Vagabond and Beyond: "Anyone who thought the small nuisances of life were bearable had never spent the night in a room with a mosquito"

Absolutely sick of mosquito bites and only 2 weeks in, these ones don't even carry Malaria. Read a great quote today from the book I'm reading, 'Tequila Oil: Getting lost in Mexico', "Anyone who thought the small nuisances of life were bearable had never spent the night in a room with a mosquito". Sums it up nicely. You can wear repellent, all your clothes and sleep in a sleeping bag liner and they still get ya. There are more opinions on how to keep them away than there are people giving the advice. Most remedies involve covering yourself in a horrible smell from eating garlic to rubbing onion skins on the skin, no thanks. Saying all this they are starting to irritate us a lot less than a week ago. Now for ruins and more ruins...

When we arrived at our hostel in Valladolid we met a nice English couple who are travelling for 10 months and have pretty much done and are doing a route very similar to ours (next door neighbours in our new hostel and were our neighbours in our previous hotel). We keep bumping into the same people along the way no matter how big the town, mad. Up early for a trip to ruins of Chichen Itza.

After some crazy colectivo driving we arrive at Chichen Itza on another sun filled day. Some of the buildings here are class and the pyramid of Kukulcan that is the postcard image for the Yucatan peninsula and the title background of this blog is the highlight of the site. Unfortunately the ball court was closed for restoration but there was some excitement in the day when a few Israeli lads started to climb the Pyramid. Security freaked out and popped up from everywhere and promptly kicked them out, the pyramid is the first building at the site so think they were only in about 10 minutes before being escorted out, looked like security deleted their photos too, harsh. One annoying thing about Chichen Itza is that they allow all the Mayans to sell their goods here (fair enough as their ancestors built it), most of the stuff looks well-made and would love to hang it on the wall at home but they hound everyone way too much. Hopefully we can buy a few souvenirs in Mexico City and post them home from there. Saw the sacred Cenote where a few dozens skeletons were found at the bottom after being sacrificed. Apparently the winning captain of the ball games they use to play would be sacrificed after winning a game but not surprisingly they changed the rules later on, probably figured out that some teams were throwing the game! Luckily one of the unpredictable colectivos arrived after a lengthly wait. Plenty of crazy travel stories exchanged back at the hostel over a couple of drinks and a planned trip to Coba ruins for the next day.

Not too many buses out to Coba and we ended up sitting beside a couple who were sitting beside us on the way back from Chichen Itza the previous day. They're travelling for about 6 months for their honeymoon on roughly the same route as us except twice as fast. We're told there is one bus back at 12.45 to Valladolid so we decided to pay for the chauffeur driven tricycle to get around the ruins quickly as the ruins are spread out over a massive area. You can legally climb these ruins so we make quick work up to the top despite the humidity of the rainforest (I think traveling by chauffeur might have helped conserve some of our energy!). Once up top you can see the rainforest from a 360 viewpoint and made the trip up well worth it. When we arrive back with plenty of time for the bus back to Valladolid a taxi driver tells us our bus left early and that next one is in 4 hours! Not believing him as he tries to charge us a fortune we wait until the bus should have arrived. It didn't, so the taxi driver was telling the truth after all. Thankfully we were with the other couple all day so with 4 of us and some negotiating we get a fair deal back to Valladolid (Less than 4 euro each to drive 60km, not too shabby)

That night we end up talking to an Indian guy who has been travelling for 7 years, just spent 2.5 years in Africa. He sells his paintings back home and uses the money to travel. Oddly he knows a lot about Roscommon and plays a few tunes with the guitar he travels with, one of which was a U2 song. He asks us if we like U2 in Ireland or do we think they sold out. We tell him that they are liked but Bono is a different matter altogether. The next day we visit the sites of Valladolid and try some Tamales, a Mexican dish made of starchy dough, which is steamed in a leaf wrapper. They are filled with meats, cheese, vegetables and spices (below is a picture I got online of them). For the weekend, moving onto Merida...