Day 42 - Monday 31st October 2005

I wanted to get out of the hustle of the big city as I had about as much as I could take so I caught a bus to Puebla, a town about 2 hours away. The town didnt have a hostel so I checked into a hotel and set out to see what the town had to offer. The local speciality is Chicken Mole (thats pronounced mo-lay - I wasn’t eating a mole) and I went to a local restuarant to sample it.

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Day 41 - Sunday 30th October 2005

Sunday is musuem day. The supposed biggest and best museum in Mexico City is the musuem of anthropology, so thats where I went first! After catching the Metro over there I got off and walked through the Basque de Chapultepec, Mexico City’s largest park.

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Day 40 - Saturday 29th October 2005

When I woke up I wasn’t sure if I was going to have another day of walking the streets, or whether I was going to go on another tour, this time to the archaeological ruins of Teotihuacan. I mulled it over at breakfast and chose the archaeological site. It turned out to be a good decision despite a slow start.

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Day 39 - Friday 28th October 2005

The hostel I was staying in - Hostel Moneda - ran two free tours. One of those was a walking tour of the historical centre of the city. I decided to go on this as it would give me some insight into the history of the city, and its Aztec roots.

The tour began from the hostel which lay on Calle Moneda. This street is where the money of Mexico was first printed, and more importantly, the location of Mexico’s first cantina.

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Day 38 - Thursday 27th October 2005

After nearly 4 weeks in Mexico I finally made it to the capital. I had heard stories that it was incredibly dangerous and that I was bound to get robbed or scammed, so on the bus travelling there I worked out how I was going to get from the bus station to my hostel in the city centre. All those plans went out the window as soon as I arrived.

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Day 37 - Wednesday 26th October 2005

I wasn’t really in the mood for doing much, but one thing I wanted to see was the Museum of the Mummies. Mexicans have a strange fascination with death, and this museum only serves to intensify that fascination. The original mummies were discovered in 1865, when due to a lack of space in the local cemetary it beacme necessary to dig up some of the older skeletons. However when they were actually exhumed, the bodies hadn’t decomposed. Instead they had dried up completely and their flesh mummified. The bodies had been presevered in this way due to the mineral content and dryness of the soil in the area.

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Day 36 - Tuesday 25th October 2005

After a night in the hostel (this didn’t rank as good one - see previous entry!) I woke up with 18 mosquito bites on my arms and back. To take my mind off the itching I wanted to get out and see why this city came recommended so highly by travellers and guidebooks alike, so after a quick cornflake breakfast, I hit the streets!

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