Merida

We’ve just left the Mexican city of Merida after spending 8 days exploring this wonderful city.  Merida is a big city in the Yucatan province in Mexico.  It’s a few hours away from the popular beaches and resorts around Cancun, so there aren’t as many tourists or tourist traps around, although there were a few.  We really enjoyed the city.  We had a wonderful hostel right beside the central square, so we had a great perspective of the cultural center and daily life of the people of Merida.  Our room in the hostel had a balcony with a great view of the square, so we utilized that quite a bit, enjoying evenings sitting out there watching the busy atmosphere below.

The city also had a wonderful big market with cheap food and trinkets. We enjoyed walking around in that area, taking in all the things it had to offer.  Merida also had really good restaurants, with really tasty food.  Joh really enjoyed the “Sopa de Lima” which is a lime soup with chicken, vegetables, and crisp tortillas.  I really enjoyed all the roasted pork dishes cooked in achiote paste – great flavor. Habanero chiles also were also very commonplace in a lot of the food. Habanero chiles are crazy hot.  Way hotter than the Jalapenos we’re used to.   It’s surprising how quick you get used to them though.  It’s already a lot easier eating dishes with them now.

The weather in Merida is also the hottest we’ve experienced yet on our trip.  It was so hot here you’d sweat just sitting still.  We ended up going for cold drinks and/or ice creams quite often here.  Across the square from our hostel was a great sorbet shop selling all types of delicious sorbets.  They had exotic flavors like mamey, guanabana, pitaya, nance, and the usual suspects like banana, strawberry, and mango.  We went here pretty much every day and tried a new flavor. Our favorites ended up being the coconut and the chocolate sorbets. The chocolate had that really nice Mexican chocolate flavor with the subtle hints of cinnamon and other spices.

We also decided to finally do a bit of shopping.  We’d been avoiding doing shopping for most of this trip, mainly due to budgetary constraints, but our wardrobe was getting really pathetic.  We’d been wearing the same 2 or 3 shirts every day for the last 6 months, and they were all really gross looking by now.  All our shirts were so faded and stretched out.  They just hung on our shoulders like grey sackcloth.   The markets in Merida presented a good opportunity to do some shopping without really breaking our budget too much.  T-Shirts were only 3 or 4 dollars and Joh was also able to get a really nice dress that is great for the climate here.  Joh was really excited to shop again. She said she had forgotten what it was like…  I hope we haven’t rekindled some long-lost former addiction in her ;)

We also spent one day visiting the Cenotes outside the city.  Cenotes are giant underground caves partially filled with water.  They’ve built some stairs down into them and you can climb down and go for  swim.  It’s a really neat feeling swimming in there.  The water was a very clear blue color, and the cave walls were covered with mineral deposits and stalactites making for a very beautiful place to swim.

We also received some good news, and that is that Joh’s parents are coming down to visit us for a week.    They’re planning on joining us for a week in Cancun, starting on July 20^th.  We’re really excited to see them.  If we’re honest with ourselves, we have been a little homesick lately and so it will be really nice to see some familiar faces.  It will be great to share our travels with other important people in our lives, so that they can see firsthand what this experience is like for us.

So we’re off to Cancun today to scout out the area for a day or two and to find a nice place for us to stay when they join us here.  From Cancun we’ll be taking off to one of the nearby islands to stay in the meantime.  There is supposed to be some great snorkeling near here and some other cool adventures to have so we’ll do that for a week or two before they arrive.

We’ve also decided on a plan for the next month.  After Joh’s parents leave we’ll have another month or so to go before we go back home for a few weeks.  We’ve debated on Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, Cuba, or Northern Mexico, but after a lot of research we’ve instead decided on an alternative plan.  We had been searching for cheap spots to fly to from Cancun, and we happened to come across a great deal for a flight to British Columbia.  A one-way ticket from Cancun to B.C. happens to be cheaper than flying to anyplace in Central America or elsewhere in Mexico.   So we’re planning on flying there and then going for a 3 or 4 week road trip across the USA back home.  We plan on stopping by some exciting places in the US, such as the Grand Canyon, other national parks, and cities that we’d always wanted to visit.  We’re planning on buying a cheap car in B.C. and buying a few camping supplies there and then start out on our way, staying in campgrounds and the like all the way home.

Naturally we’re also quite excited to be going to B.C..  My brother Chris lives there, so it will be great to hang out with him, and we’ve also got a lot more family and friends out there that we haven’t seen in quite some time.  We’ll likely be there for at least 3 or 4 days while we quickly shop for a car and prepare for our road trip, so we should have some time to visit a few people.  I know there’s quite a few of you blog readers from B.C., so if any of you can help us out in finding a cheap car and/or maybe have a place for us to stay for a few days, please email me and let me know.

Anyways, that’s it for now.  Hope all is well with everyone back home!