MEX E MEX E CO! I WANT TO BE. A MEX EEHHH CO!

(NK) The start of our Mexican adventure has definitely been more Karl Pilkington than Michael Palin. What does HE want now? Has been an overused term, normally aimed at Mexican police and military.

After our drama at the border, we put in some big driving that took us through the picturesque Querataro and onwards to Mexico City. Driving in Mexico is like playing Mario Kart for real.  There are unnecessarily huge speed humps called topes, many of which come with no warning or markings, potholes that will swallow a car, fellow drivers that go out of their way to get in yours, pigs, dogs, cows, chickens, iguanas… Mario Kart! It helps to sing the song in the title of the blog at the top of your voice to the macho man theme tune. It's a song that is now wearing thin on Fi.

As an added booby trap the police are very hit and miss. It was driving into Mexico City (the hardest level on Mario Kart) that we encountered our first taste of police corruption.

Two coppers were chatting away on their little scooters but as soon as they saw Uncle Sam’s number plates on Trisha they were all over us. We pulled over and one strutted to the window. Jesus, he looked liked a Mexican version of my Dad. This was going to be difficult. Buenos Tardis! After reeling off various ‘infraciones’ in Spanish he told us we needed to cough up $400usd. We both did our best Manwell impressions. Que? Que? Porque? No entiendo?

He asked how much money we had so I pulled out about 50p in change. No no no, we need more said Mexican Paddy and went to chat to his pal. He came back again trying to squeeze whatever money he could from us so I reached for the credit card and asked if he had chip and pin on his scooter (this back on forth continued a while).  I then offered to go to the police station, clearly something he didn’t want. This was a pretend fine not a real one, and he definitely didn’t want to have his picture taken for the blog.

In the end we were let loose but this was the only chance we were going to get. How we laughed!

Many people have said that you should give over 100/200 pesos and hope it’s enough. We would much rather play this little game. It’s more fun than throwing your money away. Play dumb, feign innocence (well, we were innocent) and offer to pay by credit card as a last resort. We’ve had plenty of police stops and military searches since, which included one guy tasting the dirt in the footwell to check for Marijuana. Maybe he’s watched too much TV. All he needed to do was check my pockets.

Once we’d settled in Mexico City we sampled some of the amazing streetfood which included Tortas(mexican sandwiches), fish tacos and quesadillas. We were staying in the Condesa neighbourhood which was very relaxed, but also did our tourist bit, visited the Zocalo and wandered around the huge park and Zoo. To be honest we didn’t really like the place. If we’d spoke more Spanish it may have been different and we’ve definitely improved on this lately. Fi had Mayan ruins she wanted to climb so we didn’t spend too long in the interior and began making our way East. 

Roadside BBQ pollo, beats KFC

We stopped at a couple of amazing places en route including a small village called Tlacotapan, a UNESCO site of four streets and two plazas. The place was very quiet and peaceful and the beautiful plazas so typical of Mexican towns came to life at night with vendors selling tacos and people meeting up for a gossip.

We were the only Gueros (slang for fair skinned folk) in town so a bit if novelty but we managed to find a small hostel for the night before our long drive to Palenque.