25/09/04- 27/09/04 San Cristobal de Las Casas, México

We crossed our last border without a hitch and even managed to hold up a bus (not in the butch cassidy sense) to San Christobal so that we didn't have to wait six hours at the border for the next bus. After yet another 15 hour journey we arrived in San Christobal half starved as none of us had eaten. After a very odd sandwich the boys managed to find a rather lovely apartment with a proper log fire. For some reason I really wasn't expecting México to be cold, but it was. So we spent the rest of the evening toasting bread and marshmellows on the fire. I managed to stop them from singing those irritating camp fire songs though.

The next day we had a proper look around the town and although we found the Mayan museam of medicine, with the rather too graphic video of a mayan woman giving birth, we didn't make it to the villiage just outside of the town where they worship Coca Cola.

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San Cristobal is a beautiful city and we were there for the PRI party campaign in the main square and we had no idea what there policies were but they put on a good show and sent paper hot air balloons with suggested voting practices up into the night sky, each powered by a flaming petrol soaked ring heating up the air inside, like a little UFO to sway the voters except those who find that the balloon has landed on their thatched roofs and set it ablaze (of which there are many) or on the canvas of their convertable Audi TTs (of which there are none). Out of interest, México is the first country in ages that I have seen Italian cars, albeit Fiats.

That video of that Mayan woman giving birth in a filthy hovel of a house with chicken feathers flying everywhere (I presume she allowed herself to be filmed as part deposit for the Audi TT) also showed the examination of the placenta and its subsequent burial inside the house and then the prostrate new mother (who looked about 13) would have a cock waved over her -if the child was a girl then the midwife would wave a hen instead to stop it from having nightmares because that will work. Just he wait until he realises what a pit he lives in and what a flash car his mum has.