I left Mexico city and all the wonderful excitement and horrible smells and headed to Puebla 2 hours east of Mexiuco city. Puebla is a beautiful colonial city with drab streets followed by breathtaking buildings at the next turn. They have painted tiles and pottery for sale everywhere and I found the cheapest meal I have had yet. Tacos for 25p each! I think i had about 12 but even so......!
I left Puebla after the great experience with the kids at the farm and arrived in San Cristobal. It was cold! Despite what the news said there was no trouble there. There was some graffitti on the walls mentioning Oaxaca but nothing where I was. I went to Tuxtla Gutierrez and went down the Cañon Del Sumidero on a boat and saw my first (wild) crocodile! Also took a trip to see waterfalls and the Lagod de Montebello and the tour guide took us right to the border and told us that everything accross the water was Guatemala! Pretty cool!

I met 2 guys in San Cristobal and we had an ADVENTURE! I wanted to go to remote as I could get in Mexico but without a decent command (yet) of Spanish and travelling as a lone female is never that safe i wasnt going to go to Laguna Miramar.Then I met Damu and Stuart (Indian and Scottish) and we all went together. We caught a 2 hour bus from San Cristobal to Ocasingo and then a 7 hour truck ride (and i DO mean truck, pics to follow!) through the jungle on a dusty road with huge holes in it, jam packed in a truck with supplies for the village and loads of people who only spoke their native language and no english and very little spanish!After 7 hours we arrived at San Quentin and then walked to Ejido Emiliano Zapata both tiny villages.We had to find and speak to the President of the village to ask him if we could stay for 3 nights and he agreed and we slept in Cabanas slightly out of the village. They were built of concrete and had iron roofs and were the best houses in the villages, palatial in comparison with everyone else!We ate dinner every night in a tiny house that they fed travellers in and for pudding he walked outside and picked us grapefruit or oranges or anything!
They were a proper democracy and had announcements every few hours as everyone in the village had to be consulted on every decision!The next day we walked 3 hours to Laguna Miramar and it was well worth the journey. We sat and sunbathed all day and there was a family down there as well who were sent there with 2 way radios to make sure we were ok and got there and back safely.It was an amazing experience. For 3 days I saw no cars or ANYTHING electric AT ALL. They had a satelite phone and that was it!
After our 7 hour trip back I went to Palenque where I am now and am hopefully going to Guatemala tomorrow! I bought a hammock yesterday and I now sleep out under banana leaf roofs listening to monkeys. Oh yes by the way its HOT HOT here!! Ok tried to upload photos but is not working (yet again!)

These are the pictures of the farm for children with learning disabilities, i had a wonderful day, one of the best so far!!!! These kids are so happy, well fed and learning life skills. There are older kids who are out working in the town and then they come back to the 'family' at night to stay. At the farm the workers are using a uk model called Independence Life to work with the kids which as 12 areas of development they work with from self care and domestic skills to managing money and taking public transport and all the kids have got jobs in the outside world as they get older and they can live independently in apartments but still come back to the famr to visit. In America i saw a lot of disabled people on the street which hard to see but here you dont see it. A lot of these children were dumped here by their parents and the Government pays them donations but will not pay families who have disabled kids. Overall impression here was one of happy loving kids who had a big family of 12 brothers and sisters and were content and were not made to feel different becuase of their disability.
My impressions of Mexico so far are of a people who are so passionate and everywhere you go you see affection and love on a scale that you dont get back home and you definitly dont get in the USA! Puebla was a beautiful city and after Mexico city it felt tiny even though it had 2 million people! I saw my first volcano yesterday, there are 4 surrounding Puebla but you are not permitted to climb any of them at present. I also went to Cholula which had a church built ontop of a pyramid! I am leaving Puebla today for San Cristobal on the night bus. I think I will splash out and take a taxi to the bus station as its 42 pesos which is $4 or 2 quid!

This is hard work!
I got to Mexico City a few days ago. I arrived late at night and had to wait for the hostel car to pick me up. I thought I was definitly gonna die on the way to the hostel as at the crossroads if the light was red he just beeped the horn and kept going! I soon found this was to be the norm for driving in Mexico City...
First couple of days were hard and then I met 3 people that I spent the next 2 days with. The first day we went to the Anthropology Museam and then the zoo to see the Mexican Wolf (see pics) and the second day we went to the pyramids north of the city and they were amazing! Its hard to believe that they are only now digging up and excavating things that date back to 200AD and America has museams with stuff from the 1950's!
All in all its so different here. I was told about one protest that took place in 1968 by students and the goverment didnt want the publicity as it was hosting the olympic games the next day so they shot them all - 1000 of them!! They later covered it up and said there was only 30 or so people. Its not just the language and the buildings that are different, the culture, value system, beliefs and ideals are all totally different from Europe and America!
Will upload pics when I can.
Am going to Puebla on Monday I want to get out of this city, 22 million people is hard to get your head around!!

San Francisco, and the area I was staying in.

ok these are pictures of me and Paul on my birthday! Also pic of the sunset and my trip to Alcatraz

Ok these are (some of) my Yosemite pics. The three guys are Andy, Jim and Paul (the guy I am staying with) and a picture of us all in the Green Tortoise bus! The first picture is me in front of the 5 painted ladies of San Francisco

The posts are all back to front now as I did one huge one last time - ah well if thats all I have to worry about I'm not doing so bad!
Just a quick posting before I leave San Francisco. I wouldn’t say that I left my heart here but there is something very special about this city. It got under my skin as soon as I got here and I feel at home here in a way that I haven’t felt anywhere other than Scotland.
I have been staying with an Irish guy called Paul who works in bars here while setting up a TV show! He is a really sound guy and made sure that I had a good birthday and made sure I had a good time while I was in San Francisco. Thanks Paul you are a star and if I can ever repay the favour give me a shout – anytime at all and I mean that!
Also thanks to everyone who made my birthday so special and different with the cards, emails, e-cards, phone calls and presents. It was really appreciated as I was kinda worried I would spend my birthday on my own.
Oh and I want to get a tattoo that combines travelling, Scotland, Halloween and self esteem, I just cant come up with one design that says all that (neither can anyone else) so answers/ideas on a postcard please!!

I did do some touristy stuff here, Alcatraz, cable cars, Chinatown and Haight St but mainly just loved being downtown amongst it all. There are so many different types of public transport here. There are underground subway trains, electric and petrol buses, trams, cable cars and trolleys – all different! We also went and watched the sunset at the beach which was so lovely, there is no good place to watch the sunrise here as it is over the city. I have seen some amazing sunsets and sunrises in America though!

I read a quote that said ‘I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be’ and I think this is very fitting to describe my time in America. I have had an amazing 2 1/2 months and mainly the great stuff that has happened has been pure chance.
As I leave I am thinking a lot about how I am fitting into my own skin at the moment. I am finding out things about myself that are truly surprising me and the best part about it is that its good things. The funny side of it is that the things I am discovering are things that people (mainly Eleanor) have said about me for a long time!

I think the real traveling will start now as I know I have had it fairly easy here for the last while and going to a country where I don’t speak the language will be much harder but I’m sure I will be ok! I plan to spend about 3 months in South America but who knows what will happen – America didn’t exactly go to plan that’s for sure!!!
One thing that has stopped worrying me is my itinerary; I am doing this to meet people and to have the experience. If I don’t ‘tick off’ a particular country its no big deal and I would far rather stop and work somewhere (like I did in Venice Beach LA) than to keep constantly moving and getting only a quick snapshot of each place in my head. That’s not why I’m doing this. It’s exhausting running from place to place ‘doing’ all the ‘touristy’ or ‘must see’ places and then leaving. I know I have great plans for things that are a long way into the future of my trip so if my itinerary, money or the people I’m with changes it all, I'm not so fussed!
I fly to Mexico City tomorrow morning, pictures to follow!