3 weeks in my friends have gone home. About time to write a post.

Well I know I'm long overdue writing a post and have a lot to catch up on. Dan, Emmanuel and James have now all gone home so now I have some time to just sit around doing nothing and update my blog.

Well I should start from three weeks ago and try and remember everything I've been doing. It's going to be hard as I tend not to remember what I did a couple of days ago, let alone three weeks.

Well it all starts in Mexico City. With nice old cobbled street and old colonial buildings the centre Mecico City was very nice. We spent the first day exploring the city and sampling the local cuisine. It's pretty much what you'd expect various styles of tortillas filled with meat and plenty of chilli sauce. Oh and always some refried beans on the side. The second day we headed out to a place called Xochimilco on the outskirts of the city to visit the canals there. There are hundreds of miles of canals there, although nothing at all like Venice as there banks are surrounded by fields and garden centres mainly and not buildings. Oh and bizarely in some places had dolls and teddys tied to the trees. The canals were however more crowded. You take a vibrantly coloured put down the canals and you frequenly come across traffic jams. There are also boats floating past selling almost anything. Beer, souvenirs, live music, even boats floating by cooking tacos! Emmanuel, James and Dan spent about 30 min haggling with one over the price of blankets. Unfortunately I don't have any photos to add at the moment as I'm writing this on my iPhone, but I will try to get some up soon.

Oh yes I was just about to move on to our road trip going south when I remebered about our trip in a police car I need to tell you about! On the last night in Mexico city we decided to head out to find some live music to listen to. Well there was plenty of Mariachi bands playing all over the place and Emmanuel was just about ready to strangle the next musician he heard so we thought we would try some jazz instead. I found a place in the lonely panet and we headed off in that direction. Via the main square for Mariachi bands in the city so had to keep Emmanual on a tight leash through there! We were looking at the map on the next street over when a police car drove past and then reversed back towards us. They got out and asked us where we were going. They told us we were in an unsafe place for tourists and offered us a lift. So the four of us, with some difficulty squeezed into the back of this police car for a 5 minute ride. We noticed throughout our trip in Mexico that everyone was so pleasant and helpful and would go out of their way to assist, even if we didn't ask for it.

So when we got to this club it was actually full of old people dancing to live Latin music. Now I haven't told the guys about this yet for fear of retribution but I had accidentally looked in the wrong section of the book and taken them to a Latin dance hall instead! Sorry guys.

So with our time in Mexico City over we headed to the car hire place in the morning to pick up our wheels for the next ten days. Our first stop was 470km down the road in Oaxaca. On the way there we had some amazing views as we drove through the mountains, and in some places you could just see mountains covered in thousands of cactuses. It was a pretty spectacular site. One site that wasn't quite to nice was the dead body covered by a tarpaulin we past on the way. There we lots of people on the way that were running the gauntlet of crossing the duel carriageway, so think we were lucky we only saw one.

We got to Oaxaca when it was dark so could only see a vague outline of the mountains from the hostel, but when we woke up in the morning we could see the amazing view in it's full glory. In the hostel we were staying there was this American guy in his 60's who had driven there from New Mexico in a battered old beetle, and boy did he like to talk. I got stuck with him for 4 hours while he talked at me about his experiences in Mecico and Belize. The other three had long since escaped saying they were going to bed but actually went and hung out somewhere else, cheers guys. He was also telling me how brave we were to drive all the way down to southern Mexico from there. Well as you can tell from this post we made it. But from what I've heard driving across the border and through northern Mexico is far more dangerous.

We headed off to our first Mayan site of Monte Alban the next day. And it was very impressive, pictures to follow. The sheer scale of what they build nearly 2000 years ago is pretty amazing especially compared to what we had in the UK at that time.

The next day we had another long drive down to San Cristobal de las Casas, but I think I need a bit of a break from typing for a while so I'll continue on with my first 3 weeks in my next post. Don't think I've got through the first week yet.