(I'm defaulting on bandombigbang, before I ever start. I still hope to write the fic that was going to be my BBB, but I'm not going to make it a duty; it's just not, in the scheme of things, important enough to me for me to let it take over my life for the next three or four months and kill off all other projects. Which is what would happen, because I make deadlines, sure, but I bitch and moan and sulk about them, and I don't do anything else at the same time.)

Hi hi, so, never mind all that. I have a new plan for the year. The plan goes like this:

Obviouslyobviously I will work on novel projects, earnest-eyed determination etc etc. But I will also write one original short story every calendar month, and read one short story every week.

Since I made this resolution on Friday afternoon, and didn't actually scrape my resolve together to start writing until 8pm tonight, January's short story was actually a ficlet. It was supposed to be flash fiction, which is under 1000 words, but it came in at 1500, so now I'm ... not entirely sure what to do with it. I'm almost certain there is no market for 1500-word stories. But I'm pretty sure that when I reread it I will either find that a) it's awful, so never mind and write it off as a learning exercise, or b) I can pare it down by a third and do something with it.

It was a bit of a cheat, besides the length, because it was based on a fanfiction idea I never wrote. (It's not based on the characters, and the idea didn't actually have anything to do with fandom.) Even so, little thing that it is, it's actually the first completed piece of original writing I've produced since I got heavily into fandom. I didn't stop working on original projects, but I stopped writing short stories - which meant I stopped writing things I could finish.

That's why it doesn't really matter if it is awful. I haven't done this in a while, and if I'm going to write twelve this year, some of them can be awful, can't they? It's very freeing.

___

On a non navel-gazing note, the other thing I managed to do this weekend was to get sadly overdue beta notes to softlyforgotten for her Z/ghost!Tennessee novelette. It's gorgeous and funny and heartbreaking and lovely, and you should go read it. You can consider it a reward for reading all about my very exciting day if you like.

(Did I mention I also worked on a jigsaw puzzle?! lilithstorm and her boyfriend started it on Friday night, and I immediately stole it and spent the next two days finding excuses to go into the lounge room so that I could do a little more. Jigsaw puzzles, they are sadly addictive. Possibly in a malignant way. This one supposedly has exciting murder mystery clues in it.)

So I wrote a Disney office AU for tangledtale's birthday! Because it seemed like she deserved one? I wouldn't normally link from here, but I don't have anywhere else to cross-post, and I'm kind of fond of it. It has Disney girls in it, you know.

___

unlurkster was talking about when it's acceptable/preferable to use British or American spelling in fic. I turn out to have strong opinions on this, so I thought I'd share them! They go like this:

I would never, ever use American spelling in my writing. Ever. I adapt my language to a setting and to characters: I do my best to make sure they're using culturally appropriate words in culturally appropriate settings, and that the way they phrase things sounds American or English or Japanese or whatever the fandom is. I'm not necessarily that great at it - sometimes all I know is that something isn't Australian - but I try. Because my characters are American (or English or Japanese) and they need to sound it.

But changing my spelling? That's pretending that I'm American.

As long as it's correct and consistent, spelling is invisible. It has nothing to do with the content: nothing to do with the setting and definitely nothing to do with the characterisation.

Obviously you can choose to write with either spelling if one appeals to you more, or if neither is your first language anyway, but there's no earthly reason to do it for the cultural verisimilitude of your story.



Side peeve! I hate having to use "British spelling" to mean "non-American" spelling. There is a whole world of people out there using standard non-American spelling, and only some of them live in England, yo.

I'm still trying to make up my mind about whether I'm going to sign up for bandombigbang. There are a lot of good reasons I shouldn't, and then there are these reasons I should:

1) If I don't I'm going to be desperately jealous (again) when posting rolls around.

2) I want a fanmix.

3) I really like the story I'd do, and want it to exist.

And there's this:

4) If I sign up for BBB, no matter what else I fail to do this year, I will definitely finish a story of over 20,000 words, because I make deadlines. (Not gracefully, but I make them.) I think that's worth something.


ETA: ... it was kind of obvious what decision I was going to make, but, yes. Officially signed up.

More no_tags recs while they're still anonymous!

( Five recs, heavy on the Panic kids, all appropriately ficletty )

The ficlets posting at no_tags have been brightening my night, internet. Today was PMS and a generally discouraged feeling that everything I was came down to pointless and dull (hormones, I love them), but then I came home, and just. This challenge. I love ficlets, the way you can hold them in your hands; the way they can be an entirely perfect expression of what they're meant to be, as longfic never can. And there's so much variety! So many amazing small pairings and oddities. I love them.

Here's a first batch of recs. I'm reading from the bottom up and I'm still on skip=20, so, you know. Incomplete list, and all.

(My own fic is completely unguessable, I'm pretty sure. Somehow when I look at a list of prompts like this I'm immediately drawn to the ones I would never think of for myself, and I end up with something wildly outside my comfort zone. Still, I'm feeling fond of it now that it's done.)

( Recs! )

Hey hey, so there's an anonymous bandom ficlet exchange going on? no_tags Clearly all of you should do it! And, uh, the chances of anybody wanting my prompts will go way up /o\

Er. Seriously, though, tiny exchange with hardly any pressure. Speaking as somebody who's avoided every fic exchange in the last year, this seems like my kind of thing :-)

I visited my twelve-year-old godbrother today, and at one point he uttered the words: "All the books in the world should be written by Stephenie Meyer and Christopher Paolini".

I am calmly telling myself that as long as he keeps on reading, it will All Be Okay.

And a little bit chuffed that he apparently likes girlish vampire romances as much as he likes boyish dragon adventures.

For god's sake. Present tense is a dubious idea at the best of times, but you should not do it if you don't know how to use your tenses. If the current action is in present tense, flashbacks and other past action will be in past tense, not past perfect. She arrived this morning, not She had arrived this morning. Past perfect is two jumps back in time, not simply the default for flashbacks.

It's not a quibble, and far too many good writers do it. Stick to past tense if writing present is going to make you look like the idiot you actually aren't.

ETA: frankkincense says that I'm coming across as somewhat caustic. Um. Sorry? Don't victimise tenses, my darlings, and I will absolutely smile at you.

Also, it is Boxing Day and I have chocolate liqueur and I am possibly a little tipsy, so.

Remember the global Walk Against Warming today, guys! I'll be there at the State Library at about quarter to twelve for any other Melbourne people who don't want to walk on their own.

Wear a white or light-coloured hat and top if you can, for the aerial photos :-)

(Walks in all Australian capitals and also Bendigo and Geelong, and in other country's capitals as well of course.)

This is probably going to be incoherent, because I'm exhausted, still a little tipsy (work Christmas party oh my god it went on and on and on), and packing some righteous indignation in a few quarters, but I kind of want to babble (non-spoilerishly) about Dollhouse.

I finally watched season one over the last week. And all of the people who said that it was disappointing (for which read: all of the internet), are fucking weird, because I loved it to pieces. The first half of the season wasn't brilliant by Joss standards, but it was interesting and cool and Eliza Dushku-ish, and if I'd stumbled on it with no Whedon associations I would have been amazed and delighted and would have marked it in the TV guide every week in sparkly blue pen so that I didn't forget. And second half of the season? Is awesome.

If anybody's missed it, Joss Whedon's Dollhouse is about a secret institution called the Dollhouse where volunteers (or sometimes 'volunteers') contract themselves in for five years of mental and physical slavery. They submit to a technology called imprinting, where their own personalities are copied and stored on a disk, and then wiped from their minds. While they're in the Dollhouse itself they exist in a blank, childlike state, but their purpose is to be hired out to clients with custom-made personalities, memories and desires. Usually they're rented out to fulfill a client's fantasies - sexual or otherwise - but sometimes they're sent out for more serious purposes like espionage, hostage negotiation etc. Situations where for one reason or another a doll is more suited than a normal specialist in the field. In all cases they don't know that their memories and desires are not their own.

Eliza Dushku is Echo, who was an activist called Caroline before she went into the Dollhouse. She's somebody new every week, but memories are beginning to bleed into each other, and she's developing a sense of self and purpose, over the course of the season, that should be impossible.

The appeal of the show isn't character-based, really, even though some of the characters (Topher! ♥ Adelle! ♥) are amazing, and some of the dolls (Victor \o/) are seriously fantastic in their multiple roles. But the appeal of the show is that it's clever, and twisty, and thinky, and because it takes an absolutely fascinating premise and really takes advantage of it, twists it in all the ways it can be twisted. Maybe the lukewarm reception is because it's not character-driven, or because the dialogue isn't as quirky and funny as Whedon usually is. But that's the thing, it's not a revamped version of The Joss Show. It's something new, Joss being clever in new directions, and it's awesome.

You know what else is interesting? That Echo doesn't have a genuine love interest. There's Paul, obviously, but the writers go to a lot of effort to show that that isn't the dream we should be cheering on. Sierra and Victor get a love story: Echo gets the struggle for self-actualisation. That's pretty awesome.

Dushku is a lot better in her multiple roles than I'd been led to expect, too. Everybody said that she proved her lack of versatility as an actor, but I didn't think so at all. Sure, some of her personalities were similar to each other, but so were some of Sierra's - Echo has more personalities than any other actor; she can be forgiven for not being strikingly different every time. She's the very best of them all at doing the in-house doll state, too. The only time I really felt she fell down was that scene in the last episode, you know the one, with Alpha and the chair, where she wasn't acting out what she was saying at all. But she wasn't even trying to, which makes me wonder if that was a deliberate directorial decision? That she absorbed what happened differently than Alpha had. I'm not sure.

The only serious weak spots, for me, were Paul Ballard (the Man Without Charisma, seriously, how could they give him so much screentime?), and the character of Caroline. I don't think that was Eliza Dushku's fault, because she was working with the lines and the motivations given to her, but man, Caroline is the least interesting personality Echo plays. I can't get excited about Echo becoming Caroline again when Echo herself is so much more interesting.

But then, maybe that's deliberate too - maybe it's part of her story arc that Echo will become more than she was.

I haven't seen or heard anything about season two (and obviously I don't want to know any specifics from people who have), but I'm crossing my fingers. Because I love this.

Hi! So I am going to be back in Melbourne in, like, forty eight hours, and I´m going to be jetlagged and headachy and sulky, and there´ll be work and phone bills and and everything will be a bit grey. Which, you know, my life, high tragedy. ANYWAY, my point is, if people felt like filling up my inbox with cheerful things to make me feel less grey when I get home? Well that would be pretty awesome. If you felt like it.

Nearly finished, now :/ Tomorrow we head to Alajuela, near San Jose airport, with one full day there before we fly out.

We´ve been on the Caribbean coast four nights, now. Puerto Viejo was a bit of a wash-out - it rained, and I think we chose the wrong hotel, and we just kind of sloped around, occasionally buying Caribbean dresses (made in Vietnam). The only really striking element was Playa Negra, the black-sand beach. It was so black, and so soft and fine, and when the waves came in they frothed grey as though they were full of ash.

Now we´re in Cahuita, half an hour up the coast, which is quieter than Puerto Viejo and so far one of my favourite places in the world. We´re in a hotel right on the water - there´s no beach just here, so the waves crash on and over a rock wall. There are hammocks slung between coconut trees next to the rock wall, and more on the little verandas outside the upper story rooms (where we are), and yesterday evening I spent about three hours lying in one hammock and then another, alternating between watching the waves, reading a ridiculous romance novel, and making notes for a ridiculous story about spies. It was beautiful and perfect, and I want another week here. We´ve had two gorgeously sunny mornings, and two pleasantly overcast afternoons, and damn, why did we stay that extra night in Puerto Viejo? Even in the rain I could have rocked away an afternoon in a hammock here with absolute contentment.

It´s such a little town - most of the buildings are hotels and restaurants - with beachy dirt roads and palm trees with colourful painted trunks and such incredibly friendly locals, Jamaican-Costa Ricans with dreads and bright shirts and girls with gleaming cornrow braids and Spanish-Costa Ricans with dusty singlets and easy smiles.

Today we spent hiking through Cahuita National Park, swimming and walking and craning our necks for sloths. It was one of the best days of the trip.

( Wildlife special edition! )

We had no luck with the volcano, although there were fireflies. (The fireflies here are so desultory. They blink maybe once every thirty seconds, in a sleepy sort of way, and fly in the dark the rest of the time.) But the volcano trip included a stop at a free hot spring, and that was pretty much awesome. The hot springs here don´t well up from underground, they´re streams heated by the lava flow. So this was basically a creek in a dark culvert, running at 35 degrees. It must have been fed by two different streams, because there was a cold current and a hot current. There were pools above and below the culvert, with rapids you could shoot yourself over in the dark - if you lay back you could fly about fifteen metres along the culvert.

We ended up taking a taxi up to the waterfall (La Caterata) and then walking back down into town. It´s a gorgeous waterfall, falling 70 feet into a pool with sides close enough that when you sit on the rocks at the edge, you´re buffeted by actual waves, splashing you in the face and knocking into your chest. You can swim round the other side, in the more tranquil pools, and there are schools of fish constantly fighting the current there.

The house of hammocks, with the cat sized hammocks, was closed for cleaning when we walked by - the owner confided to Danni that this meant he was seriously hungover - so we didn´t get to go there, but we stopped at this home coconut place, where the woman hacked off a bit of coconut and poked a straw in, and we took turns drinking the milk. Then she hacked the coconut open and I picked it apart with my fingers (Danni wasn´t interested, although she took a billion pictures of me making triumphant faces over strips of coconut).

La Fortuna was such a pretty town, I really loved it. Also, humming birds in the backyard of our hostel! There was a feeder, and a bird table, and there were always tiny birds whizzing about and squabbling with each other, whatever time you were out there.

We´re in Monteverde now - well, Santa Elena, which is the town near the Monteverde cloud forest reserve. The town is quiet and nice and has good restaurants and hotels, but otherwise unremarkable except for the way it rains out of a clear sky all day and night. The rain comes off the cloud forests (which you can´t see from town) in a constant mist that wafts down the streets.

We haven´t been to the reserve itself yet. We spent today doing extreme ecotourism - zip lining through the old growth forest on steel lines a hundred feet up. It´s right up the non-eco end of the ecotourism scale, but seriously, you guys, zip lining through the canopy. Some of the lines are slow and you can really look around, swing back and watch the trees coast by underneeth you with the rain misting in your face, and some of them are terrifying. Or, well, one was terrifying - you had to climb up onto this tiny, tiny step at the top of the platform, clinging to the line while they transferred your cable, and my legs were shaking before they let me go. Then you´re in the mist and you can´t even see the far platform, and you´re speeding through, and it was fantastic and also, I mentioned, a little bit terrifying.

Also, at the end, there´s a tarzan swing, which basically means climbing to the top of a tower, getting hooked up to a new line, then stepping out into space. You´re in freefall for only a second, but it´s so fucking scary, and then you´re swinging high and it´s the best feeling ever.

I want one.

Selvatura, where we did the zip lining, also had a tree top walk, which was a tamer way of skipping around the canopy, and a humming bird garden, where dozens of jewel-bright birds dance around feeders in the pale rain, and dart past your head. And we went to the reptile house and saw a fleur-de-lance, which is incredibly uninteresting for such a ridiculously poisonous snake. The poison dart tree frogs are really cool, though.

We had dinner at a restaurant built around an oak tree, called The Tree House, where they serve frozen mojitos in wide glasses with little mint leaf trees perched on top.

( Kind of a lot of pictures of humming birds. Um. )

I´m looking at my delicious network for the first time since I went away, and there is NO BANDOM FIC on it. It´s like an endless parade of Supernatual and Merlin and Startrek Reboot.

What´s happening, you guys? I want to come home to fic, if I have to leave the fireflies and humming birds behind, damnit :/

We´ve been in Costa Rica twenty four hours now. San Jose possibly has nicer parts than what we saw, but generally it was a hole. The Costa Rican countryside, on the other hand, is absurdly beautiful. I expected the tourist destinations to be gorgeous, but the entire countryside is this verdent mess of fields and crops and mossy ferns growing on everything that will sit still, and just, never one plant alone - you never see just one thing growing, even in the fields, there´s always a rich tangle of a dozen things all together, climbing over each other.

It´s gorgeous.

Transport hasn´t been exactly charmed so far. Our plane took an extra twenty minutes circling before it could land, and was met by half a dozen emergency vehicles. We got to the bus stop the next morning a good twenty minutes early, to find that the time I had was wrong, and we were bustled on at the very last minute before it took off. Then about three hours in there was an accident on one of the sharp winding corners, and traffic built up in both directions for an hour before a couple of ambulances turned up. On the other hand, if you´re going to be stuck in a traffic jam, what a lovely place to do it. We were driving through cloud at first, and then as we waited it gradually dissipated to reveal mossy fence posts and green fields and banana trees and some terribly relaxed looking damp cows.

We´re in La Fortuna now, which is basically a volcano town. Unfortunately it´s been raining for a week, and you can´t get a glimpse of the volcano (which spews magma into the night sky on a good day). It´s a beautiful town though, banana trees and golden bamboo and rainforest creeping into every backyard, and the rain so warm and pleasant. We´re going to walk the 4k to La Catarata waterfall tomorrow morning - stopping at the roadside refreshment and hammock place that reportedly sells cat-sized hammocks, which we´re both way too excited about - and then do a volcano tour tomorrow night. We probably won´t see anything, but you get to soak in hot springs, so I can´t see how the night can be a loss.

Here are the last Mexico photos! Apparently I haven´t uploaded any pictures at all of Chichen Itza, so these are all Playa del Carmen. Remember the part where it is surreal and insane, but so much fun.

( Style and subtlety in allthings )

Actually the other culture shock element of Mexico is the military checkpoints. Whenever the bus is entering a town, you go through a little checkpoint with guys in military fatigues with rifles lounging around. They look relaxed and friendly, and they would be completely nonthreatening if not for the guns in their arms, and the sandbags piled around their little huts. At one point one came onto the bus, checking bags, all the time with the enormous gun at his side. For my own peace of mind, I decided to assume that the safety was on.

I spent the last evening in Merida wandering around the city. There were a couple of glittering drag queens handing out free condoms in the main plaza, which was ... kind of blink-worthy for Mexico. The very pleasant guy hitting on me said that it was a protest in favour of legalising gay marriage. It was a nice mood, either way - it was a just a little gathering of people, watching and chatting and taking condoms, but nobody seemed disapproving, here in this catholic centre where I'm not even sure that homosexuality is legal, let along gay marriage. At least, Costa Rica is supposed to be one of the very few places in south and central America where it is.

I ALSO learned, from the same guy, that Merida, along with having four billion shoe stores and electric guitars on sale along with packets of chips in corner stores, is the Mexican centre for hammocks, because of the heat and mosquitos. Heat is obvious, but apparently the hammocks here are made of a material that naturally deters mosquitos. Damn but I wanted one. Sadly, even if I had a veranda to hang it, I couldn't fit one in my pack (which means that I didn't buy a hammock for you either, Mum and Dad. Know that I wanted to.).

We went to Chichen Itza the next day. It was ... impressive, with the enormous central pyramid, and the huge ball court with stone hoops attached to the walls, where they may have sacrificed the captains of the losing teams, and it was also HOT, and mostly, it was seriously incredibly touristy. The most Americans I've seen on the trip, and cords to stop you touching any of the ruins (as opposed to Palenque where you clamber all over them), and local stalls selling obsidian carvings and Mayan calendars and blankets and dresses along every path, until you get to the wide open aching hot lawn with the pyramids all around.

It wasn't nearly as good as Palenque, but I'm glad I've been. It was actually interesting architecturally. I hadn't read anything about it before we went, so all I knew was that it was a Mayan city, and I was staring at all these snake-headed sculptures and skull carvings and chac mools (sort of bowl-shaped prostrate figures, I don't actually know what they're supposed to represent), and just thinking, wow, this can't be Mayan, these are Aztec - these are what we saw in the ruins in Mexico City. But apparently Chichen Itza was a Mayan city conquered by the Toltecs (who heavily influenced Aztec architecture, and also brought the human sacrifice culture to whole new bloody levels), and unlike Palenque it was never really abandoned. Even when it stopped being a true city, for reasons they're not sure of, it remained a Mayan pilgrimage site - so it was never swallowed by the jungle. People have always been going there. They just haven't always had cameras.

Today's our last full day in Mexico, and we're in Playa del Carmen. And holy shit is Playa a shock after the quaint colonial towns and rainforest ruins we've seen in the rest of Mexico. Supposedly Cancun, to the north, is the true party town where gringos go to go wild, but if Playa is the quieter and less touristed option, Cancun must be fucking insane. It's like a cross betwen the Gold Coast and an American college movie, basically. Fun - especially in the evening when it's cool, it's a really fun town to wander around, with the clubs and open bars and beach and colour and neon - but so intense. I would hate to live here, but it's awesome to visit. We went out last night, to a beach club called the Blue Parrot, where people tug you out of the dance floor to pour shots of tequila directly down your throat. It was good to be there with a bunch of girls, so you could dance with whoever you wanted but then be shielded when you didn't want. Mostly, though, it was surreal.

There were also fire dancers who took the dance floor at one point. That was a blast from home even more than the Gold Coast echoes, although these dancers were better than most I've seen.

Costa Rica tomorrow!

This is the first trip where I´ve paid attention to the people almost as much as to the sights; the first time where I´ve felt the people are living really different lives to mine, I guess. The sweetest thing I´ve seen was a young man helping a young woman with careful hands to re-tie the cloth holding her small son against her body. They were just a young couple on the streets of San Cristobal, with smooth hair and smooth faces and a child carried in a scarf. I´m not even sure why it caught me, but it did.

They aren´t big things, I guess. There were young girls along the roads outside Palenque selling bananas, and one of them was idly balancing her banana basket on her head, using her hands for something else. There are always open trucks on the road with two or three men - only men - lounging in the tray, giving our bus window incurious glances. In Chamula, the indigenous village, two of the sad-eyed boys with outstretched hands tried our tour leader, Sam, and he grinned at them and ruffled their hair until they dropped the sad eyes and started giggling.

I´m writing from Merida, which is a tourist town in the Yucatan Peninsula. It´s pretty kitschy, actually, but our hotel has a pool, in a surreal turn of events, so I wandered around the hot city for most of the morning and then lounged by the pool all afternoon. The rest of the group has gone off to see the Uxmal ruins, but since we saw Palenque the day before yesterday and we´re seeing Chichen Itza tomorrow, I took a lazy day instead. There was only me at the hotel, so I kicked my legs around and got wet and then sat at the shaded table by the pool and spent two hours writing the first fight scene in the epic post-apocalyptic My Chem fic I´ve been planning almost as long as I´ve been in bandom. Frank was saving Gerard and Mikey from a creature with two venomous heads and black wings.

Palenque was amazing. It's the first Mayan ruin I´ve seen, and definitely the most impressive. It´s an entire city, all in white stone that used to be brightly coloured, but only five percent of it has been excavated from the rainforest. The rest is completely hidden under greenery and soil - we walked up one of the hidden ones just off the edge of the site, in the rainforest, and it was nothing but a tree-tangled hill. There were howler monkeys growling (man are they scary sounding), and rainforest all around.

The excavated buildings are temples and palaces, all in long narrow rooms, because the Mayans, along with having no pack animals and no wheeled vehicles to carry the enormous stones they built their cities with, didn´t have the technology (is it capstones?) to build wide roofs. You can climb the steep steps and walk inside most of them, wearing down the ruined stone with even more feet, and the ones with intact roofs are so dark and so close. There was one, the tomb of the Red Queen (this isn´t an Obernewtyn joke, it holds the skeleton of a lady with her bones painted red), where the original palace was converted into a tomb to hold the high status lady who had lived there, and then another pyramid was built around it, a new palace with long narrow rooms all around that people lived in, and the tomb always there in the centre. The Mayans liked to be close to death, apparently, like modern Mexicans.

Also it was pouring while we were there. Rain in the rainforest, and ancient white temples emerging through the dripping greenery. At one point a toucan flew over in a flash of yellow beak.

The city was buried in the rainforest when the Spanish found it - the Mayans were never conquered. The civilisation just folded in on itself, the bureaucracy crumbling and the crops failing in the overworked land, and all the peasants moved away and all the kings died without them. At least, that was the potted history version we got. Either way, there are people of Mayan stock all over Mexico, but particularly here in the Yucatan peninsula, and Mayan culture and styles are everywhere. Here in Merida, a shopkeeper tried to sell Danni an over-priced Mayan calendar by giving her a little lecture in everyday Mayan language used in the city today.

After the ruins we went to two waterfalls, Misol-Ha and Agua Azul. Misol-Ha is an awesome column of water that smashes into the pool below. You can walk behind it, where you get drenched by the spray as you stare out through the panel of water. It made me feel euphoric and a bit drunk; I could have stayed there for hours. Agua Azul is a wider, more diffuse series of falls and rapids, with aqua water between the brown rocks. You walk up along the river to all the different viewing platforms, and all along the path there are stalls and girls selling mandarines from baskets. Up above the stalls are the rough houses they live in, and kids from the community weave between the tourists to play on rope swings in the water. I got to swim in the pool at the bottom - again, me and Danni were the only ones to go in, so we mucked around practising Little Mermaid poses and lying in the rapids. (I´m loving all the swimming I get to do on this trip, I can´t even tell you.)

Tomorrow is Chichen Itza! Huge golden pyramid, and according to our guide, the reason that 95% of the Palenque ruins are still uncovered. All the excavation money is going to Chichen Itza, which is closer to the coast and gets the rich American tourists. Either way, it looks awesome, so.

( Photos! )

Today we´re in San Cristobal, in the mountains down near(ish) Guatemala. It´s another colonial Spanish town, with bright churches in white and blue or yellow. Yesterday we took a speed boat up a gorge (Canyon del Sumidero), to the prettiest waterfall I have ever seen - a delicate spray falling down over jutting moss-covered frills that flared out like the shape of a Christmas Tree (it´s called the Christmas Tree waterfall as a result). Also, there were pelicans and vultures and herrons and egrets and a crocodile, so that was pretty awesome.

(Mostly, though, I love speed boats. I know they´re awful, and I cordially hate them if I´m in a row boat, but speeding through the sides of the canyon with birds of prey circling above and the spray behind and the wind in my face is - well, my kind of holiday.)

This morning we visited the indigenous town of Chamula, for market day. Chamulans are nominally catholic, but they converted on their own terms. They´ve mixed up catholic rituals with indigenous Chiapas ones, and their church is decked with scarves and strewn with green pine needles. There are cleared spaces on the floor with tiny candles set out in circles and arcs, and people sit around them conducting rituals and healings with soft-feathered chickens tucked under their arms, pouring rum over candles and breaking eggs over babies´ foreheads. (Apparengly they also sacrifice chickens, but we saw no sacrifices.) Tourists wander among them, and the locals do their best to ignore us, watching suspiciously ever now and then to make sure that there are no cameras in sight. You feel both privileged and as though you´re trespassing, even though you´ve paid to come in.

They also revere St John the Baptist over Jesus, and one of their saints is La Virgen de Magdela.

I´ve seen poverty in Mexico for the first time here in San Cristobal and in Chamula (and a little in Oaxaca). Whenever you pay for anything in Chamula, and particularly whenever you get change back, there will be an old lady or a child with big eyes and outstretched hand. If children see you with food or a drink, they will come and ask you for it, too. (It feels easier to give away food than money, so I gave a boy my bread roll and made sure to spend money in the market.) (Present shopping! I love present shopping. I just wish I didn´t have to carry everything I bought, now.)

I´ve uploaded some more photos, but photobucket has frozen on me, so I´ll put them in another post.

Hola, mis amigos! (Seriously, travelling with Danni I often have to translate for her, which means using the phrase "mi amiga". I feel like SUCH a dork every time I do. Somehow it doesn't feel like a real word, just a pop culture joke.)

Anyway, so, we're in Oaxaca ("Wa-ha-ka"), although only for another hour or so. The Day of the Dead is huge here, and because we're here a couple of days afterwards, the skeleton imagery is still absolutely everywhere; this is a city that gives the definite impression of being in love with death. Our hotel (which is a gorgeous Spanish colonial converted mansion with an inner courtyard with a tiny library and fountains and parrots in and out of cages, and terribly uncomfortable beds) has a table cloth with cavorting pairs of skeletons in holiday gear, and Christmas-style ceiling decorations of tinsel skeletons, some of them with mermaid tails. There are cowboy skeletons in wall murals and gentleman skeletons on balconies and Miss Havishem-esque skeletons in intricate faded finery on pavements in front of shops.

I kind of love it a lot.

The other thing Oaxaca is famous for is the dream animals that we saw along Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City. They don't have huge display models, but they have shops and market stalls full of really gorgeous psychodelically painted birds and iguanas and dragons and turtles and unrecognisable creatures of claws and frills. The really beautiful ones are works of art and priced accordingly, but I wanted to buy up pretty much every market stall I passed. Because I would have so many uses for psychodelic dream animals. Um, yes. (Although they do have a use; they're supposed to keep away bad dreams, if you keep them in your bedroom.)

I'm warming to the tour group. I was pretty dubious about it at first. I'm not big on group activities, and it just felt like cheating, to have all our accomodation and travel booked for us. It rubbed me the wrong way sometimes when we were all trailing like ducklings after our tour leader to and from train stations etc, too. Basically this tour was a compromise, because Danni wanted tours and I wanted independent, so we went half and half, and we chose Mexico for the tour because it has a reputation for being dangerous. But honestly it hasn't felt dangerous even once, anywhere I've gone with anyone. I haven't been rocking around the streets on my own at 2am, but even so, I haven't seen even a whiff of street crime. Everyone I've met has been so incredibly friendly, and usually so willing to enter into the spirit of helping me when I'm struggling with my Spanish; it feels like a far more open culture than anywhere I went in Europe.

ANYWAY, so, as I said, warming to the tour group, partly because they're fun, and partly because it's comfortable to know transport, in particular, has already been worked out by somebody who isn't me, but mostly because it really does let us do things we couldn't do on our own. Most of the time is free to spend on your own or with others as you like, but today the whole group rented a bus and a driver and drove around visiting a family carpet place (they make dyes with moss that looks like Old Man's Beard and with marigolds and with little beetles they laboriously collect from cactus leaves) and a village market and a mezcal place (I have officially tried the worm one, and even had a shot with the special mezcal salt that's mixed with chili and ground up mezcal worm) (I'm not hugely into worms, but mezcal is niiiiiiice, mm), and to a gorgeous turquoise pool at the top of a petrified waterfall.

Seriously, it was so gorgeous, and felt so surreal, swimming in this beautiful pool at the top of a mountain. The petrified waterfall is basically formed like stalactites, from residue left by water dripping over the side of the cliff; it looks like a great frozen fall of water, truly. The pool is clear green and a little cold but mostly beautiful, continuing in smaller pools down to the edge. We drove to it through a community of cactuses and dusty dry corn fields and mezcal cactus crops and goats and men in wide hats leading donkeys (donkeys: so gorgeous) and little old ladies with long braids carrying baskets, and to come from there to this picture perfect scene was - well, it was surreal.

San Cristobel tonight/tomorrow! I have already forgotten everything I read about it, er. Eleven hours of overnight bus ride first anyway, which, ugh.

Hope everything is splendid where you are. Let me know any news! Including internet news; there should be lots more pictures like that one of Ryan and Z in burgler masks in my inbox, I'm just saying.