Planet KaPow
By Planet Kapow
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Podcast Description
4 friends traveling from Australia traveling around Central & South America. Any way. Any how.
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| 1 | VideoPlanet Kapow 39 : Fundacion Viracocha | THE MACHETE: floats through the air above me, spinning slowly, the rusty blade catching the sunlight. I slowly reach out my hand, close my eyes. The hilt lands in my palm with a gentle thwack. Behind me, Danielle is throwing herself into a patch of undergrowth, her machete flying, to see how much destruction she can wreak in ten seconds. Erin is seeing how far she can drive her machete into a fence post. Phil is crouched on the ground, rocking back and forth. âI donât want to be here,â he groans. âI donât want to be here.â The pineapple plants we have been sent to weed remain untouched. Adamâs hands are covered in painful blisters; my back, shoulders and face in mosquito bites. What sort of sadistic breed of mosquito goes for the face? We are tired, we are miserable, we are bored, we are sore. How did it come to this? Why are we here? Weâre still in San Agustin, in the far south of Colombia, on an organic farm run by the Viracocha Foundation. Ever since the initial planning stages of this trip, weâd been determined to do some organic farming at some point. It was, I suppose, a plan to assuage the guilt we (mistakenly) expected to feel after quitting our jobs and living our lives on extended vacation. Our first attempt had been in Chihuahua, Mexico - an attempt that didnât quite go to plan, ending as it did with the fiasco of Adam and I hiking forty-two kilometres over twenty-four hours without food or water. That failure only made us more keen, and finally, here in San Agustin, we have our chance. Having arrived in town, we shoulder our backpacks and walk up a dirt road that winds over a hill, past a school and an army base. Outside the base a group of soldiers are working lazily with shovels to build a gutter for the road. They all have machine guns strapped to their backs. There is a civilian woman working for them; upon seeing us she leaps up and tries to pressgang us into service. We back away, refusing politely, and continue walking. We meet our contacts, Isabel and Fernando, a pair of hippies with frazzled hair and bloodshot eyes and loose patchwork pants of many colours. This will be the only time we meet them, in fact - theyâre subsequently accused of stealing volunteersâ shoes and cameras and leave in shame. They guide us to our house for the first week - âLa Casa de Jhonnyâ - where we must stay while renovations on the main house are completed. Itâs a shack; the rooms are tiny and dark; our light has no switch and is only turned on or off by jiggling the cable until it flickers. On the landing is a patch of concrete that sinks underfoot, which we try to avoid for the length of our stay. There is no door on the toilet, just a loose plastic curtain. On the landing is a large tree root in the shape of a dog, topped with a real, stuffed dogs head that has been around so long that it has worn away to a blank, creepy greyish-white. But from the landing there is a sweeping view across the valley, taking in waterfalls, plains, forests and farmhouses. We embark on a farcical odyssey about town in search of gumboots big enough for Adamâs enormous feet, and then itâs time for lunch. The Viracocha Foundation is a farm that grows organic fruit and vegetables to supply to schoolchildren in the region for their lunches. Itâs an admirable pursuit, and the food is truly delicious. But when weâre all asked to hold hands and give thanks for something in our lives, nervous glances are quickly exchanged between us. We hadnât even started working yet. On the first day Iâm handed a shovel and put to work alongside a young Colombian guy named Camilo, tilling soil that previously grew coffee. The work is hard and sweaty, but satisfying. After an hour weâre called away by Carlos, the supervisor. Camilo tries to chat with me in Spanish as weâre walking out but I find his accent all but impenetrable; I nod and shrug and | 27 12 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 2 | VideoA PK Preview: Ecuador | IT'S BEEN: a long journey through Colombia, and as we come to the end of it we thought we'd throw together a teaser of what's to come in the next few episodes in Ecuador, where we get our first taste of the Andes, find out what the air tastes like at 4800m, see what Ecuadoreans do with cute little guinea pigs, help the local milkman, and somehow end up at a cockfight (if I had a dollar for every time I've said that!). Enjoy! More episodes comin' at ya soon. | 20 12 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 3 | VideoPlanet Kapow 38 : Salento to San Agustin | MY EARS: pop furiously all night, the right ear sounding like a thousand champagne bottles corked in quick succession, as the bus ducks and weaves dangerously along the narrow mountain passes on its way south from Bogota. In the dawn light we pass muddy rivers, swollen and engorged and furious. And Colombia unfurls herself, a huge, soft quilt of sumptuous green hillsides rolling to the horizon. We find ourselves a spot on the map where the air is cool and clear - Salento. A rustic hostel in the midst of vast paddocks where we can help weed the vegetable garden, build the pizza oven, play with the dogs. We pause: we breathe. River trout fills the menus of the restaurants in the main plaza of town; handicraft kitsch clogs the stores. Salento seems the most perfectly harmless place on earth. Which makes it all the more astounding when on our third night there Dan and Phil come running up to us at dusk, wild-eyed and exhilarated, to report that they have just been held up by a skinny, trembling man with a flick knife on the dirt road outside town. âThatâs not a knife,â said Phil slowly, looking the man directly in the eye, âThis is a -â - and then they both sprinted past the confused would-be mugger without further harm. Itâs a wake-up call for us. Since coming to Colombia weâd become sloppy, overconfident - despite its reputation Colombia really does feel like one of the safest countries in Latin America. After much discussion we decide itâs time to re-adopt the caution that had seen us through the dodgiest cities so far - Managua, San Salvador, Guatemala City. Our gazes become steely-eyed; our biceps ripple with readiness; our minds are alert to every possibility. This lasts about three hours. By the next day weâve put it behind us and headed out in two separate directions - Dan and Phil to a horseback ride through the surrounding countryside and the remaining three on the back of a jeep to the Cocora valley for a day of hiking which passes by in a succession of dreamlike images strung together by the swampy, waterlogged track through which we slog all day. Hummingbirds dart past, thrumming the air - a dozen of them at least, swooping and hovering, holding their wings upwards and still like insects when they land. A cluster of wax palms, sixty metres high, together on a hillside obscured by cloud. An armadillo, shuffling along beside us with wheezing breath. The place has such a hypnotizing effect on Erin that she decides to stay awhile, volunteering at the hostel while the rest of us move on, first to the hot springs of Santa Rosa - âCall me George,â says the owner of the hostel in strained English, âI like to practice English but I speak it not very fine.â - and then to the bars of Manizales, where a Colombian girl with braces cheerfully demonstrates to Adam the âColombian accordionâ, in which the breasts are squeezed together rhythmically, resulting in a sound not unlike heavy breathing from the table of older gentlemen behind us. Adam watches in stunned silence. And then itâs onward to Cali, the highway clogged with cars full of young men hanging out the window, wielding the green flag of the cityâs soccer team. The pedestrian overpasses are crowded with motorbikes using them to change direction. We get into the city tired and cranky; our cab driver takes us to the wrong address, then tries to charge us double the price for his mistake. âI wish I knew the Spanish for âfucking assholeâ,â says Phil despondently. Cali is a working-class city famous for salsa; its many bars vibrate with the energy of hips being gyrated at dangerous angles. Despite several lessons in Mexico and Cuba, none of the team could be mistaken for a salsa expert, and Adam and I in particular more closely resemble broomsticks suffering convulsions than anything remotely rhythmic or sexy. So itâs time once again to hit the classroom for | 17 12 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 4 | VideoA PK Preview: The Salt Flats of Bolivia | WELL, NOW: it's no secret that the Planet Kapow team has started dragging its feet on the videos a little - we're now five months behind and counting. So while we place our noses firmly to the grindstone and get on with pushing out upcoming videos from Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, we thought we'd post up a taste of what's to come. This video was shot at the Salar de Uyuni in southern Bolivia, one of the most remarkable places on the earth. It won't appear in our episodes for several weeks, so enjoy, and stay tuned for more. | 19 10 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 5 | VideoPlanet Kapow 37 : San Gil to Bogota | THREE SMALL: children on bicycles cling to the rear bumper of a semi-trailer slogging its slow way up a mountain. Another small boy on a hairpin turn holds a handmade flip sign indicating whether itâs safe to pass. Our driver drops him a coin from his window. A drunkard at a bus stop goes to pee off a bank into the river; he overbalances and tumbles down the grassy embankment. Looking out the window, I had never imagined such a shade of green to be possible. In the morning we find ourselves at Bucaramanga bus station. The drivers are loading the bus with packets of sugar in their thousands, filling up the luggage hold and the rear seats; they enlist Adam and Phil to lend a hand. Once we are all aboard and sitting on the bus, a policeman boards and asks us all to get out. He snatches my bag away and searches it roughly; his partner grabs Erin. The bus station security guard looks on grinning eagerly as if in anticipation. They go through all our things until they find the culprit - Philâs rolling tobacco. âItâs just tobacco,â Phil explains. âMarijuana?â asks the policeman uncertainly. âNo, no, just tobacco.â The policeman sniffs the pouch hesitantly, then swings on the security guard. âItâs just tobacco, you fool!â he cries. The security guard skulks off. The policemen submit Phil to a thorough pat-down anyway before they allow us back onto the bus and storm off, muttering to themselves about it having been a waste of time. The next few days are spent traveling on crumbling highways between the beautiful towns of San Gil, Barichara, Guane and Villa de Leyva through typically mindblowing Colombian countryside. The roads are blocked with with the earthy vomit of landslides and in a lot of places are missing an entire lane, having disintegrated and slid down the slope - sometimes taking an unfortunate truck or bus along for the ride. We bathe under waterfalls one hundred and eighty metres high, swollen and cacophonous: itâs like swimming in a factory. We hike past bellicose geese, gobbling turkeys, peacocks fanning their tails. We wander through Villa de Leyvaâs profusion of whitewashed houses, cobblestone streets, orange terracotta roof tiles - an image that should be becoming tiresome by now but just isnât. We slide gleefully down natural rock slides stretching thirty metres, crashing against the walls. Outside of Villa de Leyva we find ourselves at an ancient Muisca astronomical site, dozens of huge rocks fashioned into p***ses rising straight and proud from the grass beneath. Precisely how the presence of so many engorged dicks assisted in their astronomical calculations isnât explained, sadly. And the clouds pass low over the green fields. The abundance of marine fossils in the area is extraordinary - particularly given that it lies two thousand metres above sea level and several hundred kilometres from where the ocean is now. Giant pliosaurs, trilobites and other creatures are on display everywhere. In Guane the museum contains over ten thousand specimens; the surplus are used as paving stones in the plaza outside. An old woman unlocks the museum for us and guides us through with a schoolteacherâs pointer and a menacing scowl. Thankfully we are spared her wrath as a young Colombian joins the tour; the death stares rain down as his particularly obnoxious black metal ringtone sounds no less than eleven times during the thirty minute tour. San Gil is billed as the âAdventure Capital of Colombiaâ, but we completely fail to take advantage of it; Dan and Phil are the only ones with sufficient guts to attempt to paraglide but the wind dies and leaves Dan stranded on the clifftop. But San Gil does introduce us to the wonderful Colombian sport of Tejo. Under a corrugated iron roof being pounded with rain and on a floor of dull grey concrete, groups of older men are tossing their heavy iron weights some fifteen metres across the ro | 17 10 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 6 | VideoPlanet Kapow 36 : Mompox to Medellin | THE WILD: backcountry of Colombia is where the land really comes to life, flooding the senses with shades of green I hadnât thought possible. In the dusty streets of Bosconia we are physically grabbed by a couple of men and dragged bodily toward a mi... | 6 10 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 7 | VideoPlanet Kapow 35 : Cartagena to Taganga | WE FIND: ourselves in Turbo with Sebastian and Pixie, negotiating with a couple of touts in front of a bus armoured with bull bars and heavy-duty off-road tyres; it is a rough road ahead. The day is hot and our packs are heavy and the touts are shouting; cars are buzzing past, honking their horns and kicking up plumes of choking dust. Eventually we agree to the price, but Pixie is not happy - âI have one rule over here,â she says to Sebastian, âand that is never to buy anything when Iâm being pressured,â but she gets in nonetheless. The seats are coated in dust. As we pull around the corner a large, sad-faced drunken man jumps into the stairwell clutching a half-empty bottle of aguardiente, and has to be physically wrestled from the bus by the conductor. Outside, a horse attached to a cart has its head deep inside a wooden bucket. A couple of hours on an unforgiving dirt road past grand Spanish haciendas leads us to a semi-collapsed bridge where we are forced to change buses. A great crowd of people pushes by carrying produce. A young guy in a smart white shirt and aviator sunglasses walks past with an enormous basket of green plantains balanced atop his head. Everywhere the ground is littered with exploded plantains. The bridge is still crossable on foot; a recent storm has washed away the far bank and the bridge now tilts at an unnatural angle. Next to it, the tattered remains of a pedestrian suspension bridge sway in the breeze. It is three hours further to Monteria; outside the city a man boards the bus and offers to take us the remaining distance to Cartagena. We agree while the bus driver circles the city, unable to enter the terminal because of a fatal motorbike accident just outside it that has drawn hundreds of onlookers, jostling for the best view. On our final pass of the terminal, the paramedics are lifting the corpse into the ambulance, wrapped in a white bodybag. The driver gives up and heads back into town. We board the minivan but this new driver wants to go to the terminal for some reason. Still blocked by the crowd, he turns down the highway on the wrong side of the road, trying for the rear entrance. An oncoming semi-trailer blasts its horn at us and swerves away at the last second with such a microscopic distance between us that the two people on the passenger side actually fling themselves from the van and onto the traffic island. We all pass out in the van, Adam slouching in a shirtless heap next to me. The blinding lights of semi-trailers race across our faces. At one in the morning a cow on the side of the road steps in front of the van. There is the squeal of tyres, a rush of gravity, the sound of something breaking... Everyone is suddenly awake. âWhat was that?â gasps Danielle. âWas that a person? I think it was a person,â says Adam. âA cow,â I croak through a dry throat, âIt was a cow.â The cow has disappeared into the bush and the driver inspects the damage. We have lost our front indicator and side mirror. Semi-trailers continue to roar past at short intervals. We arrive in Cartagena at two in the morning. Pixie and Sebastian split off to a different hostel. The man who takes down our names in the guestbook has lost his left hand; he uses the stump to hold down the page while he writes. We wake to a steaming sun, sweating with our backpacks on as we trawl the streets for a hostel that has been recommended to us. It turns out to be a dilapidated three-story terrace; our room has large holes in the ceiling, no door on the bathroom and a toilet that doesnât flush. The shower has no tap; it is controlled by means of a rope, and the drain clogs and forms a stinking cesspool within two days. There are four huge dogs at the hostel that drag rubbish out of the bin and onto the kitchen floor. They leave the rooftop as a minefield of turds. Outside of the hostel, Cartagena is a masterpiece of colonial Spanish architecture, | 6 9 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 8 | VideoPlanet Kapow 34 : Panama City to Turbo (The Darién Crossing) | SO HERE: we are, in a 4WD driven by a lanky Panamanian with a gold tooth cut into the shape of the Playboy Bunny. We were up at four oâclock, giddy with excitement, and even though he was two hours late to pick us up and has stopped every half hour for the last five hours our excitement has not abated. Today it happens. We are on our way, past the Darién Gap and into South America. Today. Today. This is it. The Darién Gap sounds like the fanciful invention of a writer. A harsh, jungled no-manâs-land, traversable only by a combination of foot and dug-out canoe, peopled by some very dangerous men, armed to the teeth, whose only English phrases include âThe ransom is two million dollarsâ and âSay hello to my little friendâ. A land of wild things blocking the only point of contact between the two American continents. Itâs barely conquerable at the best of times - the expedition to cross in 1985-7 in a Jeep, taking 741 days, actually took more time than it would take for a snail to cover the same distance - and since the escalation of violence in Colombia in the mid-90âs, increasingly likely to end up in kidnapping, or worse. But Diego and Mario, the two Brazilians weâd spent time with in Granada, had explained to us that it may be possible to skirt the edge of the Darien Gap, taking longboats from island to island through the San Blas archipelago and then further south, to the border town of Puerto ObaldÃa and into Colombia through Capurganá. That was all the information we had to go on. Our 4WD drops us in the coastal town of Cartà which, against our expectations, is nothing more than a thatched-roof palapa and a carpark. A soft-voiced Panamanian explains that we will need to go to the island of Cartà Sugdub, which is a common stop for passing cargo boats. He guides us to a small longboat. Adam tries to take a photo of a group of men struggling with a homemade sailboat off the pier, but someone on the longboat shouts in protest. âNo photos here,â says the helpful man, âYou can take photos on the island.â I sit down next to a plastic bag full of dead fish and we set off, lolling across the shallow waves, the spray of sea in our hair. The island is packed - every available space has a cane fence around it, giving the island as a whole the look of a wooden fort. The water around the shore, clear and blue, is encrusted with trash, strewn with plastic bottles and missing flip-flops. On the concrete pier, women are wrapped in bright orange and pink fabrics, covering their lower faces like Technicolor ninjas. On arriving weâre told wildly conflicting stories - there will be a boat to Puerto ObaldÃa tomorrow, there will be a boat at 1pm, there are no more boats, period. The boat will take six hours, it will take five days, it will take three days - maybe. An old Kuna man with great Coke-bottle specs approaches us. âI donât know if there are any boats,â he says vaguely in fluent English, âMaybe later?â He shakes our hands, except Danielle, who he canât see out the side of his glasses. His name is Charlie; he speaks English because he spent most of his life working on American naval bases. âIf you come and visit me in the afternoon, Iâd like that very much,â he says, but though we run into him several times, shuffling along in his orange Hawaiian shirt, he never recognizes us again. The island is small - it can be crossed in any direction in around two minutes. Everywhere kids are playing. They try to push each other into the garbage in the water, they play tug âoâ war using their ragged clothes as ropes. We sit down to a meal of fried chicken and rice and try to formulate a plan. Remarkably, thereâs a pair of foreigners already on the island: Yannick and Shirley, a pair of cyclists on a colossal intercontinental odyssey. Theyâve been here a day already; they speak optimist | 26 8 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 9 | VideoPlanet Kapow 33 : La Fortuna to Panama City | A TAXI: to the border, an eventless crossing, and here we are. Costa Rica! Now a series of buses - to Liberia, to Cañas, to Tilarán, where there are no more buses and a taxi driver hauls us the rest of the way to La Fortuna, cheerfully singing the advertising jingle for Imperial Beer (âLa cerveza / de Costa Rica / [eagle whistle!]â). Lake Arenal looks misty; the sky is deeply overcast and here, in the steamy central American jungle, itâs actually quite cold. We have come to La Fortuna on our desperately unsuccessful quest to see real, red-hot magma on this trip. So far, no less than seven volcanoes have failed us, but weâre informed that Volcan Arenal is one of the most active volcanoes in the world, erupting almost daily. Outside the cab, a series of expensive hot spring resorts glide by, all subtle lighting and waterfalls gurgling over rocks. We peer at Arenal through the gloom but all is silent and we descend on the town, winding up in a hostel where we cook dinner, drink a beer, and are assaulted by the full-force of an incredibly loud British lout named Jimmy who shouts at us like a living, breathing Twitter post - âAw s**t yeah man thereâs some FAHKING good beers cominâ out of the States yâknow, fahking microbreweries and all that s***e, but yâknow, any fahkinâ P**S is good enough for me MATE HAHAHAHAHAHA!â. Next day is overcast again, drizzling lightly, cold and miserable. This is not what we expected from Costa Rica. We amble about the hostel with confused looks on our faces. We had wanted to visit the volcano but itâs submerged under a thick wet blanket of cloud. Feeling the bite of the cold, we decide to hit the hot springs, our perennial niggardliness causing us to eschew the usual comfort and relaxation of such affairs to trudge down a muddy slope and through an open stormwater tunnel to a secret, free âhot springâ, which would actually be better described as âthe runoff water from the more expensive hot spring resorts upstream that has been soaking the wrinkles, callouses and open sores of hundreds of elderly gringos for several hours'. We lie and chat and afterward find an oddly shaped rapid that, amazingly, sends one sliding at high speed down the moss-slickened floor of the concrete tunnel. After a time the rain starts to fall in great thick globs that break and splatter across the face. Our gear gets saturated; we make our way up to the road. We are turned down for a beer at the expensive resort next door (âOur bar is for people who are... dry,â sniffs the man at reception, eyeing our dripping clothes as pale, chubby seniors shuffle past in dressing gowns), and stand in the rain until one of the resortâs drivers takes pity on us and carries us back to town. Another day of buses, of overcast skies. La Fortuna to Ciudad Quebrada. Quebrada to San José. San José to Limón. Limón to Puerto Viejo de Talamanca as darkness falls. The whole day full of vibrant, breathing jungle crushed under the weight of the soggy grey sky. In Puerto Viejo we have a slow night of chatting with dull Norwegians, of walking listlessly through the rain, of chasing a large crab off the road, pincers waving in fury, of going to sleep in our tents on the wooden floorboards of the hostel. Next day the rain still pours. We sit in the mosaic-covered open area of the hostel and do a lot of very little. The waves crash loudly, less than fifty metres away, but we never even set foot in the sand. Only two things come to mind for me about Costa Rica: rain and jungle. But mostly rain. Weâd always planned to push through Costa Rica quickly, scared off by dozens of travelers bemoaning the high prices and Americanized culture. But we found quite a breathtaking country - an easy country, certainly, but none the worse for it - and one that was nowhere near as expensive as, say, Mexico or Cuba. But it rained. Across the entire country | 22 8 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 10 | VideoPlanet Kapow 32 : Masaya to San Juan del Sur | TENSIONS RISE: and drop away constantly within the group; weâre only four, after all, and weâve been traveling a long time together - seven months, now, for Adam and I, five for the girls. And while traveling alongside three of your best friends can be one of the richest and most rewarding experiences in life, it can also be a bit like trying to run down the street with a plastic bag over your head. So there are sunken veins of frustration and hostility constantly swerving, bubbling, disappearing. And, on a handful of occasions, they bleed to the surface. None of us are known for our exaggerated sense of drama - there are no all-day shouted feuds here, no punches thrown, no tedious bathroom lock-ins. Just a quick blast of words (not yelled, but flung like knives) and then we scatter to our corner of the bus, to read or listen to music or - my favoured tactic - to stare vacantly out the window with a big stupid grin on my face to try to demonstrate to the others that Iâm having a much more enjoyable day than they are. Itâs in just such a silent, slightly ridiculous tableau that we travel back west through the jungles and plains of central Nicaragua, the trip back from Bluefields proving to be more than we could take. But not even such determined sulking could withstand a town like Masaya. Itâs Sunday and the plaza is full of life; there is a fundraiser for a local hospital for children with disabilities, one man tells Erin (he signals âintellectual disabilitiesâ by sticking out his tongue, contorting his arms and grunting). A little ways south of the concrete horror show of Managua, Masaya isnât bursting with attractions but it compensates by emanating good vibes from every orifice. Over beers at barn-style bars thrumming with conversation and laughter and romantic ranchero tunes, weâre forced to kiss and make up. Paul Theroux, in his 1979 book The Old Patagonian Express, relates the âcommonly held viewâ that âNicaragua is the worst eyesore in the world: the hottest, the poorest, the most savagely governed, with a murderous landscape and medieval laws and disgusting food.â But with a monthâs stay in the country we saw nothing of the sort; on the contrary, Nicaragua was the most exceptional of the central American nations. The people were wide-eyed, friendly, curious, funny; the landscape unspeakably beautiful. And the cities - Managua aside - were alive. Granada, Leon, San Juan del Sur: they breathed and pulsed and laughed and sighed. Masaya was no exception. Except, ironically, for its major attraction, its markets - a sad, uninspiring arrangement of tourist bric-a-brac, with a chorus of shopkeepers urging â¡Pasen, adelante!â as we pass their stalls attempting to look interested. It is admittedly easier to inspire awe as a city when you have a gargantuan volcano looming on your outskirts. From a distance Volcan Masaya appeared squat and unprepossessing, but upon driving to the craterâs edge we find it to be truly enormous - a car driving on the opposite lip is a distant speck - buzzards using the billowing sulfurous gases for updrafts. We climb to the cross erected by the Spanish to rid the volcano of evil spirits caused by human sacrifices, where bumblebees whirr noisily and the volcano and its surroundings spread out in their jagged, formless glory. Signs in the parking lot advise visitors to park their car facing the exit in case of eruption and, if the volcano expels rocks, to hide under your car. A faint rumble from the volcanoâs depths sends us scrambling for cover. We head south to Ometepe Island, two impressive volcanic cones linked by a narrow isthmus in the middle of a massive lake. Walking the black sand beaches, large blue birds with long tails and floppy combs upon their heads fly over us awkwardly and ward us off with a dozen distinct cries. An eagle circles overhead. A vulture sits menacingly on a branch. | 6 8 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 11 | VideoPlanet Kapow 31 : Mombacho Volcano to Big Corn Island | MANAGUA IS: full of ugly steel sculptures draped in coloured fairy lights. We drive around in the dark, attempting unsuccessfully to procure tickets for the odyssey that awaits us. Nicaraguaâs capital is an unpleasant city in a region infamous for unpleasant cities; driving around in the dark there hangs a pervasive atmosphere of sleaze and dust and things burning, punctuated at every junction by these ridiculous steel sculptures, blinking at us from the roadside. No capital city in central America could accurately be called pleasant save perhaps Panama City, but Managua ranks alongside Guatemala City, Tegucigalpa and San Salvador as one of the most immediately unlikeable. Later we will find out that it wasnât just a baseless hunch; an Australian we met later, in Colombia, told us that he had gotten off an eight-hour bus in Managua and hopped straight in a cab. The cab had driven around the corner, three armed men had gotten in, and after a brief struggle had proceeded to beat him senseless, driven him from ATM to ATM to withdraw all the money he had, and then stolen his every possession, dropping his passport at his feet when they dumped him on the street. The day following our arrival we purchase our tickets east and make a token attempt at sightseeing, taking a taxi to the Plaza de la Revolución. The taxi driver cheerfully points out what passes for points of interest along the way. âThereâs a theatre,â he says. Wow. At length he stops in the middle of a vast, flat expanse of blank concrete, with only a small seafood restaurant squatting on the outside edge. âOkay,â says Dan, âHow do we get to the plaza from here?â The taxi driver looks confused. âWeâre in it,â he says. Itâs a wasteland. It looks like a mob has come through and looted it of anything remotely interesting, like a car stripped of its parts. There is a giant steel structure that vaguely resembles a Christmas tree, covered, naturally, in blinking fairy lights. It is easily the most impressive feature of the place. The cathedral, made structurally unsound by the great quake of â73, is covered in barbed wire and scaffolding and ¡Peligro! signs. Over at the flagpole a large team of men work to hoist the gargantuan national flag outside the presidential palace; it is a quarter of the way up before they realize it is upside down. An old man wanders vaguely among us, selling plastic bags of water. âItâs safe to walk here,â he says, indicating the ground on which we are standing, âBut donât walk over there. Definitely not. Itâs very dangerous.â With his hand he is vaguely motioning toward everything to the east and south. He pauses as if thinking. âOr there,â he says, indicating everything to the north. âDonât walk there.â We walk west. Around the corner is the revolutionary monument of a peasant grasping a pickaxe and an AK-47 in ridiculously musclebound arms. The leg is damaged and the steel rods poke through absurdly like some kind of Third-World Terminator. Underneath is a quote from Sandino, the national hero: âOnly the labourers and the farmers will go to the end.â That night the cold wind pours in through the open windows of the bus but its howl does nothing to overwhelm the non-stop parade of mariachi and reggaeton blasting through the speakers. It is three in the morning and we are on our way across Nicaragua, heading to Big Corn Island, on the Caribbean Sea. At three-thirty we stop at a food station selling what look like they may, at one point, have been hot dogs, but now look like shriveled p***ses wrapped in mouldy bread. As I line up for the toilet a softcore S&M film is showing loudly over the heads of the tired looking passengers, trying hard not to look at what they are eating. At four in the morning we pull in to the small village of El Rama, where we are shuffled in the pre-dawn darkness to a lin | 16 7 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 12 | VideoPlanet Kapow 30 : Leon to Granada | âPASSPORTS, PLEASE,â: says the Honduran official brusquely. Weâre sitting on the Nicaraguan border at six in the morning, after an epic bus journey across Honduras, from the thick jungle of the north through the lakes and plains of the centre to ... | 17 6 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 13 | VideoPlanet Kapow 29 : Utila to the Bottom of the Sea | PEOPLE HAD: been spouting excited stories about Utila as far back as Zacatecas, Mexico, and we had come to imagine a lethargic island of sandy streets and wild, all-night parties. But first impressions arenât great; from the moment we set foot ashore we are pushed to the side of the concrete roads by motorbikes, ATVâs, golf carts and tuk-tuks roaring past at ridiculous speeds by shirtless American boys with bleached hair. We wander aimlessly with our backpacks sticking to our backs in the heat. A portly American bellows at us from his front verandah to offer us a room. âEverywhere better than mine is full up!â he yells, âThere are cheaper places, but theyâre s**t! Just dirty, rotten s**t!â We continue walking. âHey you!â he shouts to his elderly neighbour, âYeah, Iâm talkinâ to you! They want a room!â At the Treetanic Bar we have a couple of beers before the place fills up with divers. A bell is rung and the bartender calls out that Portia has today passed her divemaster course; he says she has one last test to complete. Portia sits up on the bar, a ruddy-faced Australian in a bikini top. âShow us your t*ts!â someone shouts. Portia dons a snorkeling mask and the bartender pours blue Curaçao into the snorkel until, finally surrendering, she yanks the snorkel from her mouth and spits the liquor across the people in front, most of it dribbling down her chin and stomach. âShow us your t*ts!â someone shouts again. The bartender is now pouring beer into her goggles, which Portia is sucking through her nostrils. The beer is finished, Portiaâs hands are thrown skyward, and the party begins. Next morning after a breakfast of johnnycakes stuffed with ham, eggs and cheese, weâre ready to see Utila with fresh (though bloodshot) eyes. We see a postcard: white sand, azure water, swaying palms. On the hot streets, young girls on bicycles, their hair in pigtails and cornrows, scream at each other in the gentle Caribbean cadence of their unintelligible Criolle. Rotten tomatoes sit in boxes out the front of the pulperias, the bananas soft and covered in tiny flies. We rent bicycles and roll down to Chepes Beach for a swim, the powdery sand clinging to our feet. Then east around the point on a hot dirt road, the rustle of lizards darting off on either side. The sand and scrub to either side is littered with Private Property signs and occasionally a dirt bike whines past us. We pull up on a rocky outcrop overlooking the sea, separated from the ocean by a three-foot strip of plastic bottles and trash. Adam tries to go for a swim but punctures his feet on the urchins and dead coral. Erin and I turn back for Bando Beach while Adam and Dan look for a sealed road back to town. At Bando a couple of girls lazing behind the bar, gossiping in Criolle, take our entrance fee and we swim in the warm clear water, a baby shark swimming circles of Erinâs shins. Dive boats rumble past in the distance. The following morning Adam and Dan head to the first day of their open-water dive course. Erin and I push off toward their dive school to hitch a ride on the one oâclock dive boat. We sit on the warm wood of the pier while the divers, laughing and joking, load the old wooden boat with the grey clinking oxygen tanks. The divers are young and tanned and full of fun, all shirtless and most sporting a small beer gut from their time on the island. We head out to sea, sitting on the front deck of the boat in the sun. In the open water we stop and the divers disembark. We stay aboard with a handful of other snorkelers - two Scandinavian girls and Brian, an Australian - and Hoover, a native Utilan who is driving the boat. Brian asks Hoover some inane question about Henry Morganâs fabled treasure. Hoover looks distantly out to sea. âMan, I wish I had dat treasure,â he murmurs, âIf I had dat treasure, man, I wouldnât be drivinâ | 25 5 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 14 | VideoPlanet Kapow 28 : Copan Ruinas to La Ceiba | BACK IN: San Salvador, we find an ancient station wagon posing as a taxi; our driver is short and rotund, bald but for a horrible slicked-down combover. He squints and has a gold tooth that he sucks on between sentences. Winking, he reaches in the rear door and releases a rope that holds the rear door closed. It pops open and he screams âAutomatic!â with a laugh. Heâs giggly, chattering and obsessed with distances. âOh, the border!â he says, when we tell him our plans, âFrom La Palma, the border is eight kilometres. From here to La Palma is sixty-seven kilometres. So altogether it is seventy-five kilometres.â âOh,â I say, looking out the window. âIn a straight line,â he says, leaning in close as if telling me a secret, âitâs only forty-eight kilometres away. But because the road is so windy, itâs seventy-five kilometres to the border!â He giggles abruptly. At the bus station hustlers try to approach us with their broad American accents. There is a concrete guard tower full of soldiers, and most of the buses have several windows smashed in, the spiderwebbed glass throwing the sun into our eyes. On the other side of the border, between rows of parked semi-trailers stretching as far as the eye can see, a pickup truck full of men in cowboy hats stops and picks us up. The back smells of manure. We pass two cow skeletons lying in ditches by the side of the road, pieces of hide still attached like ragged clothes. These will be the two trademarks of Honduras: cowboy hats and roadside cattle carcasses. Central America is often spoken and written of as if the countries were indistinguishable from each other, each one a tiny jungle kingdom of corruption and tropical decay, but itâs been pleasing to discover that each has its own distinct personality - laidback Belize, reserved and polite Guatemala, brash and fun-loving El Salvador. Honduras is the exception, the country without a face; it is, in fact, its very facelessness that is its defining characteristic. But itâs not necessarily a negative trait; for a lot of our stay Honduras plays like a best-of album of the countries visited so far, retaining the raw edge of Guatemala with the rural friendliness of Mexico and the Salvadoran fondness for a good party. In Santa Rosa de Copan, Adam and I step gingerly into a dimly-lit pool hall in a quest for beer. The place is packed out with old men on stools clutching Salva Vida beers, young men in flannelette shirts and moustaches holding pool cues to their shoulders. All are staring at us through bloodshot eyes. A thick fog of silence and tobacco smoke descends; I can hear my footsteps tap clearly on the dirty tiles as we walk to the bar - and then, as if someone has pressed play, the entire hall erupts into smiles and shouted questions - âWhere are you from?â âDo you like football?â âIs it cold in Australia?â âDo you play volleyball?â âCan you buy me a beer?â âCome on, amigo, buy me a beer?â - this familiar Latin friendliness always showing up where it is least expected. Over the shouts we try to order a few beers to take back to the hotel, where we meet up with the girls carrying hotdogs drenched in six sauces, and we sit on the wet balcony over the empty street and salute this new country that is so much like the old ones. In the morning we follow the garbage truck down to the highway and jump another bus for Copan Ruinas. Adam pops the roof hatch of the bus so that he has room to stand, drawing roars of laughter from the entire bus. The girls do battle with the wandering hands of the cowboys as we stand in the crowded heat. Halfway along a man disembarks at a large sugar mill with a revolver in his hands. The bus driver beeps the horn at him; he slides the gun casually into the back of his waistband and continues walking up the path. A Honduran man spots Adamâs camera and, point | 15 5 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 15 | VideoPlanet Kapow 27 : Antigua to San Salvador | IN ANOTHER: little town on Lake Atitlan named Santiago de Atitlan, we find our way up a gravelly path to the shrine of Maximon, the infamous âWicked Saintâ, patron of drinkers, smokers, gamblers and prostitutes. Each year at Easter in towns across ... | 10 5 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 16 | VideoPlanet Kapow 26 : Nebaj to Lago de Atitlan | ON THE: road out of Semuc Champey, the truck we are in pulls over at the top of a hill. The view from the hill is spectacular - verdant green valleys; a small, moss-encrusted church - but the hill itself is covered with trash, the refuse of the hostels along the river. A pack of scabby dogs fights over the scraps. Our driver jumps out and dumps a large barrel of waste onto the pile. The dogs jump at it growling, torn toilet paper trailing from their mouths. We head further west, toward the Ixil Triangle, scene to some of the bloodiest massacres of the civil war. Mayan families drive past crowded into smoking pickups overloaded with furniture, a stove hanging off the end of the tray. I cling tightly to the rails of the roof of the minibus, my a*s wedged as firmly into a tyre as can be managed, the rest of me splayed across the assembled luggage. Adam, behind me, clings precariously to the back ladder, which scrapes across the concrete speedbumps. At the top of a pine tree by the side of the road I see a child, eight years old perhaps, standing on a high branch without ropes, calmly cutting firewood. âDid you see that kid?â I call out to Adam. âAll I can see is your a*s,â he shouts. Across the valley the low white clouds spill softly over the tops of the mountains and slide down quickly and silently, like death. The clouds billow in over the mountain town of Nebaj, where the blinking red lights of the telecommunications towers provide the only light in the scrambled patchwork of grey monochrome. Here, the team splits up - Dan and Adam off for a three day hike to outlying villages; Erin and I on a day hike, walking up a steep dirt track toward Cocop. A man with a tall brown hat and a machete tied to his belt wants to know why we are walking when we could take the bus. I tell him we need the exercise, but he continues to look baffled. âWhere did you come here from?â âAustralia,â I say, but again he looks baffled, so I repeat it. âIs that a village?â he asks. I smile. âCoban,â I say, âWe came here from Coban.â âAh, Coban,â he says, âItâs hotter there.â At the village, the foundations of the razed houses are still visible in the paddocks, lilies growing profusely in the houses of the massacred. The next day we walk another steep dirt track to the resettlement village of Acul. Along the way there is a gang of men working on the road with hoes and shovels. They are older, mostly, and speaking Qâechi. Some of the men wear white panama hats, and they are not working. As we come close the working men turn to us. âWe want water,â they say, reaching out their hands, âItâs very hot, and we have no water. A little water, please.â Over the hill the track is as steep down as it was up. We pass a woman and some children herding goats up the hill, who stop and stare as we pass. In the streets of the village an old drunk stumbles toward us, hissing, with eyes wide. In the main street another drunk is passed out, face up, in the middle of the road with the sun beating down. The clotheslines of the village are covered with the red skirts of the women. While Adam and Dan continue their hike, Erin and I head south to the market town of Chichicastenango. We arrive in the dark, stumbling on the cobblestones through the skeletal city of scaffolding on which the market will be hung tomorrow. At the end of the street a group of women are laughing while they make tortillas, the dough making a damp slap between their hands as they stand over the black hotplate. In the morning, walls of wooden masks stare down at us. Fabrics and bags and wooden saints. Buckets of chicken feet sit in the sun. The crowd heaves and swells. The shorter Mayans just put their heads down and keep walking, uncaring if they run into someone else, simply ploughing through like tractors in a muddy field, while the rest of us hesitate and are bogged. | 2 5 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 17 | VideoPlanet Kapow 25 : Finca Ixobel to Semuc Champey | GUATEMALA SHINES: an almost luminescent green as we fling ourselves south through the outskirts of Poptun to Finca Ixobel. Finca Ixobel is something of a legendary travelerâs hangout started by two Americans - one of whom was kidnapped and horrifi... | 28 4 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 18 | VideoPlanet Kapow 24 : Caye Caulker to Tikal | WE PASSED: a few lifeless days in Mexico in what we called "rest and reCubaration", racing through the markets of Chetumal to stock up on all the bits and pieces lost or worn into the ground along the way. When we began to feel the first flickers of enthusiasm returning, we jumped a bus to Belize, where we were promptly ripped off for $20 at the border post (we had a joke back then that has ceased to be a joke and become something between superstition and fact - that every border crossing in Latin America would end with us being ripped off exactly three times; no more, no less) and switched to a decommissioned American school bus, canary yellow, jangling like a sack of coins, lovely and breezy while moving but stickily suffocating the moment it came to a halt. These, the famous chicken buses, were to become the sole form of transport across Central America. For the main part they were enjoyable but trying to fit Adam into one required some complex body origami. Belize is an anomaly - a small Latin American country that thinks it's a Caribbean island, with historical ties to Britain and English as the national language. It has a total population of only 330,000 - to put that in context, El Salvador, which is slightly smaller than Belize, has 7.2 million people - though you'd never know it from sitting on that bus, passing village after village, people crowding up and down the aisle, babbling in their gentle Caribbean accents. After several hours the bus staggered into the ugly humidity of Belize City, from where we jumped into a boat, gliding across perfect azure waters to the tiny island of Caye Caulker. Half a dozen dreadlocked Rastafarians greeted us at the dock, waiting to guide people off to their guesthouses. We shouldered our packs and wandered up the sand road. A young guy on a bicycle pedalled lazily over to me and the girls while Adam strode on a little ahead. "Hey mon," he said to me, smiling, "It seems you have a surplus of women. Would you mind if I borrowed one?" Caye Caulker used to be only one island until 1961, when Hurricane Hattie quite literally ripped the whole thing in half, in the process giving the island its only swimmable beach. The Split, as it's known, now prominently features submerged picnic tables and an archipelago of the shattered remnants of a concrete pier sticking up from the water, wobbling underfoot. We snorkel at the Split, amazed - starfish, stingrays, squid, flounder, dory, angelfish, the collected debris of the hurricane, all within a couple of metres of the shore. Afterwards we sit on the sand with a beer watching the sunset, in front of which a bearded, potbellied Rasta sits on the bow of his fishing boat, talking to us with glazed eyes about the glory of Jah while tossing us fresh coconut flesh retrieved with his machete. On the way back to our cabin a young man approaches us, smiling - "Man, you've got a surplus of women! Would it be okay if I borrowed one?" The heat of the middle of the day on the island is crippling and we spend much of each day pasted to our bed, face up, watching the arms of the fan spin lazily past. In the night we have a couple of beers, eat some dinner - almost inevitably lobster, everywhere serving lobster, lobster omelettes, lobster burritos, lobster burger, lobster draped in coconut and deep-fried. Then some cocktails - the universally beloved 'Pantie Ripper' - and then the long wander up and down the island, looking for a bar full of people. But most nights the bars are empty and when they're not, the thin vein of quiet hostility that one sometimes detects running through the island bleeds to the surface. On our last night Erin and I are having a drink at a rooftop reggae bar when we're approached by a skinny Rasta and offered weed. "No thanks, we're okay," answers Erin brightly, but the man turns on her spitefully. "Don't speak for 'im," he spits, motioning to me, "In dis country de man speak for de woman. | 23 4 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 19 | VideoPlanet Kapow 23 : Santiago de Cuba to Baracoa | BUT BACK: to the story. Back to the beginning. Havana is a beautiful city to walk around. Crumbling buildings pour into narrow streets full of 1950's convertibles, old couples in home-made horsecarts, teenagers playing wallball. Old ladies drop baskets attached by ropes over their balcony, lowering them to the street where a waiting salesman places a newspaper inside. Waves crash loudly over the seawall and onto the street. As soon as we arrived, young men approached us, seemingly spontaneously, to help us find a casa for the night. We strode together from house to house, each one phoning the next one down the streets, nobody with a spare room except an old couple on the fourth floor of a building. Cuba does not have hostels - choices for accommodation are restricted to expensive government-run hotels or casas, literally people's houses with a spare room that the government has authorised to be let out to travelers. It's a system with benefits and drawbacks as a traveler - you get a good glimpse into people's lives, and your Spanish improves immensely; but you also miss out on the community of other travelers, swapping tips and stories, building that collective excitement which is the greatest quality of hostels. Of course the boys helping us to find these casas were after more than just thanks; but we'd been so long in the secure bubble of Mexico that we'd lost our instincts for getting hustled. It took us a couple of hours to lose the first hustler but we found ourselves immediately in the company of another, then another. And another. Always approaching with such a confusing amalgam of charm and hostility, always swaggering and standoffish, hard-eyed and smiling warmly - a mix that had us constantly off-balance, caught wrong-footed. And, foolishly, we let it get to us. Tensions rose and tempers flared - mine, mostly. Inevitably on the days we felt good, open, enthusiastic, something would come along to spoil it, so we settled mainly on a slightly bitter melancholy. "I miss Mexico" became a regular, ridiculous refrain. In a market behind the massive, stately capitolio building, a large musclebound Cuban approached and offered us the usual fake cigars; we politely declined with the detached "No, thankyou" that becomes your automated response in places where items are constantly being thrust at you. His eyebrows rose in fury. "If you are tired, go back to your own country!" he yelled in English, "Go home to bed! In Cuba there is no room for the tired!" I remember getting a haircut in Havana. The barbershop was nothing more than the grimy hallway of a building, people constantly passing through, remarking on my blond hair. The barber, a widely-smiling forty-year old, passed a bottle of rum to Erin and I, then took a couple of swigs for himself before pulling out his scissors. He joked with us, teasing me about my receding hairline. His father came through, kissed Erin on both cheeks, and both father and son had some more rum. The barber's eight-year old son came out and told us about his day at school. "Wow. Wow. Wow," the barber kept saying, watching my hair fall to the floor. "Wow," he said, "Wow," as he sliced my face open with the straight razor. We were having such fun that I didn't much care. Then he fell into conversation with a small man behind me. "Do you understand?" he murmured, but I didn't realize he was talking to me, so I didn't respond. They both waited a moment, and then the small man said, "How much are you going to charge him? Five CUC?" "No." "Ten? Fifteen?" "Twenty," said the barber, and they both laughed. I told Erin what I'd overheard, and we decided to try and pay in pesos rather than CUCs, but he threw them back at us. "No! Cuban money is f**k you!" he yelled in English, "Is f**k you!" Erin was taken aback but I'm not sure he meant to be that offensive - I think he was trying to insult the currency rather than us. We eventually wrangled him down to ten - still far too much, | 14 4 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 20 | VideoPlanet Kapow 22 : Havana to Trinidad | CUBA IS: different. Different, I think, from most any country in the world. Certainly different from anywhere I've ever been. And with more than two months of distance from the country, that's still all I can say about it. Not good, not bad, not fun, not awful. Just different. So I'm not going to try and write about our time there just yet; I'll save it for next episode. Perhaps I'll have a better idea of what happened then. Let's talk about the country instead. Bear in mind this is based primarily on personal observations and conversations with Cubans during a sixteen-day stay in the country, hardly enough to qualify myself as any sort of authority on the place, but since I'm a fan of passing off wild baseless allegations as fact, here we go. Two things about Cuba. The first is that, amazingly, Cuba works. Somehow, despite the economic embargoes of the most powerful superpower in the world and a distinct lack of allies or trade partners or natural resources or even any obvious revenue streams, Castro has fashioned a country based on completely different principles from anywhere else on the globe, and it works. Fascinatingly, Castro has actually succeeded in creating a class-free society. While it's very possible to become rich in Cuba by exploiting loopholes - most notably by having a husband or other relative outside Cuba sending remittances - the fact is that there's nothing to spend it on. There are no country clubs in Cuba; no privileged golf courses. There are very few expensive restaurants, and none are terribly nice. There are no gated communities or landed estates (*cough* except for those owned by Castro and close associates *cough*), no high fashion, no gentleman's clubs (all these assertions are becoming less true as tourist dollars and infrastructure flood the country, but I'll come to that soon). There are nice cars, sure, but they're all sixty years old and besides, even the poor people have them. There's rum, yes, and fine cigars, but again: everyone has access to them. Everybody has a house - a house, mind you; not a lean-to, not a shanty with a piece of corrugated iron for a roof, not even a fibro cottage, but a real, no-fooling house. Everybody has food, whether or not they have money. Everybody has access to world-quality medical care. Everybody has access to a full and free education, including university, with some of the best teacher : student ratios to be found anywhere - far better than the USA or Australia or Britain. Everybody has access to free public transport. With no way of differentiating itself from the masses, the upper class of Cuba becomes invisible and ceases to exist. It sounds incredible, but there it is. Other Communist nations were infamous for suppressing or destroying existing architecture, art and religion, but by refraining from that practice (admittedly out of pragmatism, at least in the case of architecture: Cuba simply couldn't afford the construction of new buildings) Fidel not only avoided popular uprisings but actually supported in the creation of a thriving literature, film, dance and music scene, which is now the main basis of its tourism. And Cuba's very poverty and isolation has led to it being named by the WWF as the most sustainable country in the world - indeed, the only nation declared to have sustainable levels of development - as every single existing resource must be conserved and recycled as long as is possible. So it's still possible to walk around in Havana surrounded by seventy-year old buildings, coughing on the syrupy smoke of the '56 Chevy's grumbling past, and not see a single advertisement, anywhere, for anything; a single plastic wrapper; a single four-wheel drive. Which, to me, describes a certain type of bliss. But. The other thing about Cuba, though, is that, well, it just doesn't work. Nothing about the country works. The country lurches ineptly from food shortage to food shortage. Sure, you get your bread free, | 20 3 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 21 | VideoPlanet Kapow 21 : Tulum to Cancun | IT WAS: late when we reached Tulum after a long day of buses, and after tossing our belongings into our tiny bungalow, we sat down at the bar, curled our toes in the sand, and ordered a shot of mezcal. It was two days before Christmas, and the first time any of us had been on the Caribbean. Adam ordered us another mezcal. Several hours later, we found ourselves wobbling over the dunes to the beach, the powdery white sand stuck to our feet. The full moon illuminated the long stretch of beach, the gently lapping waves, the yachts bobbing softly offshore, and we stood and gazed in awe at our first view of that famous sea. We stripped off our clothes and jumped in to the warm luscious water. We lazily stroked out to a nearby boat, hauled our bodies over the edge, and flopped like dead fish to the floor, our bits and pieces flapping about palely in the gleam of the moon. After about ten minutes we decided that lying naked in someone else's cramped, uncomfortable boat wasn't as much fun as we'd hoped, so we rolled back over the side, the water swallowing us. It was at this point that I realized how much I'd drunk; the lights on the shore blurred all around me and voices seemed to come from all angles. I lost all my bearings and began to flail about in a panic. Only after I'd resigned myself to a watery death did I notice that I was actually thrashing about in knee-deep water. I stood up gingerly and made my way to the dark pile of our clothes further up the beach. About halfway to the clothes a pair of headlights turned on us from further up the beach and a police car made a slow pass in the sand. As we started to quicken our pace, the police car made a wide turn and came straight for us. We fell over in the desperate rush to put some undies on, Adam making the entire run back to the bungalow with his boxers held loosely in front of him. Tulum, and by extension Christmas, floated by in a drunken montage of flash frames. Our bar atop the small table in our bungalow, stocked with the finest liquor the local Super Che supermarket had to offer. Waking on Christmas Day with our heads in agony, mumbling our "Merry Christmas" to each other and grudgingly accepting our presents before heading back to bed. Shopping at the Super Che, ostensibly for roast chicken and vegetables, instead showering the cashier with cigarette packets and litres of cheap rum. Wrestling at the bar, Erin sitting on my head screaming "How do you like SAND?!" while shovelling handfuls of sand into my screaming mouth. Waking up, all of us, covered in bruises that turned purple and black in hours, my ears blocked with sand for three days. On Boxing Day we rose like Lazarus to see the local Mayan ruins built hard up against the beach. In a stellar location, the ruins themselves weren't terribly impressive and matters were made worse by the fact that they were thick with a crowd of imbeciles. One American girl of around twenty-four to her friends: "So, do you guys know when these were built? I heard it was in, like, the year minus two thousand." When our brains began to hurt, we jumped a bus to our final town in Mexico: Cancun, the a******e of the Americas, where all the retarded capitalist genius of the US floats down the Gulf to wash up limply on Mexico's golden shores. An utterly soulless, life-sucking assortment of mega-hotels and bars catering to date-r****ts and idiots, Cancun was so utterly unlike the rest of Mexico that it seems almost insulting to mention it in the same sentence. We knew it would be like that. But we expected, at least, that one could have something of a good time in Cancun, so long as you kept your standards low. But the city was empty, a ghost town of neon signs and MTV advertisements and humvees and special appearances by washed-up porn stars and triple-price drinks. We had expected Cancun to give us a chance to recap and reminisce. To remember everything Mexico had been to us, | 13 3 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 22 | VideoPlanet Kapow 20 : Palenque to Merida | IT WAS: on the bus from San Cristobal de Las Casas to Palenque that I finally had my breakdown. Almost everybody has a traveler tantrum, given enough time - alone among us, I have not seen one from Danielle, but I'm sure it's coming - and the odd thing is that they generally don't come when things are at their worst, but just when things are vaguely irritating - such as this time. Sure, the bus had delayed an hour at the station; yes, it was pulled over by the cops after half an hour for a problem with its registration and had to sit by the side of the road for forty minutes; and okay, it then sat at some little ratshit town for over an hour while the driver had two dinners and half a pack of cigarettes. But none of this was exactly extraordinary in Latin America, and the others suffered stoically through it as normal. Not me, though; I boiled and raged inside, feeling as if I were going to explode, until, while the bus driver stood outside with his twelfth cigarette, I burst from my seat, shoved roughly past Erin, yelled "I'm getting off this f*****g thing!", and then dramatically stomped down the aisle. The effect of this was slightly dampened when I smacked my head into the television monitor that hung from the ceiling and tumbled, sprawling, into the laps of the middle-aged couple to my right. We eventually pulled into Palenque station at about 1am, grabbed some late-night tacos and fell blissfully into our beds. I, however, missed my bed, hit another television set, and sliced my head open. After wiping the blood off, I held a sock to my head to stem the bleeding, and tried to sleep. Four and a half hours later, the aerobics classes started pumping their music next door. We pulled ourselves together, the sock stuck fast to my hair, to face the muggy smoggy morning of Palenque Town. Things had not gotten off to a good start. But the ruins at Palenque could make even a sleep-deprived, emotionally-drained, critically-injured doofus swoon. They are simply majestic. Palenque rose to be one of the most important cities of the Maya about 1400 years ago, under the brilliantly-named emperors Sun Shield and Jaguar Serpent II. It fell into ruin, along with most of the Mayan world, roughly 1100 years ago, and was only rediscovered in the mid-18th century. Now the white stepped temples lie in the midst of thick jungle with the terrific Jurassic Park roar of howler monkeys in the trees and thick ribbons of ants crossingthe paths. There are tunnels and tombs and temples upon hills that look out across the entire site, plus - of course - the mandatory collection of hawkers selling every variety of the tacky and wooden that can fit on a blanket. But unlike a lot of the famous ruins, it's still possible to find a bit of peace and quiet to sit and let the whole place just roll itself around in your head. We returned to the expansive grounds and jungle pool of our hostel very satisfied. Pavel, the Czech student with whom we'd gone biking in San Cristobal, arrived that afternoon. Back in San Cristobal he'd told us that he had organized to hire a car further on in Merida, and offered to share it with us to drive around the Yucatan. We'd enthusiastically agreed; Pavel, always impeccably dressed with his trademark white trilby perched on his head, was a fun guy to hang out with, a good talker and a good traveler. After he'd roped up his hammock we headed down the long dark dirt road to the El Panchan compound, where, rumor had it, some good Italian food awaited us by the river. The dirt road was long and lit only by the flicker of occasional fireflies, and we were in good spirits, joking about in the dark. But at some point during the dinner Erin became terrifically sick, and so, while the others sat and watched a Peruvian band play, we began the long tortuous road back, stopping every so often so that Erin could let fly into the surrounding jungle. By the next morning, | 28 2 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 23 | VideoPlanet Kapow 19 : Taxco to San Cristobal de las Casas | HUNGOVER AND: irritated, I sat with the others waiting endlessly for a bus that apparently had no intention of coming. It was a hot day in a dusty little s******e junction town with tuk-tuks screaming past, aggravating my headache and my sullen whining... | 18 2 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 24 | VideoPlanet Kapow 18 : Mexico City to Taxco | THE TEAM'S: all here, finally thrown together in the fiery bubbling cauldron of Mexico City. Planet Kapow is ready to properly begin, and Mexico's laying out a welcome mat of fun times and dancing skeletons. 2010 marked one hundred years since Z... | 27 1 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 25 | VideoPlanet Kapow 17: Everywhere to Mexico City | ADAM'S GONE. Up through Guadalajara, shooting back to Mexico City, rounding Los Angeles, across the Pacific to Hong Kong for two weeks while his father gets married and he meanwhile tries desperately to overcome jetlag in time to celebrate and then fly back to Mexico. Daniel and I, the only ones left, the lone survivors, continue our trip along the coast. Immediately on leaving Cuyutlan, Mexico raises another curtain and becomes a totally different country, straight out of a Corona ad, all swaying palms and thatched bungalows and tropical heat and schoolkids piled into the backs of pickup trucks, hooning around the sharp clifftop turns of a road that clings ferociously to the gorgeous coastline as we pass out of Colima state, roll slowly through Michoacan, and pass eventually into Guerrero. In Guerrero we spend a couple of days in Zihuatanejo, the fabled paradise for Tim Robbins in Shawshank Redemption, passing away a couple of balmy nights with margaritas and fish tacos in open-air bars with gravel underfoot. Close to paradise, but the overabundance of wrinkly American retirees lazily throwing sticks for their overweight dogs sends us off again on an overnight bus to Oaxaca state. At eleven o'clock, under cover of darkness, the bus pulls into Acapulco, Mexico's ultra-famous resort town of the '50's. With a couple of hours to kill we jump out, wandering barefoot through drifts of rotting garbage spread evenly across the roads like snow, passing cars throwing up greenish-brownish-spewish water onto our clothes as we seek shelter on the stripclub-crammed roads. As close to a modern ruin as you're likely to find in the world. And then off again, into Oaxaca state, down to Puerto Escondido, finding our way to the Buena Onda Hostel. There'll be more to say about Puerto Escondido later. For now, let it suffice that the Buena Onda is probably one of the greatest hostels in the world, a tiny, ultra-relaxed society of surfers and drifters and Brazilian models, set on one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, with a soft breeze coming in off the ocean and the palm fronds waving and the plethora of hammocks making slow synchronized arcs. Everyone rushes out onto the beach as the sun sinks into the ocean with a soft sizzle and then retreats back to the outdoor tables, gathering around a bottle of tequila and a guitar and Dan's harmonica and swapping stories while others bring out pots of achingly juicy prawns and soft tortillas. I could (and later would) spend a lot more time there, but even the couple of days Daniel and I were there merged together into one blissful instant, punctuated only by the brief hour when some over-excited local set off some fireworks too close to his house, set his thatched roof on fire and started and inferno that engulfed fourteen houses and had some of the more panicky hostel residents packing their bags and rushing out onto the beach for safety. But of course, all things must pass, and before we knew it Dan and I were on our way to Zipolite, an hour or so east, another thick slice of paradise, this time with a steady population of hippies, nudists and drug dealers (the distinctions between the three often hazy, admittedly). But the ocean in Zipolite was baying for blood, pretty rough even at waist deep, and with time slipping away we boarded a minivan in sweaty Pochutla up the twisting, vaguely nauseating road through the mountains to Oaxaca City. In Oaxaca we were led in tow by a maniacal, six-and-a-half-foot tall, cape wearing American woman who showed us some of the better nightlife in the city. Still a bit hazed out by the Escondido/Zipolite blissfest, we visited a traditional weaving village, the biggest tree in the world ("In width! In width! It is NOT the tallest tree in the word!" shrieked our guide, having obviously dealt with disappointed visitors in the past), a mezcal factory, and impressive Zapotec ruins at both Mitla and Monte Alban. | 21 1 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 26 | VideoPlanet Kapow 16 : Guadalajara to Cuyutlan | WE HAD: been hyping Guadalajara between ourselves for quite a while. I don't know how it started, because I don't remember having a conversation with anyone who raved about it, though a lot of people seemed to be heading there. But we had definitely built up some expectations somewhere along the way. When we'd been stumbling around a dead, lifeless Morelia in the days following Dia de Muertos, and when we'd been lying in a horrible bed of sunburn-related pain in Uruapan after climbing Paricutin, we'd consoled ourselves with the thought of the party to come. Guadalajara, the second city, four million people in the mountains, would not let us down. At some point over the following four days, during which the most memorable night we'd had had ended with us buying extortionate drinks at a bar filled with morbidly obese and / or pregnant prostitutes before retreating back to the calming groans of the 24-hr porn channel in our hotel, we decided that we'd misled ourselves somewhat. We caught the next bus for Tequila. In Tequila, where the namesake drink was invented in the 16th century, we toured the Jose Cuervo factory and trashed ourselves on cheap margaritas and Cuban cigars. It was as poor a gringo performance as anything you're likely to see but it helped blow off a little steam after Guadalajara. We returned to the big city drunk, happy and slightly abusive, though it failed to improve Guadalajara at all. We slept it off and headed for the beach. Down to Cuyutlan, through valleys stuffed tight with fir, the weather getting warmer, nostrils slowly unblocking and eyes glazing over. We tossed our things into our hotel, pitched neatly around a pool from which a mosaic of a topless mermaid grinned happily at us, and strode a couple of metres to the gleaming black sand that stretched endlessly in both directions. With salt haze obscuring the horizon, we threw ourselves at the pounding surf, we lay on deckchairs sipping micheladas, we ate cheap food at empty restaurants while mosquitoes went to town on our increasingly disfigured legs. Then, inevitably, Daniel - who had, at some point during the Cuervo tour, decided that tequila was "like water" for him - would convince us to buy a large bottle of said beverage and polish it off during the night. Generally, this would be followed by long periods in the bathroom for Adam and I, whilst Daniel laughed and called us pussies from his rocking chair on the patio, then by a sleep, then by waking with our skulls disintegrating and going out to start the whole process again. The only attempt to break this cycle came with our attempt to walk six kilometres up the sand to the neighbouring beach of El Paraiso. The day was windy and hot, and within a few minutes we all had our t-shirts wrapped tightly around our heads, blowing against our faces, looking like something straight out of Lawrence of Arabia, our skin rapidly burning (again) as it slowly dawned on us that six kilometres of sand does not make for the most interesting hike. But we strode on, coming eventually to a deserted expanse of land where the corpses of no fewer than fourteen sea turtles, each a metre long, lay scattered across the sand in various stages of decomposition, some little more than skeletons, others looking like they'd just washed up, all being picked over by large flocks of buzzards. No more than one hundred metres away lay the turtle sanctuary, famous throughout the region. It was mystifying. But then that was that. Adam left the next day, off to Hong Kong to attend his father's wedding, to return in two weeks. And Daniel and I boarded a bus bound for Zihuatanejo, and steeled ourselves for a few days of very long distances. - Two songs this episode - the ridiculous "El Mariachi Loco" by Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlan, and the absolutely beautiful "Antillas" by El Guincho, from his guaranteed 2008 partystarter, Alegranza!. | 17 1 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 27 | VideoPlanet Kapow 15 : Morelia to Paricutin | AND OUT: of the asphyxiating behemoth of Mexico City, through the murky endless ocean of white houses, out, out, until we hit the long green fields and lakes of Michoacan state, heading into Morelia, readying ourselves for Dia de Muertos. The Day of the Dead is one of the most famous Mexican traditions, but it's hard to pinpoint what it's actually about. Traditionally, in pre-Hispanic times most peoples had some time of year when they believed communion with the dead was possible - for the Aztecs, it was usually an entire month following the summer solstice; for the peoples of Michoacan, only one day - during which people would ensure that their loved ones were cared for in the next life with offerings of food and flowers. With the arrival of the Spanish a big dollop of Catholicism got stirred into the mixture and later, Jose Guadalupe Posada's calavera engravings - meant to satirize the upper classes - would come to be the dominant image of the event. Now, the day seems to be mainly about teenagers getting drunk and eating candy, and little kids dressing up as zombies. Still, in Morelia they threw one hell of a party, and it was a nice place to be out on the streets soaking up the vibe. But apparently more traditional celebrations for Dia de Muertos do still remain, and so we headed out to nearby Patzcuaro - where we found more candy - and to Isla Janitzio - where we found more drunken teenagers. But whatever; the island was appealingly misty and mysterious, with terrific views back to the mainland from the ridiculous 40m-high statue of Jose Maria Morelos y Pavon that looms over the island like a blocky concrete King Kong. And Patzcuaro's countryside was refreshingly airy after the monoxide onslaught of Mexico City. With only a few more days before Adam was due to leave Mexico for his dad's wedding, we headed onwards, to the town of Uruapan, from where we planned to hike out to Volcan Paricutin. Paricutin rose without any warning whatsoever from a farmer's field in 1943, in the process burying two nearby villages and instantly creating an industry of men on horses who assault you at the bus stop offering to guide you to the top. The volcano's initial eruption lasted nine years and left it standing at 410m, since which time it has remained dormant. We set out early with bags full of cookies and water - but no sunscreen (because we're idiots). We had with us an eleven-year old on horseback named Jesus about whom we learned the following: he did not have a girlfriend, he liked going to school, he knew how to say "Hello", "Thankyou" and "Tip?" in English, and he liked basketball and quesadillas. Jesus was our way, our light and our guide. He also kept all our water strapped to his horse and had the bad habit of riding a hundred metres in front of us where we couldn't get to it. To begin with the trek was glorious, through long avocado fields looking out onto vistas of cuneiform crusty black lava from which the bell tower of a drowned church was visible. After an hour or two we hit the black volcanic sand, and it began to be a bit of a slog. But we looked about ourselves still with wonder, passing tiny Purepecha villages and women making blue corn quesadillas on black hotplates. Then the trees fell away and the track started to rise, and the sand became unbearable, filling our shoes and taking us back a half-step for every step we took. The sun beat down upon us mercilessly and Jesus ran away with our water, further up the track. Adam, as ever, strode on. Dan and I started to struggle. By the time we hit the base of the volcano we'd already done fourteen kilometres, which is what we'd thought the entire hike would be. Dan and I were already finished, but before us stood a perfect cone of black sand, incredibly steep, stretching a few hundred metres into the sky. Jesus dismounted and started scampering up the volcano; he and Adam would reach the top within half an hour. | 27 12 10 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 28 | VideoPlanet Kapow 14 : Mexico City (DF) | AND HERE: we are. Hillsides covered in boxes, boxes on top of boxes, these little white boxes, hills beyond hills covered in boxes, how many lives inside each one? - an army, a multitude, a swarm, an omen, a mass, a teeming ant nest, a sadness, a pity. Twenty-five million people choking to death as one. Mexico f*****g City. We arrived at the northern terminal in darkness, and it would only be in later days that we'd see this endless expanse of little white box houses, draped in a thick icing of carbon monoxide - from the castle in Chapultepec Park; from the buses as we headed out and back throughout the week. The Aztecs considered Mexico City the centre of the universe, and centuries later their observation remains tragically true - the place is a black hole, a cosmic cesspool of people and concrete and cars and smog and s**t, swirling constantly and drawing more in toward it. Built on a swamp, the place actually visibly sags - the roofs of the buildings in the centre undulating like a serpent. The city has a population higher than all of Australia, piled on top of each other, everyone breathing in each other's fumes, everyone sharing in the utter ruin of the land under the weight of modern civilization. And yet - impossibly, Mexico City remains a fairly pleasant place to be. The centre is positively overflowing with parks and plazas and museums and restaurants, and 80% of the time you can walk down the street without having to shuffle shoulder-to-shoulder with the faceless mass of humanity that resides here (though on the Metro that statistic drops to about 3% of the time). The main plaza, Plaza de la Constitucion, is breathtaking despite the roaring traffic; the main cathedral is wonderfully epic despite the roving crowds of vendors and beggars. And Chapultepec Park - less a park than a combined park/market/zoo/museum/entertainment complex - is a fantastic place to wander aimlessly while aggressive-looking squirrels glare at you from the tops of bins. Just outside lies the ancient ruined city of Teotihuacan, with two of the largest pyramids in the world providing views over the smoky plains while touts with jaguar whistles startle large groups of Japanese tourists. The biggest city in the Americas at the time - supporting up to 250,000 people - the city collapsed mysteriously in the 8th century and was a site of pilgrimage for Aztec leaders right up to the Spanish invasion. It was the first pre-Hispanic site we'd visited on our trip through Mexico, and its majesty was simply awesome. On our final day in the city my brother arrived, a day late after a cancelled flight, a layover in Dallas, and an international hijacking attempt brought on by Stilnox tablets. Together we headed out to the lucha libre - wrestling, Mexican style. Such a mix of the skilled and the inept I've never seen before or since, as extremely large men and women with a shameless fondness for spandex threw each other over ropes, dived out of the ring and into the first rows of the crowd, slapped each other on the chest, and generally pranced around ridiculously, while the raucous, heaving crowd went wild, screaming and clapping and spitting and throwing food. The stadium banned cameras and so our only footage is that stolen over an iPhone camera, so you'll have to use your imagination - but trust me, it's utterly glorious. - The tunes on this episode are the stabbing rush of "Nada Puedo Hacer" by Los Romanticos de Zacatecas, the lovely "Valentina" by Carla Morrison, "Bestia (Julieta Vanegas Remix" by Hello Seahorse!, and the absolutely pounding "Nunca Nunca" by XYX. | 22 12 10 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 29 | VideoPlanet Kapow 13 : Guanajuato to Bernal | AND NOW: our long and winding journey brings us to what quickly became our favourite Mexican city, Guanajuato, where the streets fluttered with coloured flags and music, where the buildings burst with colour and life, where everything great about Mexico came together in one neatly packaged town, nestled safely in a small valley. We'd arrived quite by accident in the middle of the Cervantino, one of the biggest arts festivals in Latin America, and we found ourselves in a swirling cyclone of amazing music, art, and to Adam's delight, the most incredibly good-looking population of people in the entire world. Trying to find a decent excuse to hang around, we enrolled in a Spanish school and were thrown quickly back into the workaday routine, waking at 8am and rolling painfully out of bed and down to the local market, where we purchased our 5-peso breakfast of delicious bread, average cheese and godawful ham, inevitably washed down by a s****y 10-peso Oxxo coffee. We'd then wander up the steep hill to school, trying (and generally failing) to get our heads together during the three hours of classes before rolling back down the hill for bagels and coffee at the cafe below our hostel. During the nights we'd wander back and forth between bars humming with great bands, talking and drinking and occasionally, regrettably, dancing as well. It was a truly terrible way to spend a week. As the week wore on the party got fiercer and the nights more surreal; we watched from a pedestrian overpass as a massive squad of policeman swarmed on a small reggae party on a sidestreet, tackling people to the ground and throwing people in their squad cars. Later, drunken teenagers swarmed around us, chanting "Photo! Photo! Photo!" at Adam and cheering as he took a shot of them, before flying off as a great mob to the next poor sucker toting a camera; later still, the main street was all of a sudden cordoned off by a wall of policemen wielding batons and forcing everybody of the road. Adam and I were asked to pose in photos for people as if we were celebrities; an old couple, dancing in a terrible state of inebriation, fell onto our table and smashed my glass before stumbling into the band and trying to take the microphone from the singer. At 4am on the last night a police-car deliberately tried to run down one of the kids we were walking with, missing only by inches as his friend wrenched him out of the way. The increasingly aggressive behaviour of the police over the week was mystifying, particularly in the context of an internationally famous festival. Apart from a couple of brief run-ins later in Mexico City, and seeing them calmly watch a couple of men beat the s**t out of a guy in Zacatecas, it was one of the few times we've seen the Mexican police live down to their truly atrocious reputation. From Guanajuato we headed to Queretaro, where we got drunk with Hector, the Mexican intellectual, and where we got drunk with Tim, the Australian intellectual, wandering through the incredibly rich city of beautiful plazas and the great strip of bars, and then climbing the Pena de Bernal, the third-largest rock in the entire world - but really it was all just a delay, a distraction, a roadblock before the Great Big Thing that lay before us and occupied our minds and our conversations day and night: Mexico City. Mexico f*****g City. - Music on this episode includes "24 horas no son suficiente", by Mexico's wonderful Piyama Party, the very funky "Cumbia" by the Mexican Institute of Sound, and "La Tierra Sagrada" by Maria y Jose, as well as a great ska track recorded on the streets of Guanajuato. | 20 12 10 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 30 | VideoPlanet Kapow 12 : Aguascalientes to Real de Catorce | AND SO: the southward journey continues, out of Zacatecas state and into tiny Aguascalientes. The city here was another of Mexico's famed silver cities, along with Zacatecas, San Luis Potosi, Guanajuato, Queretaro and Taxco - all of which we would visit in due course. While it failed to live up to the stunning beauty of Zacatecas, it was nevertheless a disgustingly pleasant place to while away a couple of days - especially after we were seized upon by the staff of a bar near the cathedral, who for no particular reason decided to spend their Monday night showering us with free beer and tequila and trying to set us up with middle-aged factory workers from the outskirts of the city (these being, we supposed, the only women to have entered the establishment in quite some time). In a surreal ending, they rounded up some local lesbians who happened to be walking past (with shouts of "Hey, lesbians!") to have their photos taken with us. Yes, the fun never stops here in Mexico... From there to San Luis Potosi, full of beautiful colonial streets, where we stuffed our faces with the local delicacy - tortillas fried in hot chili oil and stuffed with meat. It seemed like everything was shaping up for an excellent stay - and then we ran into Omar, a friendly-seeming guy who invited us round for a couple of drinks. For a while everything went well - he was a filmmaker, showed us some of his films, told us about a few cool bars - but started becoming, in turns, uncomfortably aggressive and then creepily desperate for our company, all of which was soundtracked by his constant catchphrase, a growled "Stop f*****g around!". After a few hours we tried to make our goodbyes, but he insisted on walking us back to our hotel, where he proceeded to pound his fists on the front glass door for several minutes and then got into a near-punchup with the hotel manager. It ruined San Luis Potosi for us, but fortunately Omar was the exception that proves the rule - one of very very few unlikeable Mexicans we've come across. Still, it was enough to put us on a bus bound for Real de Catorce. Real de Catorce was a thriving silver town of 40,000 during the 1800's, but was almost entirely abandoned during the first few decades of the 20th century - nobody really knows why, though it was a bad time both for silver prices and for rural Mexico, which was going through the ten-year revolution. Now it's a stark stone ruin draped across a valley - though quite a few people have moved back in and set up shop, trading on the 'ghost town' reputation. We went for a long meandering walk through the valley, past the abandoned mine, creepy in the twilight, but we knew there was only one way to do this properly: on horseback. Clip-clopping along slowly, cautiously - horses being unfamiliar to both Adam and I, each of us filled with visions of the horse tripping and rolling on every descent. Out of the cobblestone streets of town, through great stands of cacti, past the stone ruins of an abandoned village. Finally across barren plains, empty and desolate, to a mountain atop which the indigenous Huichol people perform their sacred peyote ceremonies after their three-month march from Jalisco province. Three thousand metres high, with sweeping views of the surrounding country, all gloriously free of the least trace of civilization - and who should we find there but an American IT guy from town, who had jogged all the way from his internet cafe "just to get the blood pumping" - "Normally I do two laps a day," he sighed with a voice full of regret, "but my foot's a bit sore, so I'm going to take it a little easy today". He turned and jogged away, only getting about twenty metres down the road before I killed him with a large rock to the head and buried him in a shallow grave. A*****e. But riding back into town, with mariachi music from some tinny speakers on someone's roof booming across the valley, and children playing dancing games in the dirt, | 8 12 10 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 31 | VideoPlanet Kapow 11 : Zacatecas | OH, ZACATECAS! Where it finally all came together, where Mexico finally showed us her true glorious self, where the good vibes that had been slowly swelling since Tepic at long last came crashing down on us in a great wave. Finding ourselves in one of the nicest hostels in Mexico, perched above the magnificent basilica around which Zacatecas revolves, the streets alive with noise and parties, we met the biggest group of travelers we'd come across since entering Mexico. Once again, as in La Paz, these were members of the hardcore set - six of them were traveling from Alaska to Argentina by motorbike. One - a lieutenant of the Australian army, discharged after being severely wounded in Afghanistan - was on his way up from Argentina, having had an incredible journey that included traversing the hellish jungle no-man's-land of the Darien Gap on foot over ten days and having to flee from a group of heavily-armed Colombian drug-runners. Against this backdrop our own journey seemed little more than going out to the local shops after dark, and we quickly hit the streets to avoid having to reveal how lame we were. And what streets! Having never been to Europe, a city like Zacatecas was completely foreign to me, and I stumbled along the narrow cobblestone streets in a baffled daze, staring at the beautiful colonial buildings and plazas in silent awe. Around us religious processions walked past in a river of blue balloons, clowns were attacked by screaming children, street parties raged, people danced, people laughed, people looked at each other and smiled. We went nightclubbing in an abandoned mine. We strapped ourselves to a flimsy-looking wire and shot two-hundred metres across the valley. We watched a large german shepherd, strapped by its electric cattle prod-wielding owner to a cafe chair, get spooked and run down the street, smashing several cars with the wildly flailing chair. We saw Mexico, and we drank it down greedily. And then we received word that a cowboy festival - a charreada - would be taking place just outside town, so we hopped a taxi our there, and were immediately drowned in old Mexico - mariachi bands playing atop the grandstand, elaborately dressed horseman performing equally elaborate lasso tricks, a crowd that hooted and hollered and tossed their sombreros and shoes into the ring every time three horses were brought down. The horse-tripping that went on at the charreada is the type of thing I would have found a little abhorrent a couple of years ago - the injuring of animals for sport seemed senseless to me. But being there - well, it's different. The charros are men of skill, and if they rope a horse incorrectly (around one leg instead of two, for instance) the rope is immediately dropped and the horse released. But more importantly, the charros are preserving traditions that hearken back to a type of agriculture that was based around knowing your animals. To say that it went back to a time when people cared for their animals may be going too far down the "idealized rural past" pipeline, but they definitely knew their animals, and this afforded those animals a certain kind of dignity - the dignity to run and to have the chance of escape (no matter how small that chance may, in truth, have been). It certainly seems preferable to the sort of industrialized agriculture we partake in today, where we line up animals onto conveyor belts leading to a painless, meaningless death, divide them and distribute them in standardized plastic packaging and discard them from supermarket shelves when they reach their use-by date. Support it or decry it, but we walked out of that charreada feeling like we'd seen something worth seeing, that we'd come away with another little piece of this country revealed, and that it was time to go jump on some horses of our own. - Songs on this episode include the excellent "Guero Canelo" by Calexico, Pedro Fernandez's "Caminos de Guanajuato", | 24 11 10 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 32 | VideoPlanet Kapow 10 : Posada Barrancas to Durango | A MISREAD: train timetable, a sudden inexplicable desire to get out of Posada Barrancas as quickly as possible, and without warning we found ourselves abruptly back in Chihuahua, far from the coast where the train was supposed to deposit us. Back to the bar at the San Juan, meeting another bunch of local boys and girls who trawled us across the bars of the city, drunk in the back of their car, dropping us back in the morning to stumble back to our room and pass out. The best fun when traveling, I've found, is always in these towns like Chihuahua - B-level towns, big enough to have a university and a couple of bars, maybe a couple of nice parks or a river, but nothing more. Nothing much to see or do, but enough to fill your day if you're bored. Those towns have just enough attractions that the people who live there are proud to live there, and proud to show the town off to visitors, and not jaded from a constant influx of tourists. And Mexicans, on the whole, just seem a whole lot more connected with where they come from than a lot of places in the world, accepting of both the good and the bad, and almost universally proud of the whole. It's a great atmosphere to travel in. But our grand journey south needed to begin, so we headed off to Torreon in an attempt to get out to an abandoned mine nearby. Torreon was a bit of a surprise - a beautifully grand, absolutely decrepit hotel - utterly dilapidated, big holes in the roof - but nevertheless one of the best places we've stayed. And an aqueduct beneath the city, and a lovely plaza. But we'd come to see the abandoned mine and, finding the buses out there long since terminated, we abandoned Torreon instead, catching a bus through the painfully lonely, flat desert to Durango, far to the south, as the sun set over the distant horizon. Durango shocked us. It was stunning. An incredible Plaza del Armas forming the centre of the city, captivating buildings and an unbelievably good-looking population who just stood and stared at us with those fiery Mexican eyes. And every day there was filled with light and colour and fun, but during the night we felt just a little out of step with everything, unable to find a good bar, failing to meet anyone, sidling up to the local hamburger stand with a guilty look in our eye and ordering one with the lot. A situation not helped by our hotel, a cheap dive we dubbed 'the Whistlefuck' - filled from early morning by moustachioed workmen playing bad Mexican radio far too loud and whistling incessantly, and filled from early evening by young men bringing prostitutes into the hotel for sessions that pounded painfully through the paper-thin walls for anywhere between twenty seconds and several hours. We got to know them. There was the Donkey Puncher, a young man who came in at the same time each afternoon with a different girl, earning his nickname through the extremely strange braying / snorting / hiccuping / strangled sound he made at the moment of climax - followed immediately thereafter by a babbled apology to the girl, who I guess would now have to find another way to fill out the remaining 58 minutes for which she'd been booked. And who could forget the Emphysema Screamer, a working girl who sounded like she'd been around the block a few too many times, whose moans of almost-certainly-authentic pleasure were halted every so often to make way for a hacking smoker's cough that always ended with something being spat somewhere. Enchanting. Outside of Durango lay a few film sets that had been built specifically to take advantage of Durango's empty desert landscapes (and cheap Mexican labour) to shoot Westerns from the 50's through to the 70's. The Magnificent Seven was shot out there; so was The Wild Bunch. Films kept being shot there sporadically right up until a couple of years ago but the Western died a slow death a while back and Hollywood had found cheaper places to shoot films, so now they lie abandoned. | 6 11 10 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 33 | VideoPlanet Kapow 09 : Chihuahua to Posada Barrancas | AND THEN: a sleep like death, a sleep of nothing but sweet engulfing darkness. We awoke to find ourselves in the city of Chihuahua, a few hours northwest, sore to the bone and hungry as we'd never been hungry before. Chihuahua was a big shaggy dog of a city, impossible to dislike despite the constant sounds of f*****g wafting into our cheap hotel room from the pay-by-the-hour rooms down the hall. The San Juan Hotel had its faults, certainly, but what it also had was a fantastically s****y dive bar attached to it, the place where everybody in town met up over a couple of 40oz bottles of beer to start the night before drunkenly staggering to their cars and heading off to the next s****y bar. Which, from a traveling point of view, is exactly what you want in a bar that's literally outside your door - everyone happy and excited, psyched for the night ahead, dressed up and made up and at the exact point of drunkenness at which it seems like inviting to your table two sleepy-eyed white dudes who don't speak your language terribly well is a really great idea. Which is precisely how we ended up in the tiny apartment of Fernando, an anthropology student who, along with two of his friends, decided to spend his Tuesday night giving us lessons in Cuban dancing in his kitchen until we passed out in the wee hours, exhausted from throwing ourselves around like morons trying to keep up. Which, coincidentally, is about the same time that I realized that, actually, really, Mexico is probably the greatest country on earth. We spent a couple of days in Chihuahua, wandering the wide avenues of a town that just oozes good vibes and fun times. And history, too - the place has figured in most of the major events in Mexico's history, and the chubby-faced bandit-turned-hero-general Pancho Villa practically has a cult here. Dude invaded the US just for the fun of it back in his heyday. But Copper Canyon beckoned, and we boarded a mariachi-filled bus to Creel, where we planned to catch the train through the canyon to the coast. Creel had a bit of backpacker life, and it was nice to talk to a few travelers for the first time since La Paz, but really it was a bit of a one-trick pony, its bars shutting too early and its hostels pushing far too hard on the guided tour garbage. But its one trick was a stunner: Creel was surrounded by beautiful yellow fields dotted with weird rock formations and Raramuri villages and lakes and lonely churches on dirt roads. From the back of a bicycle it was perfect, though the thirty kilometres of pedaling did nothing for legs still ravaged from that walk through the Chihuahuan wilderness. But a bicycle and a wide blue sky and an empty road: this is a great thing. So we rolled from the Valley of the Erect P***ses to the Valley of the Frogs to the Valley of the Mushrooms; and then we boarded one of the last trains left in Mexico - the Transferril Chihuahua Pacifico - to Posada Barrancas, on the edge of the canyon. There are some things in the world that are worth seeing. Copper Canyon is one of them. Walking slowly along the lip of the canyon, peering timidly over the edge, awestruck. It's too immense to put into words; too immense to take in, even when you're there, staring directly into it. Especially when there are hummingbirds darting out from it, over your head, hovering and disappearing, and local villagers descending into it, completing the daily six-hour trek out of and back into the canyon, just to attend school. You can reel off figures of size and depth, but nothing compares to the staggering feeling of trying to look at something that's just too big to look at. We'd heard talk of a cablecar at the canyon, just little bits here and there, nothing concrete. It was new, we knew that much. We eventually caught sight of it after rounding a headland and spent the next few hours marching through the scrub to find it, mystified as to the lack of signage. | 28 10 10 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 34 | VideoPlanet Kapow 08 : Huajumar to Yepachi | WE LEFT: Huajumar in the morning under light cloud, still excited about going to work on the farm despite the repeated delays. We knew extremely little about it - what work we'd be doing, how remote it was, how many people would be there - but the mystery made it more thrilling, and we were keen to have a new experience and learn some new things. We arrived in Yepachi at about 9:30am, grabbed some quick breakfast, went to the little community centre where a woman unlocked the door to the dusty computer room - looked at our emails and, sure enough, there was one from the farm, explaining that we probably wouldn't be able to get a lift and would instead need to hike out to the farm, some 25km away. The first 8km, the email said, would be easy to hitchhike, as it was along a well-used mining road. The rest we would need to walk. So we strapped on our backpacks and headed out, down the mining road. In a moment of stunning idiocy, we decided not to take any food and only a litre of water. I don't know what we were thinking - perhaps that we'd pass a small village along the way? - but that's what happened. In any case, there was certainly no hitchhiking. We saw a few cars pass over those first couple of hours as we puffed our way over the mountains, but they were invariably traveling in the wrong direction. We spent a while trying to determine which was the right turnoff - the email had said there would be rough-looking road off to the right after five miles, but there were several rough-looking roads off to the right after five miles. Eventually a truck stopped and let us know which one it was - "But hurry," he said in Spanish, "there's a storm coming." * Â Â Â Â Â * Â Â Â Â Â * We set off. It was now well after midday and we decided we'd be running the risk of arriving under darkness if we were to carry our large packs the whole way, so we hid them under a tree off the side of the track, figuring that we could get a lift back to pick them up after we arrived. We turned the corner and found ourselves in the middle of a herd of cows - and two bulls. The bulls immediately spun toward us, staring and stamping and roaring. The first one lowered its head, and we did the valiant thing and sprinted as fast as we could to the cover of nearby trees, bushbashing for several hundred metres to get around them. And then the storm hit. Lightning crashed on every side of us, echoing endlessly through the myriad valleys. And the rain poured and poured. We tried to refill our pitiful little water bottle but we collected less water that way than by simply standing in the rain with our tongues out. We were soaked and hungry and thirsty and tired, but we'd gone too far to turn back. We kept walking. As the day swept into late afternoon we stopped more and more often to consider turning back, each time electing to push onwards. By the time it got to 5 o'clock we'd gone too far - we would not make it back to Yepachi before dark. But we were becoming increasingly worried - we hadn't seen anyone on the track the entire time, and doubt was slowly growing that we were even on the right road. It had also become obvious that this track would be completely impassable by car - entire sections had collapsed into creek beds and at one point we had to wade for thirty metres through a river to rejoin the track - meaning we wouldn't be able to retrieve our packs without trekking all the way back out again. We started to panic. * Â Â Â Â Â * Â Â Â Â Â * Part of our worry was that Chihuahua is well known as the most dangerous state in Mexico, and several people had advised us (rightly or wrongly, I'm not sure) that Yepachi itself was a dangerous place to be. A hell of a lot of drug traffic comes through the state, and to be alone on deserted tracks through the forest after dark with no camping gear was a very worrying proposition. By 6:30pm, we were ready to collapse. We were still in deep forest, | 21 10 10 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 35 | VideoPlanet Kapow 07 : Tepic to Huajumar | AND THAT'S: when it all started to turn around. Up out of San Blas, still scratching at our thousands of mosquito bites, bathing ourselves in the anti-itch cream we'd bought at the chemist and which did precisely nothing to help us, we headed back to Tepic. We'd passed through Tepic twice before and had come to think of it as little more than an overgrown bus station, but there we found blessed respite from the humidity and mosquitos that had plagued us for the past several weeks. For the first time in a long time we could sit outside for hours without coming away looking like we were slowly melting and smelling like we'd been bathing in someone's garbage. Instead we came away with energy and mojo restored, and the next day we decided to attempt to reach Ceboruco Volcano, an active volcano that lay a few hours southeast. This was the first time since the Sierra San Pedro Martir National Park that we'd done anything even slightly difficult - we couldn't find anybody, anywhere, who knew how to get to the volcano without a car - but after a few buses, a hike and a friendly taxi driver, it worked. And even though the volcano wasn't the most spectacular thing in the world (the endless lava fields, 8-bit and charcoal black, notwithstanding) the entire day had a great feel about it, the glow of starting over again as we made our way through the tiny, beautiful towns and blue agave fields that encircle Ceboruco. That happened to be the day we were due to head north, on our way toward a farm in the wilderness of Chihuahua state on which we'd organized to work for a few weeks. It was a couple of days away by bus and our first stop was Ciudad Obregon in Sonora state, many miles north. Whatever good vibes we'd managed to manufacture over the course of the day dissipated fairly quickly in the face of a fifteen-hour bus ride that stopped with swearing-under-your-breath regularity for toilet breaks and security checkpoints that involved us all being herded off the bus to wait in the darkness for half an hour, even at 4 o'clock in the morning. It's worth stopping here for a moment to mention the drug wars, because for obvious reasons it's something we're not able to capture on video terribly often. People are dying, here, with stunningly mundane frequency. Every day, the headlines scream of the latest massacre. A lot of people warned us away from Chihuahua altogether; others restricted their warnings to the border areas with the US. As to who is doing the killing - who knows? The media says that it is cartels attempting to wipe out or move in on other cartels, with the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels being the major players, as well as the Zetas, who were formerly the highly-trained mercenary army of the Gulf cartel but as of February are an independent force in the conflict. A significant number of Mexicans we've spoken to believe that the Calderon government is behind most of the killings, either to wipe out the cartels once and for all, or to muscle in on the action themselves, or simply to create such disorder that the US is forced into increasing financial aid to Mexico. That may be nothing more than simple rumourmongering but it demonstrates a wide distrust on behalf of Mexicans toward their leaders, and anyway it's certainly true that Calderon has enlisted more than 45,000 soldiers in the war on the cartels. Several hundred women were horrifically murdered and mutilated in Ciudad Juarez a couple of years back and still nobody knows who did it or why. Mostly, the consensus from Mexicans is the same as that expressed by Hilary Clinton a couple of weeks back: that Mexico will soon be indistinguishable from Colombia twenty years ago. And that nobody seems to know how to stop it. Heading north from Tepic to Ciudad Obregon - the latter of which is still several hours drive from the US border - we were stopped no less than a dozen times for drug searches. On the way from Sonora to Chihuahua, | 13 10 10 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 36 | VideoPlanet Kapow 06 : Puerto Vallarta to San Blas | AND SO: Independence Day came upon us. Mexico's Independence Day is usually a pretty big occasion but this year was special - it marked two hundred years since Father Miguel Hidalgo made his famous speech of defiance against the Spanish overlords who had ruled Mexico to that point, the 'Grito de Dolores' - "Death to bad government! Death to the gachupines!". The ensuing war cost Hidalgo his life - he was executed by firing squad, had his body decapitated and his head suspended in a cage for ten years from a building in Guanajuato, until the War of Independence was won in 1821. This year also marks 100 years since the beginning of the Mexican Revolution, which wasn't quite such an epic tale of heroism. The dictator Porfirio Diaz and his successor, Victoriano Huerta, were opposed by a number of different factions around the country, who ended up coming together to end their reign. Mexico remembers a group of four heroes, all generals during the revolution - Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, Venustiano Carranza and Alvaro Obregon, who are all widely feted. Trouble is, as soon as the revolution neared its end, Carranza had Zapata assassinated, and was subsequently assassinated himself by Obregon. A couple of years later, Pancho Villa was shot to death in Chihuahua, also probably on Obregon's orders. Obregon was then assassinated five years later. And that probably tells you everything you need to know about Mexican politics. The celebration itself, though - at least in Puerto Vallarta - was basically a non-event, starting with a muffled bang and ending with a barely-audible whimper. Unfortunately, with things the way they are at the moment, the entire area of the celebration was cordoned off by soldiers who conducted cavity searches on each and every person entering. No drinking was allowed in the streets and the few restaurants and bars who remained open felt free to triple their prices. It was fun to wander about the thousands of people milling the streets, though, with music playing and everybody shouting and dancing and having a good (sober) time. The fireworks were spectacular, and it seemed like the night was getting ready to catapult itself into a crazy drunken orgy of awesome. And that's when everybody went home. We waited another day to see whether anything would happen, but of course it didn't. So we packed our bags and headed north to the small beach town of San Blas, which was once one of the busiest ports on the Pacific but is now a sleepy surfer hangout famous as having one of the longest waves in the world. We found ourselves a grass bungalow on the beach, threw our backpacks down and celebrated. "Ah, this is more like it," I thought, "Real travel again. No more hawkers, traffic, noise. Just us and a guitar and the sand and the sea." What I hadn't considered was that we had to share a single mattress and the fan we'd been provided with didn't function. See, the thing about San Blas is that it was once one of the busiest ports on the Pacific, but it had to be abandoned because the humidity and surrounding mangroves meant that it was infested with massive swarms of mosquitos that spread major epidemics of disease throughout the town. The humidity killed us, and all night we stretched and ripped at a mosquito net that clearly wasn't designed to fit two large sweaty men under it. In the end it covered nothing, and we awoke to find our bodies as freakshows, festering swamps of swelling and merciless itching. It was a little hard to enjoy San Blas after that. We packed our bags and headed to Tepic, a couple of hours east. Tepic! Who would have guessed that little Tepic, the town we'd thought of only as a place to change buses, would be the town that started to turn everything around for us? But that will wait til next time. - The tunes this episode are made up of a recording of a band on the streets of Puerto Vallarta - if anybody recognizes the song they are playing (or, | 8 10 10 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 37 | VideoPlanet Kapow 05 : Mazatlan to Puerto Vallarta | OUR FERRY: from La Paz to Mazatlan turned out to be a decommissioned cruise ship, complete with disco, swimming pool, observation deck, bar and games room. Not a bad way to spend a night, even if we didn't get a bed and were forced to watch Armageddon dubbed in Spanish. The sun rose over Mazatlan and it was immediately obvious that here was a city unlike others we'd been to in Mexico. Mazatlan had energy; it had colour and style and movement, all despite the raging humidity, which hadn't dropped since our trip across the Sea of Cortez. We did little in Mazatlan, spending most of our time cruising the many colourful plazas and grabbing a drink at one of the sprinkling of truly outstanding bars stretching back from the waterfront. And, so long as we continued to do little except sit and drink, things went well. As soon as we tried to do anything more, they fell apart. We tried to hop across to nearby Stone Island (Isla de las Piedras), having heard stories of white sand beaches and lonely taco stands, only to find the beach brown and crusty and the taco stands filled with a non-stop conga line of hawkers hocking their wares. I continued my incredible run of injuries by slicing through my little finger when I misjudged the height of the ceiling fan in our dingy hotel room; the next night, after spending hours psyching ourselves up for a big Saturday night on the town, I fell into a fever and spent the night lying in bed trying not to throw up. The next day, we headed south again. Puerto Vallarta must once have been an incredible destination - cobblestone streets, miles of clean beaches, a backdrop of incredibly lush green mountains - but it seems those days are quickly fading beneath a landslide of group tours and ridiculously oversized (but completely tasteless) margaritas. It didn't help any that the storms continued to dump all kinds of crap onto the beaches and transformed the ocean into a brownish goo that gave the sensation of swimming in something halfway between minestrone soup and raw sewerage. We found a cheap hotel and a good quesadilla stand, bought our first bottle of tequila and filled our days with walks around the countryside and complaining about the heat while the rainy season that would eventually leave parts of Mexico in ruins continued to rage around us. Trapped in a rainstorm of truly epic proportions one night, we stumbled, dripping and miserable, into a dimly-lit bar off one of the rapidly-flooding main streets. Inside, a bloated American fellow sat chewing on a cigar and ploughing through what he told us was his fifteenth Corona of the evening. "Where are you from?" we asked him. "New York!" he bellowed, eyes unsteady. "New York!" we repeated, with the awestruck tone that's mandatory when talking to someone from New York. He smiled grimly. "Well, actually Connecticut," he yelled, "but the thing is -" Without warning he abruptly stood up, took two calm steps toward the door, and issued a stream of milky vomit that collected briefly on the cobblestone street before being picked up by the rainwater and carried off. "- the thing is," he continued loudly without missing a beat, "Is that nobody seems to know where Connecticut is," and then he fell into a contemplative silence. This would prove to be our classiest interaction with a foreigner in Puerto Vallarta. - For music in this episode we've got the tubariffic "Sin Evidencia" from Sinaloa's very own Banda El Recodo (who've been around since 1938!), which I could happily listen to all day, and another selection from the band that is fast firming as 'Favourite Mexican Band' around the Planet Kapow offices - "Suerte" by Jovenes y Sexys. | 3 10 10 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 38 | VideoPlanet Kapow 04 : La Paz to Mazatlan | The desert heat had sent us a little crazy, and we'd built La Paz into a mythical dreamland in our heads, a place where the bars heaved with the force of hundreds of drunken partygoers, where our toes would sink into the endless white sand, where we wo... | 27 9 10 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 39 | VideoPlanet Kapow 03 : Guerrero Negro to La Paz | OUT INTO: the desert, and though we'd spent a Sydney winter dreaming of the heat, we hadn't really prepared ourselves for it. We cut fairly pathetic figures as we stumbled into San Ignacio as the sun beat mercilessly down - dripping with sweat, haggard and glowing like something highly radioactive. Collapsing under the first piece of shade we could find, we bought a couple of beers and were privy to an extended discourse on Mexican history from an old man who spoke no English (of the entire thirty-minute monologue I think I understood three words, two of which were the words for "Mexican" and "history"). We smiled, nodded and made all the all the agreeable "Mmm-hmm" and "Is that so?" grunts we could think up, grateful for the shade and the cool beer that turned lukewarm within minutes. San Ignacio is a wonderful town, stuck in time, with a leafy village square, a beautiful church, and canyons and petroglyphs nearby. I wish I could say we saw more of it. But with our internal organs baking under skin that was rapidly approaching the look and texture of pork crackling, we relented, retreated, retired to a hotel room, lying face up and semi-naked under a slowly revolving fan, backs sticking to bedsheets like velcro, with the only sound our constant complaining. So the next day, Adam's birthday, we packed up and headed for the coast. Mulege was our destination, a small town that achieved limited fame as the only prison in the New World that had no bars - surrounded by desert, with no means of escaping that wouldn't end in a horrible, thirsty demise among the cacti, the prisoners were even allowed to keep mistresses in the local village and had a simple rope tied around the prison grounds at night. Sounds like paradise - and it would be, if not for that constant burn rolling in from the desert. In Mulege we found no refuge from the heat - if anything, it was worse, soaring to forty-six degrees. But we made the five-kilometre trek from town out along the river to the Sea of Cortez, past houses and groves of palm trees utterly demolished by the hurricane that blew in last year, with crazed looks in our eyes, desperate to throw ourselves into the water. The water, hot as a bath, wasn't exactly refreshing, but it sufficed. We ate lunch at a shack on the water, looking out at the azure vistas before us, and then retreated once again to the hotel and passed out. By the time we awoke, Mulege had been taken over by a carnival, all light and sound, and we wandered, dazed, among the partygoers, downing some quick tacos before passing out again. We were defeated. We needed to escape. La Paz lay before us, with the promise of endless white-sand beaches, throbbing bars, sunset beers with other travelers. We should have seen the warning signs in those sort of images, but the heat had ruined us, and the next day we boarded the southbound bus. - For this episode we've dipped into the catalogues of a couple of home-grown Mexican bands, opening with Jovenes y Sexys' wistful "El Reloj" and closing with Piyama Party's upbeat "Fan de Carcass". You can find these along with a whole lot of other great stuff from Mexico and South America over at the Club Fonograma blog. | 26 9 10 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 40 | VideoPlanet Kapow 02 : Tijuana to Colonet | THE TUNNEL: that leads to the bridge that leads to Mexico is so low-key and inconspicuous that for a while we couldn't even find it - we had to approach a cop to point it out to us. And across we went, no customs, no stamping of the passport, only a tinny voice that shouted, "Hey you, no photos!" from a tiny speaker box when Adam tried to take some shots of the three-hour queue of cars coming from Mexico, stretching to the horizon. Down some stairs, through a turnstile, and there we were, in Tijuana - the whole process so mystifyingly simple that we wandered back and forth for a time, searching for someone to hassle us, some ridiculous queue to join, almost crossing back into the US by accident. By the time we got to Tijuana we had been lectured about it at length by other travelers, people on the bus, taxi drivers, whoever - it had become a mythical city of danger and chaos, a place you could be confident of being shot and / or decapitated within minutes of arriving. All nonsense, of course, but nonsense has a habit of becoming more believable the more often it's repeated, so we boarded a bus to Ensenada and watched Mexico unfold. In Ensenada we found a deserted city, rapidly vacated after the end of the college breaks in the States, no cruise ships in port, just us and our backpacks. We wandered up and down the malecon, chowing down on plates of ceviche and fish tacos, the condiments lined up before us in a rainbow of flavour and chili. The people in Ensenada were incredibly friendly and helpful - we've since found this to be the case all over Mexico, but never quite like Ensenada. At our hostel we found a random assortment of travelers from Mexico, Switzerland, the US - and Gabi, who ran the hostel and with whom we were able to try out a little more Spanish and make believe that we were actually improving (we weren't). We had heard a little about El Parque Nacional Sierra de San Pedro Martir, which lay a little further south, a place of bobcats and condors and bighorn sheep, but with no public transport to the park we were left in a bit of a bind. We were talking about it to Gabi one night when she interjected with "I have a car." What followed was three days of harassment and nagging until Gabi relented and loaded us, Pris the Swiss and Gilberto, from Mexico, into her 4WD with shopping bags full to bursting with bread, ham, beer, potatoes and Jack cheese. It took a couple of hours to reach but entering the park was to enter another world, first opening up into wide desert plains, strewn with boulders, mountains looking like giant mounds of rubble, nothing in the dirt but a few sad-looking cacti, roadrunners darting across the road in front of the car beep beep - and then, suddenly, rounding a bend and the landscape changing utterly, now endless seas of conifers, chipmunks racing laps around the treetrunks, condors hovering high above, and everywhere the smell of pine. We set up our tent in a clearing near some boulders, started a fire and stuffed our faces with the ham and cheese, grown lukewarm and sweaty, respectively, in the back of the car, and grabbed a beer. What followed was an incredible night, under an acid-washed sky flooded with stars, so many that there was less dark space than light. Guitars playing all night, stories being traded - brilliant, so brilliant, though between the Mexicans and the Swiss I think we heard Radiohead's "Creep" several dozen times that night, in a variety of versions, including soft jazz - and then a freezing, uncomfortable night on stony ground with not nearly enough blankets. After an aborted effort at a mountain hike we were off again, Adam and I dropped off in the tiny town of Colonet to continue our journey south. Gabi, Gilberto and Pris were amazing people to spend time with and with any luck we'll run across them again, but we had to say goodbye. It was time to head into the desert. - | 15 9 10 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 41 | VideoPlanet Kapow 01 : Sydney to San Ysidro | AND HERE: we are. Welcome to the very first episode of Planet Kapow, as Adam and I fly out of Sydney for the glorious excess of the United States. Erin and Danielle will follow us over in mid-November; for now we have a couple of months to explore Mexico. But first - the U.S. America: a population constantly in conversation with itself, one long unending group psychiatry appointment. Everybody there is possessed by the need to get things off their chest, weights off their shoulders, monkeys off their back and worries off their mind - and they'll happily do so with whoever's listening, whoever's closest. A question like "Excuse me, do you know where the bus station is?" might result in an answer that covers that person's last two marriages, a weird rash that keeps reoccurring on their left buttock, and their enlightened thoughts on the issue of medicinal marijuana, but leave you no closer to finding a bus. This is especially true of L.A., a city where people say things like, "Screw you, scumbag!", and "Hey, peace, man!" without any sort of irony at all. A city of actors, where every immigration officer, bus driver and waitress puts on a show, hoping that you or one of the people around you may be a talent agent about to give them their big break. But for all that, it needs to be said - Americans are some of the most open, helpful and friendly people in the world. It pains me to admit it, but Australia could afford to take notes. Any issue that we had while in L.A.would be workshopped between complete strangers on the bus to come up with the best solution. Any time we were in trouble, or even looked vaguely confused, people would flock to us to see if they could lend a hand. Everybody wants to help. Unfortunately there's no helping L.A., which, without a car, is simply an impossible behemoth of a city. It took us six hours to get from the airplane to our hostel at Venice Beach, some five kilometers away. And aside from its stylish pizza joints and semi-permanent population of impossibly cool skaters, Venice Beach itself is little more than a strip of dirt that, despite being in constant contact with the ocean, refuses to turn to mud. San Diego was different - and something of a surprise: a city of wide open spaces, grand buildings and a beautiful harbour. And in Ocean Beach, a hostel crawling with the young and inebriated, attracted to the place like lemmings to a cliff, stumbling down narrow stairwells and shouting down phone lines to friends far away. Most of them under 21 and thus unable to drink legally, but they found a way. Of course they found a way - wine bottles stashed under jackets, ID's altered and forged, the passports of the elder statesmen smuggled out of the bars to a line of impatient teenagers waiting around the block. A fun couple of nights for Adam and I - the first ending with a midnight swim in the harbour with some Canadians and a Finn, our feet slashed on the rocks beneath; the second ending up at a house in the suburbs with a large group of San Diegans who had been impressed with our (slightly faked) Australian accents and brought us back for a long, long night of trading stories and playing boardgames in front of a freakishly big TV with a Bud Light in hand. At 5:30am we found ourselves in the back of a pickup truck, keeping our heads low so as not to be seen by the cops, telegraph poles and signs for burger joints passing by overhead, pale in the shallow dawn light. We pulled up at our hostel only minutes before reception opened for the day, passing out on our clean, paid-for beds that we would have to vacate in another four hours. And then on to Mexico - and oh, the convenience! A $2.50 ticket on the San Diego trolley takes you the last few miles to the border town of San Ysidro. And then - no customs, no passports, no scans, no nothing, really - just an unmanned tunnel. On the other side of that tunnel: Mexico. But that will have to wait until next time. - | 8 9 10 | Free | View In iTunes |
| Total: 41 Episodes |
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The real Mexico
Excellent videos guys! The shots look amazing and great choice of music too! Looks like you're having a great time, can't wait to see the girls in the eps as well! Keep them coming
Around South American with friends as your guide
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Awesome Podcast
Planet Kapow is brilliant! Each episode is well made and the entire experience looks amazing can't wait to see Ecuador! Keep it up guys!
