Lazy days in Mérida

We packed Heather into a taxi, and waved her off from Mexico City to the airport and the UK - a few hours later we were off to catch our plane to Mérida in the Yucatan.

Mérida is a very pretty city, of which we took far too few photos, and for us a very hot one, coming from 2000 metres higher up, and several hundred km further away from the equator as we were. So we spent our week there taking it all pretty easy, strolling around town in the mornings and/or the evenings, making friends with fellow tourists in the greenery-filled Hotel Trinidad, or hiding from the heat in air-conditioned internet cafes, or the air-conditioned TV room of the hotel.

To make up for the lack of photos of the pretty city itself - here is evidence that Mexican muralism doesn't begin and end with Diego Rivera, from the Museum of Contemporary Yucatecan Art, and from around town:

We met the friendly Tracie and Anna from the UK (though the only photo we got of them is no good - send us a better one, if you're reading this!), in the early stages of a big tour of Latin America; Isaiah, your average Mexican/Cuban/Jewish/American firefighter/botanist from San Francisco and Yosemite, who hung out with us at La Noche Mexicana as well as at the hotel; Zoe, drama student from Canada (again, no good photo), bravely continuing solo on the last leg of her big Latin American tour even though her Spanish-speaking friend had bailed out some weeks ago; and Garet & Karina, permaculturey Californians (though Garet hails from Miami) on their way to surf the Oaxacan Pacific for a while after six months working with a 'kids eco-camp' in Costa Rica, who we were to bump into again in both Palenque and San Cristóbal de las Casas.

Our one big excursion was a day trip to swim in a couple of cool cenotes out in the Yucatan scrub - a great trip on a hot day. A hot walk through town picking up a roast chicken and lots of water on the way, and we caught a collectivo (minibus) to the little town of Cúzama, a bycicle rickshaw to the edge of the area with the cenotes in, and then a tiny horse-drawn cart running on rickety, very narrow-gauge rails to take us between the pools. We saw no banditos, but the cart ride through scrub had a definite Western feel to it. The cenotes, meanwhile, were great - it's hard to photograph the effects of the shafts of sunlight lighting these huge caverns, with stalactites and tree roots reaching down from the ceilings towards the clear cool water.

- Mark