Standing still

Travel tip no. 2

The effective lifetime of your brand
new Swiss Army penknife corkscrew is maybe 2 or 3 bottles before it snaps off.
Use with caution.

Our southward odyssey hit paydirt about a week ago as we arrived on the Oaxaca (WA-HA-KA) coast, and the little turtle town of Mazunte. We have definitely found the sun, and have the scars to prove it. Apart from vacating a beach cabana that was more romantic in the abstract than the reality of the plumbing and the rats, we have scarcely moved since.

You know that beach lined with quiet, cheap little bars - where you sit out in a baking sun for as long as you can bear before rushing into a cooling sea with waves that wash over you. Well, that´s where we live now. There´s even a great pizzeria. And after all those overnight bus journeys, the warmth and sea are doing wonders for my back.

Until the 90s, Mazunte was dependent on hunting sea turtles and selling their eggs, laid on the local beaches. Since this was outlawed, the town has reinvented itself as an ecotourist centre - focused on conservation and education. The local turtle ´museum´ makes slightly uncomfortable viewing, with these ancient giants of the sea confined to grimy pools. But there are no shows, no riding the turtles. It seems a genuine effort to understand and restore the population of the extraordinary creatures.

We´ve now both been laid low somewhat by stomach bugs. I promise you we are drinking only bottled water and being careful what we eat, but our English stomachs are just not used to this environment. The Mexican style of doctoring seems to be a drop-in clinic attached to a pharmacy, where the consultation fee is not high, but you get quite a bag of prescriptions for your ailment. I think they call it the ´razors and blades´ business model. I like that they can tell what kind of bug you have by poking your guts around and taking your temperature - no need to send samples to the lab like you would back home.

Aside from that, we are feeling rested and holidayed and ready for some meatier challenges. We´re nearly done with Mexico and will move on to Guatemala in the next week, hopefully finding a language school to hone our conversational skills. Next stop, rainforest.