Charlie and Steve's Excellent Adventure

October 24, 2014

While you were working – a travel day in Cuba

You know the saying ‘polishing a turd’, when you can’t possibly make something good out of something so bad. Well Cuba has had a good go at reversing the saying. Where this first night and a day has been dripping in amazement and wonder, a somewhat frustrating side of Cuba has shown itself. It seems the grab for tourist money which has been intent but respectful thus far isn’t always as restrained.
We’re getting used to the constant smooth introductions and also getting good at pushing them aside, but we’ve avoided quite blatant conning so far, or has it avoided us? We need a taxi to the bus station as we’re heading out into the countryside to Viñales, this is where the fun begins.
We’re looking for a cab but a bike taxi grabs us and says it’s 10minutes for him and $10, as opposed to $7 for a car so we settle on $8 and off we go. We get about half way and he comes to a hill and says that the station is just ahead so we’re finished. A bit shitty we resolve to walk but it soon becomes clear he only took us about half the way, never intending to make the trip. A car cab costs us another $5 and although we’re not notably out of pocket it’s a bad taste. True to form the taxi driver offers to take us the whole way to Viñales (two hours) but we just can’t trust the commitment so we firmly fight off his offers. It’s a bit sad but we’re beginning to feel like cash cow prey.
Then the bus station. We wait in a short queue for about half an hour to be told that we need to get tickets at another ticket booth, hmmm. That ticket booth is unmanned as the staff are at lunch, hmmm. We were told we need to be there an hour prior to departure and it’s 30 minutes to go and no success yet. With about 25 minutes on the panic clock the staff come back but on buying the tickets we’re told “sit down’ with no explanation to our exasperation. Many people buy tickets and I try again… ‘sit down’, hmmm. 10 minutes till departure and the boarding is called, shit! With less than 10 minutes we, and two other pairs of travellers are barrelled onto the bus. Safe to say that getting to the bus has been a tad more stressful that it needed to be.

The three or so hours on the bus calm us down somewhat, and we descend into Viñales to picturesque mountains, a relaxing exhale encompasses us both. Until the bus stops. I didn’t realise we had recorded a single and definitely didn’t realise that it went to number one with a bullet in Cuba. The frenzied crush getting out of the bus is like nothing I’ve ever seen before, we feel like star witnesses in a celebrity trial bashing our way through a throng of protesters. It’s pretty fierce and after this day the polite denials are out the window, no shame in telling a lovely looking woman where to go, laws of the jungle here, there’s only one way to play. Wow, it really appears today that we might need to keep a bubbling aggression at hand nearly all the time, this has a genuine chance of tarnishing what is so obviously an amazing place to be.
So we take a breath, safe in our Casa, no other word comes to mind but intense. Taking stock, it’s important to remember that the tourism dollar is not only extremely lucrative but a fairly new market for many people here. With Cuba so long detached from any meaningful tourism this new found bounty is indeed a frenzy. It can’t be scoffed at, it’s really just people in a hugely competitive market with no formal way to reach their audience. So the only option is to get out there and sell, and to do that you have to get your voice to the front. So with a basic market concept we are very familiar with it’s now up to us to be ‘good travellers’ and get on board with the features of a new place. We always say we want to see and do different things, this challenge is a clear spin off of the tumultuous history that makes Cuba what it is. We now have to walk our own talk, even though it’s a bit tricky at the moment.

October 23, 2014

While you were working – Havana

After a day of walking the streets to soak up Havana much of the initial wonder has only been reinforced, it’s all a little bit luscious. The people are luscious, the buildings are luscious, the streets are luscious, the food… not so luscious but it’s not too bad either.
But lets start from the beginning, where the hell have we woken up, the Casa we’re staying at is outrageous. The ceilings are about 5-6m high, we have grand antique furniture with glowing dark timber and a gaudy crystal chandelier in our room. Oh, and it’s fluro orange with matching curtains, thank god we didn’t drink much, if there’s ever a room not to have a hangover in this is it. The furnishings and decorations in this place are gaudy, elaborate and lavish, it’s obvious there was a serious amount of cash here at some stage (The Spanish pre-1898). The old style grandeur of the furnishings is set off by a colour palate that belongs on Romper Room. Our fluro range cuts to iridescent green in the dining room which throws to bubble gum pastel purple in the next. It’s brash, vivid and like everything here it’s a style of its own, indeed nothing in Cuba doesn’t have a style of some sort.

We ventured out of the relatively comfy enclave of the historical area that caters for tourists quite well and into the more gritty streets. One of the first things that hits us is that there’s a massive amount of restoration works going on. Where much of this city seems quite run down, there’s a humming vibe of rebuilding to reclaim the historical glory of this place. Apparently this is in part driven by the tourist dollar and the two currencies here. There’s a tourist currency and a local currency, the tourist currency is 25 times higher than the local. So in short, we pay the same ‘numbers’ for things but the tourists pay 25 times more, ouch. That said, things are still pretty affordable (about $40AUD for a big meal of various seafood and beef with salads and rice with four mojitos) and the evidence of where it’s going makes the whole deal quite palatable.
It can’t be a comment about Havana without mentioning the music and the social interaction here, you simply cannot be alone in Havana. The music is nothing short of breathtaking. Every restaurant seems to have a musical ensemble and from a violin/ guitar duo to two guys that played guitar and had voices like honey and chocolate. The standard of musical talent here is phenomenal, we see ‘finalists’ of talent TV shows that are simply rubbish at home, there’s locals kicking around in bars that are just…. wow… WOW! So you appreciate music, it’s pushed so welcomingly into your consciousness here, it can’t be avoided and drives a vibe that pulses in this town.
And there’s the other type of social interaction, everyone has something to sell; everyone. With the two currencies, getting a few tourist bucks is a big windfall so you need to be really decisive with your interactions. The locals here are a suave lot, generally when you get your denial across you get a warm gracious smile and and fond farewell. We did however get one dude that stuck to us like glue. We needed to fake a taxi ride home to shake him off, he was not going anywhere. With quite a few firm and repeated demands we managed to get out and cut the ties, that wasn’t a great one but part of the deal I guess. Generally though it’s just a matter of not being pushed around and you’re all good.

October 23, 2014

While you were working – Down the rabbit hole

We leave Mexico behind in with a raft of fond memories, onto our next adventure, Cuba. With all sorts of stories, information and history to patchwork a preconception from, we are expecting possibly a bit of a tough travel week. With Cuba so economically cut off from the world for so long it’s widely recognised as a step back in time, with vintage 50’s-60’s cars leading the charge of a style penned in recent history.
So here’s the scene, you know the saying ‘paint with words’ right? Well lets have a go at constructing my grammatical masterpiece, we’ll call it ‘First Glance at Havana’.

The Backdrop: The style, the theme here feels like we’re in a film-clip for an epic Prince song, directed by Quentin Tarantino and shot in Paris. There’s no escaping it, Havana is F’ing sexy, we have a massive contender for the sexiest city in the world. The architecture is grand, the people are smoking hot and the overflowing groove of music and dancing all points to gettin’ it on. We unknowingly plonked ourselves into a restored historical part of Havana and I get that Paris feeling, every streetscape you walk past is nothing short of a study in beauty. It’s not a muted style like much of Europe, its brash, erotic, colourful and full of caribbean swagger all balanced into an aesthetic triumph.

The mood/feel: Again it has to be mentioned, it’s sexy. Imagine underground jazz bar mixed with steamy version of a gritty ‘Benny and the Jets’ or ‘The Wanderers’. The feel here is of alarmingly acute sense of aesthetics and style but the truly genuine forefront of a movement that has come from a lack of brand and cash influence. The streets and styles are lifted from the pages of glossy fashion and style magazines but the style of Havana isn’t copying the iconic pages, it feel more like the pages are copying Havana and feeding it to the rest of us.

The Highlights: The people here are the highlight followed by the architecture, combining to make a striking focal point to this picture. The people look like sexier Jamaican track stars styled by Tom Ford with theatrical presence just like they stepped off the set of Glee, the edited version. Put that all against a colonial architecture dripping in history, fashioned by Gaudi with a colour palate of Dali. The big surprise here is that the buildings and plazas are so meticulously finished and presented, so perfect, so shcmick. Yes, I’m throwing it out there, the coolest sexiest race of people on the planet. It also has to be mentioned, the female police and older schoolgirls are what hip-hop film clips are trying to be, even we have to look.

So down the rabbit hole we have fallen. I for one expected a sense of the cool and sexy but not the aesthetic pizzazz we see. This is a weird and wonderful place that is nothing short of a jarring trip into somewhere that doesn’t seem quite real. I don’t know how to take all this in, we’ve been here for just a few hours and we’re agape in wonder. So there’s my go at a lyrical painting of what I see. Oh, and not to mention, we’ve been offered ‘girls’ about five times already, and not only by men, yes indeed it’s sexy and liberated, Go Cuba!

So we have fallen well and truly down the rabbit hole, lets see how deep this goes.

October 22, 2014

Top 10 – Mexico

Here it is ladies and gentlemen, we know you’ve all been waiting for it, it’s our top 10 for Mexico. We’ve come to this list based on our experience, will it stick with us, was it enlightening, did it exceed expectations? So some of this might surprise, some of it will be obvious if you’ve read some of the previous posts. And not surprisingly there’s a bit about food here.

10- Tlayudas in Oaxaca: The food here is amazing, no doubt about it. We found overall that restaurants are very over-rated, street food is where it’s at. There’s plenty of great street food gems but Tlayudas scrapes it into the top 10. Yes Tlayudas are great but they were completely unknown to us, quite a regional treat being only really in Oaxaca and the street stall we found them at epitomised the bustling humming vibe of street food.

9- Sierra Norte: Sierra Norte is probably a little hard done by here, a place of this grandeur would usually be further up the list than number nine. Although the weather made the trip a lot harder with rain and cloud smothering us, it’s undeniable that the landscape was amazing, even if we could only sense the drama in patches rather than taking in all its glory.

8- Oaxaca City: Yes, shock horror, a city is making it into our top 10, but Oaxaca doesn’t feel like a city as we know it. We heard and read multiple times that Oaxaca is a sort of unofficial heartbeat of Mexican culture. This is reflected in our experience with strong Spanish colonial influence (architecture), ancient history (Monte Alban), Outdoors (Sierra Norte is part of Oaxaca state), great food and it’s beautiful to boot. Not surprisingly we stayed longer than planned and chose here to start studying Spanish.

7- Museo de Antropologia: Another surprise one for us, a museum. The first thing to note here, like many great museums or galleries, the building is great. it boasts a huge central courtyard with a truly immense floating ceiling supported only by a central column, spectacular! Secondly, if you wanted a good dose of what this part of the world is about historically, this is the place. Not displaying the occasional piece of genuine antiquity, this place has room upon room upon room of huge and interesting pieces with thousands of years of history.

6- Tacos el pastor in Mexico City: What an introduction! Yes it’s just a taco but this was our first piece of food in Mexico. Straight off the plane we were desperate for something, anything just to see us off to bed. What we got was the aforementioned street food experience and a ‘welcome to Mexico’ slap in the face in the best possible way. Will possibly never forget this meal.

5- Palenque ruins: Hard to put into words, you really have to visit these ruins to get the gist. Some of the other ruins we visited were nice but Palenque was the only one that really hit the nail on the head and filled us with appreciation for what they really were. The area was vast and sprawling, it had exposed areas and jungle, restored and dilapidated, natural grace and man made awe, a genuinely complete package.

4- Carne Asada in Oaxaca: Another food one, Carne Asada in Oaxaca was the food we went back for the most throughout the whole time in Mexico. The process of ordering was enticing, the presentation was authentic, the atmosphere was buzzing and the food itself was moorish. Carne Asada became more of an event than a meal.

3- Frida Kahlo Museum: To start this trip and tell me that Frida Kahlo’s house would be in the top three I’d say you’re joking. We have some appreciation for Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera before visiting so that helps but this small place tells a story all of it’s own. We left really appreciating that in many ways Kahlo and Rivera were at the forefront of shaping so much about Mexican culture of the period, food, fashion, appreciation of indigenous origins, revolutionary leanings, links with the Soviets, take a breath, and so much more.

2- Chamula community: Quite a bolt from the blue this one and a really unexpected gem. We were afforded a look into an indigenous community that’s about as authentic as we’re going to get along with an eloquent parallel to much of a national dialogue, melding indigenous and colonial cultures. Truly fascinating, genuinely enlightening and shamelessly to-the-point. A deserved number one place is sadly sitting in second.

1- Cenotes in Tulum: For anyone reading the blog this will not come as a massive surprise. In making this list there was little/ no discussion, cenote diving in Tulum was the winner. Diving in itself is a sort of escape into another world, an environment unlike our own, like skydiving or canyoning, a place where it feel like a different planet. If diving is a different world, cenotes are a veritable planetary journey through the cosmos. We dived four cenotes and all were different ‘planets’ to put it that way. some have caves, some have caverns that are spacially disorienting, some have a cloudy sulphuric layer like an 80’s film clip smoke machine. They even change throughout the day and even the year as the light enters them from different angles, some are green, some are blue, the list goes on. This is a genuine ‘best in the world’ feature and a deserved number one. There’s really too much about cenotes to summarise, have a bo-peep here.

October 15, 2014

While you were working – If God did a poo

As we prepare to fly out of this crazy country we call Mexico, it feels like we’ve already left. Not because of some ethereal high-brow poetic concept, simply because Cancun feels nothing like any shade of Mexico we’ve seen. In short, if there was a god, and if he was the interventionist type, you’d say that he/she did a big poo and called it Cancun.
We are a little biased here, cities in general aren’t our thing, particularly when they’re over developed and a bit plastic. So Cancun is pretty close to our version of a hell. This place is a hastily mashed up combo of Vegas, the Gold Coast, a theme park and of course… A poo. Admittedly we have only had a passing stay and seen very little but as the saying goes, if it looks like a poo and smells like a poo… Lots about poo here, fitting really.
So with all this vitriol, best a bit of an explanation. First up we were warned by the cabbie on our way to the hotel that we need to be careful not to get mugged and stabbed, great! So safe to say that the local area is a bit poxy.
The shining light for tourists in Cancun seems to be the hotel area. This is a thin peninsular surrounding a lagoon packed with over 50 big hotels. It has all the trappings, restaurants, events, bars, diving, jet-boating… you name it. So with our full day in Cancun we decided that this place doesn’t really sound like ‘us’ so much but it’s better than being stabbed. As it turns out, only marginally better, wow, this is plastic vacuous shite on the grandest of scales. I’ve barely ever seen a place more devised to take large amounts of money from insipid new-money social parasites than this. Harsh I know but that’s the feeling that seeps from every pore of this part of town. And just to emphasise the environment here, even Charlie wanted to go sit in the hotel room in stab-town rather than experience this place.
But we take a breath, as we must. My thoughts sit not so much on the sad situation that is Cancun, but more so on what these places invariably do to the surrounding areas and towns. This is a phenomenon that happens all around the world, a tourist trap that is indeed a trap, it keeps the surrounding towns far less abused. This phenomenon allows places like Tulum to exist, with draw cards that lead the world accompanied by a far more genuine experience.
It is a risk in pondering these circumstances to greedily covet places like Tulum. We as white middle class tourists want to keep Tulum casual and authentic so that we can be the only white middle class tourists to see it, I’m aware of the irony. Tulum, and other places like it, however aren’t without tourists, in fact there’s plenty of them. As our dive guide Carlos said “you’re not Americans, they stay in Cancun or Playa”. A moment while I climb my moral high horse… there’s the ‘all inclusive’ tourists and there’s the rest, God bless America for providing these tourist traps, god-poo’s for all the flies to buzz around.

October 14, 2014

While you were working – Unearthing a gem

We’re winding up our time in Mexico now and we leave behind a relatively small town called Tulum. Relatively small in that it is in close proximity to Cancun, Playa Del Carmen and Cosumel, far more noted tourist destinations. We came for a few nights and stayed over a week, it turned out to be one of those places that feels like it hasn’t been found yet, not by the masses at least. In some ways it feels a lot like the more touristy places act as a sort of filter, keeping the trash largely clear from the places we want to go, a blessing really.
So we’re talking about Tulum and it can’t be a conversation about Tulum without a mention of Cenotes. We dived more than we planned here, partly because we had an opportunity to do it cheaply but mostly because it feel like a true revelation. Whenever you travel you hope that you find something that completely knocks your socks off, forces a wide-eyed stare of wonder, an involuntary exhale. And that’s exactly what this is. We had always heard there was good diving around here so it’s not a complete surprise in that respect. Having such a highlight that will be hard to top this year so early on is a surprise.
And to find this sort of wonder, the kind that rightly has an ‘only here in the world’ tag in an unaffected cruisy town is the travellers dream. We ate ourselves full regularly for about $10AUD (that’s both of us) on delicious local food, found our best coffee in Mexico and enjoyed history, beaches and explored new frontiers all in one. And to have most of the pox tourist trash caught in Cancun and Playa, a true gem is what we have been blessed with.
Again we had no photography on our dives so I’ll plagiarise here. We dived ‘The Pit’ and ‘Dos Ojos’ and we can’t believe they were better than the first two!!! I won’t attempt to describe this, pictures do it all, hopefully you see a slice not what we felt.

And true to the running theme here we took a small day trip to Coba, an adjacent town. We’re pretty done with ruins but we it’s apparently the tallest Mayan pyramid and perches you high atop the jungle canopy. Annoyingly, we of course have to see this… The ruins were indeed pretty cool, coupled with the beautiful bike ride through the jungle pathways, it was a beautiful day.

But again a recurring theme popped up, apparently there’s swimming Cenotes here. And true to form, the majesty and amazement of the Mayan ruins gets casually swept aside by a natural occurrence. The serendipitous quality of natural discoveries always seems to outshine their relatively contrived and know man-made counterparts, however great they may be. These Cenotes are very tight, a spiral stairway feeds you through a tight cleft in the earth, into darkness you go… BOOM It hits you in the face. That wide eyed wonder usually reserved for small children at a circus seems so much more profound as an adult, and so fleeting. The cavern opened up is approximately 40m across and less than 10m under the ground. Filled with the typically crystal clear water it’s truly a magical experience. And just to top it off the tight staircase that takes you all the way to the water has intermittent diving platforms, the highest 8m or so. Safe to say the stairs were only taken one-way.

So a good early contender for highlight and place of the trip. Were looking forward to knocking these early front runners off the perch.

October 12, 2014

While you were working – A day at the beach

We contacted the local fire brigade and paramedics for this one, Charles Philip Winn was going to go to the beach and expose that luscious ranga pigment (or lack thereof) to the tropical sun. In the face of a very realistic fear that he was going to burst into flame like a vampire in cheesy movies, we hopped some absolutely rad vintage Mexican fixies and these two temporary hipsters lugged it up to the beach. We may possibly have trespassed on a posh resort but we pulled the tourist card and no one stopped us, gold! Seriously, getting a laid back Mexican to give a crap about something trivial like that is impossible, a seriously unknown quality of this country.
So not to crap on too much, the sand was sandy, the water was clear, the sun was hot so to an Aussie, it was… a beach, you know the ones? But just a beach, not quite, for starters you cast your eye to the left and do you find…?

– A plastic mole with a boob job (cronulla)
– Bogans (cronulla again… or QLD)
– A plastic dude with budgies far too small (Bondi – nth)
– A plastic dude with D&G sunnies (Tamarama)
– A really red British tourist (pick a beach)
– A stoned disaffected youth (pick a nothern beaches beach)

Not here, not quite, it’s just a small Mayan beachside ruin, WTF! It’s quite weird, the beach is nice, but to have this slice of history right beside you is jarring and fantastic. We take a wander and the ruins are not exactly Palenque or Coba but the positioning is outrageous. It makes a fun but otherwise not notable beach visit definitely something to write home about, so, we are doing just that.

Not nearly as noteworthy as the ruins are the awesome beach bars. We perch up on our oversize theatrical style swings and sip away at a beer in the cool breeze. After being in Mexico for three weeks we were absolutely hanging for a swim, maybe its just familiar, maybe we’re missing home, but it was sensational. We did notice red flags indicating ‘dangerous water’ though, this was weird. It was like a choppy high-tide south Narrabeen (really cool code for no waves at all) so we were uber rebellious and broke the shackles of limiting regulation to embrace freedom. Geez I love being a wanker on occasions.

Oh, and sunset is ok too 🙂

October 12, 2014

Gluttony Expedition: How Australia butchers Mexican food

Tacos do not have ANY of the following…

– There is no ‘Old el Paso’ pre-made kit here.
Holy crap don’t start me. Tacos here are nearly always street food. Tacos are not a saucy rich slop-fest, they’re a ridiculous whack of freshness. You never eat a meal of tacos here and leave the table feeling bloated. Usually packed with fresh onion and Corriander, the only saucy bit is a zesty ‘red or green’ (who knows the difference but the red one feels a tad abrasive the next day) which again is fresh as a spring daffodil.

– Tacos do not have a hard corn-chip type shell
There’s this thing we call a taco… now throw that in the bin and lets not ever speak its name again. In case you’re not sure, call an exorcist and do some sory of voodoo to boot, this beast of Satan should never see the light of day. Tacos here are a very soft tortilla and always served with two tortillas giving them body and I guess strength, these babies never burst apart. They’re also small, easily fitting four served flat, yes flat on a dinner plate. It’s possibly shameful to admit that a meal is usually eight or so tacos, small, tasty gems and you can make all eight different no probs.

– Taco meat which is recycled bolognese sauce
Who the hell i s’Old el Paso’ anyway and who’s gonna start the letter writing campaign. The meats are NEVER drowned or even coated with any sauce. Instead you get differing meats grilled sharply: chicken, pork, beef and, wait for it, lebanese style yeeros, OMG It’s time to keep a tissue handy, who’d have thought?

Are we missing the point? no, just the FOOD!

There’s so many things here that seem to be nothing short of staples. How on earth can any Australian try Mexican food without these little rays of sunshine?

– Tlayudas: Like a folded over pizza made in a really big tortilla. It’s made up then whacked right onto flaming coals, soooo morish!

– Mole: Mainly chilli and i’m sure all manner of unhealthy stuff (have deliberately not investigated) this thick gravy/ sauce packs a punch and comes in a heap of styles, colours and flavours. It seems to be a pretty essential basis to so many meals, how many of us have even heard of it?

– Tostadas: This is a simple little diddy. A taco tortilla served flat and this time it is crispy. loaded again with freshness and flavour it’s an essential way of creating variance to the culinary journey.

– Chilli: Chilli is a variety of plants not just a plant. There’s apparently over 70 well known and used chillis. So next time you throw a ‘birds eye’ on nachos, hang your head in shame

– Frijoles: Basically beans here but again, they’re in everything, it’s simply not Mexican if you aren’t within a sombreros width of these

Burritos… What’s a burrito? Don’t get me wrong, burritos as we know them are delicious but unless they’re hiding, they’re not here. Same deal with Nachos… with sweet chilli sauce. And for that matter, haven’t seen nachos at all, is this another figment of the imagination? And last but not least, not everything is drowned in cheap cheese! Ok, fair to say that half of Mexico does this too so at least there’s one thing we’re kinda keeping authentic, even if it’s a bad one. The real crime here is that Mexican food is all about freshness, not cheese!
So the point here is that it seems really obvious to us that two pots of bugger all Aussies have the first idea of Mexican food. Not for any poor taste but we simply have no idea what it’s meant to be. A cuisine is more than a collection of dishes and recipes, it’s an all encompassing experience, a diet, a lifestyle. Many of these meals bounce off each other from meal to meal and the underpinning currents of consistency that tie them all together are apparently sitting in Villawood detention centre as it was wearing a burqa at some stage it seems. It’s a massive shame but Mexican food, the Mexican way of eating has not arrived, watch out when it does and get your smile ready, there’s no looking back.

October 10, 2014

While you were working – Cenote Diving in Tulum, Mexico

Ok this one is a little for the diving nuts among us but lets all put on our imagination caps just for a little. Our dive master took absolutely rubbish photos so i’ve scored some web images of the particular cenotes we dives, please excuse the plagiarism…

What is a Cenote?
This part of the world has a bit of a weird feature, there’s basically no overland/ surface rivers, in fact there might not be any at all. Instead, the water flows through underground channels which eventually interconnect and make it out to the ocean. A cenote is a hole in the surface, usually small, where you can access this limestone subterranean network. And as the saying goes, a picture paints a thousand words, this is what a cenote is. And yes, it’s as otherworldly and crazy as you are thinking.

So we linked up with a local dive shop and we’re away. Our chain smoking pre-cancer poster child guide Carlos is a small chirpy local dude with a healthy streak of greenie pinko hippie, perfect! We dive Casa Cenote first which is a gentle introduction with some cool small caverns. This one is simple but has 2 main cool features.
There’s a thing we’ve never seen before, a hydrocline. Similar to a thermocline (where a distinct visual barrier separates cold and warmer water), a hydrocline separates salt and fresh water. So where a thermocline goes from stupidly clear water, the longest visibility we’ve ever seen, to slightly fuzzier water, a hydrocline is clear fresh water sitting atop a dense roiling salty water sheet, like a silken layer of cloud. With the clarity of this water it’s the most ‘flying’ feeling we’ve ever had diving, and to do it above the quiksilver milky sway of the hydrocline is phenomenal. Watching a diver disappear into the hydrocline and re-emerge like a jumbo from storm clouds seriously stops you in your tracks, it can’t be described. the seemingly viscous caramel of the salty water swells and clings to the diver before serenely parting to suck back into it’s slightly disturbed surface tension, if that’s even the right term.
Casa Cenote also takes you through small caverns, not squashy at all, under mangroves. So you have multiple small light sources, the hydrocline underneath and you ‘fly’ under the reaching fingers of the mangrove roots. It’s so disorienting, you simply feel like you’re flying above clouds and under the earth at the same time, who needs mushrooms or cactus, this is just so wrong. I try swimming upside down to have the ‘earth’ below me and the ‘clouds’ above but its not helping, I think someone slipped me some Payote or Iowaska. Drink spike date rape alert!

The first dive wet our appetite so we really wanted to have a look at something more dramatic. We’d heard of Calavera Cenote, apparently a particularly small entry to a cenote which is quite well known. Upon arrival we walk past what seems to be someones house and through what can only be called the shittiest, post apocalyptic excuse for a backyard ever, to come to a round hole in the earth. weird juxtaposition given the majesty and angelic purity of the cenote against the Mexican version of Tempe tip.
Again, the picture versus words thing…

We push to the outer parts of the ‘temple of doom’ as it’s known and commence doing a circular lap. The underground network is in full view as the corroded, pock marked geology seems to branch out pretty much everywhere. There’s no real aquatic life here, it’s just rock formations, all dramatic it seems. We don’t delve into the caves as such but we do work our way through heaps of crazy rock caverns and rooms. Again the visibility is a joke, even better than in Casa Cenote. We look at each other and through to a wall over 10m away and it’s like being on the surface. For the non divers, 5-8m visibility in Sydney is ok, amazing ‘vis’ in PNG is 30-40m, here’s we’re 80m plus, we just haven’t gotten a view far enough to see if it goes further.
With heads spinning we leave our days diving amazed that this has lived up to all expectations. We are planning to go to two more sites, Dos Ojos (two eyes) and ‘The Pit’ later this week. We can’t see how this could possibly be topped but Mexico does seem to like a surprise.

October 10, 2014

While you were working: Is ‘tourist’ a 4 letter word?

It’s the eternal travel question, exactly how big a tourist do you want to be. Do you proudly show your Paddy Pallin brand hiking gear with some local guide you screwed down from $3 to $2.80 carrying your gear. Or do you reject the need for nutritious food, hygiene and sleep for the ‘real’ experience? We were faced with this very dilemma in Palenque, a town on our way from San Christobel to Tulum. We needed to stop for a day and the bus schedule pushed us to Palenque. But there’s not much in Palenque except for Mayan ruins. So…

Option 1:
Ditch any illusion of being uber euro-traveller cool and saddle up the binoculars and safari suit to set off into the jungle.

Option 2:
Attempt to push our hostel status ranking one peg higher (and yes, I’m sure there is such a thing) and be the only people too cool to go to Palenque and not get caught in the capitalist exploitation trap.

With one day to spare in Palenque, we of course join the ant line up the mountains to Palenque ruins. It doesn’t hurt that Palenque is so ridiculously hot it’s not funny so we are desperate and hopeful for some sense of relief in the shade of the jungle. We do retain some credit though as we avoid the tours and find our own way up there. And when I say avoid the tours, that’s a geniune effort, in Mexico sometimes, think school of Piranhas on a chicken carcass, these people are ferocius!
With map and history notes in hand we get into the ruins and what do we find? I’m not too cool to say it’s pretty bloody amazing. We went to ruins in Oaxaca and they were awesome but these are so much more. These ruins are massive and stretch on seemingly forever into the jungle with only a small part peeled back and exposed for view. There were no great massed crowds so the sense of exploration was very real. We were there early so we climbed one of the highest temples and simply sat up there, somewhat above the jungle canopy and took it all in,

We mixed this with wandering off into the jungle to the less exposed areas. With nothing but the screech of howler monkeys overhead to break us from feeling like we are one of a select few to have viewed this place, it’s exactly what you do this type of thing for. These ruins in particular are also quite unique in that you can access just about all of it. So climbing through tunnels and passageways in the bowels of these ancient buildings to emerge into steamy daylight at another part of the complex is quite an adventure. Yes I’m sounding like a tourist guidebook right now but this, for us, was far beyond being frog-marched into a cash collection booth and spat back out the other end.

There’s always a trap with doing something ‘touristy’ and we often scoff at the idea. In many ways we travel to discover the unblemished, to find the unherarlded gem. A visit to Palenque isn’t a romanticised or ‘cool’ kind of trip at all. but just sometimes, a thing that is talked about is talked about for a better kind of reason, something more than value-less cash. I have no doubt that in a different frame of mind, and indeed at another time, we would have left Palenque feeling like we wasted our time, in the past we have probably done just that.
I guess what’s different now is that with more time we’re travelling, not on holiday, it’s a subtle but important difference. Tourist is a 4 letter word when applied to a quick crash-and-dash approach to vain attempts to ‘soak up’ culture and history from an armchair. The exact same actions and locations can also describe quite an interesting journey into discovering something new, pushing boundaries and getting a better understanding of our world. It seems pretty clear that the definitive difference lies within the person visiting, not the place being visited.