventually got rid of him and we both agreed that he was our que to get the hell out of Merida!
As we were having 3 days in Tulum we didnt bother stpping at Chichen Itza and instead planned to go on one of the other days when our heads werent as sore. We arrived into Tulum on the coast of Mexico Tuesday evening and oh my lord is this place beautiful. We stayed in a beach hut at a hotel called Papaya Playa and we literally stepped out of our room on to the sand. The bar had swings overlooking the Caribbean Sea. It was really beautiful and the weather was perfect. We mainly sunbathed for the couple of days we were here. We visited the Tulum ruins which are alot smaller than the others weǘe visited but the are located right on a cliff by the sea which looked amazing. There are also Iguanas everywhere that are the size of small dogs and outside the ruins Faye managed to hold this massive one that this guy was walking around with! Unfortunately we didnt end up making it back to Chichen Itza as we were enjoying the sun, sea and Pina coladas far too much. So Faye has now been to Mexcio twice, even driven up to the entrance, and has still not been inside the most famous ruins in Mexico! Sheś not pleased to say the least! On our last night before we were scheduled to leave Mexico really early we decided to go fo a nice quiet meal in town. This was all going to plan until we had the bloody Mexican police called on us!! We had stopped at a restaurant on the main strip and both ordered pasta. It had taken ages to come and when it did the spaghetti was still raw. It wasnt even slightly undercooked, it still could have been in the packet it was that raw. We had a mediocre soup to start so decided we didnt want to wait for another pasta ot be cooked and asked could we just settle what we had eaten and drank. The waitress then told us that regardless if whether we wanted new pasta we would have to pay for it! Faye point blank refused and after speaking with her boss the waitress then offered that we pay 50% and they would cover 50%. Faye again refused and told them there was no way we were paying for food we hadnt even recieved! The waitress then actually called the police and 5 mins later 4 armed officers turned up in a police truck! Thank God I was sitting down because my knees were jelly. Faye stood her ground though and insisted we wouldnt be paying regardless ans she knew what her rights were! Luckily the police agreed and told the restaurant we were not obligated to pay for food that wasnt served to standard! We left pretty quickly after that and our last meal in Mexico consisted of a slice of pizza and packet of m&mś. oh well!.. On another note, the evening before we had been chatting with the hotel manager and he was asking about our Spanish. We told him it was quite poor but the one thing we had gotten down to a tee was how to ask for a bus ticket from one city to the next. Faye said the sentence which i wont put here as I am still embarrassed. After laughing for about 10 mins straight he then told us that what we have actually been saying is ´can we but 2 ticket offices in xxx city and xxx city!!´ At this point of the trip we had been on 6 different buses across Mexico and not once had anyone corrected us along the way. Mortified!
Anyways we left Mexico the following morning and headed to our next Central American Country - Belize
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