After the insane waterfall day in Palenque, I had a last supper with Luuk, Bas and Nienke, and then it was time to head on. Luuk and Bas were heading south from Palenque, taking a bus the next morning to Guatemala where they planned to visit an active volcano – you hike up an adjacent mountain, from where you can watch it erupt every thirty minutes. I added it to my to-do list.
Continue readingMexico | Falling Water
Next stop was Palenque. I took a night bus there with Olatz and Nienke, and we arrived at 8am and wandered through the little mountain city. It’s hillier and more haphazard than flat Merida, with the latter’s colourful cobbled lanes replaced with topsy-turvy highstreets crammed with pharmacies and hat stalls. At the end of each street, when each one inevitably dipped away or curved around, green broccoli mountains line the horizon. I noticed very few backpackers or tourists in the city, which is simultaneously pleasing and a little intimidating when you can’t speak the language and are aggressively blonde.
Continue readingMexico | Salsa Man
Maaan I’m a bad writer. Not in the sense that what I write is bad – no. What I write is glowing brilliant amazing, fuck you. I’m a bad writer in the sense that I just don’t… do it. I spend my time thinking about writing and getting excited about it, and then I simply do not do any writing. But whatever, I’m here now. Hello.
Continue readingMexico | Conch
The next morning – BIG BREAKFAST – Luuk and Bas were due to leave for Bacalar, a lagoon town in the south. I’d heard that it’s more of a party place than anything, and it was in the wrong direction for my journey. Instead, I reluctantly hugged my jolly Dutch boys goodbye in the hostel, and that afternoon, along with Nienke, Olatz, and a cool New York stoner-screenwriter called Ian, we hired a car and headed out in search of cenotes.
Continue readingMexico | Cursed
Olé!
Do they say ‘Olé!’ In Mexico? I do not know. But that’s my mood. Olé! Vamonos!
Continue readingMexico | Whole Lotta Holbox
Well shit, I’m in Mexico. I’ve been here sixteen days already and not written a jot because every time I tried to write it was rubbish. It’s too cool here to describe conventionally. I love it. Esta muy bien, or whatever. Still working on the Spanish.
Continue readingSerbia | What The Hell Is ADD?
I spent a few nights in Belgrade doing not much of anything – I had a decent amount of work to catch up on, so while Jack went out exploring, I stayed in the air-conditioned hostel common room and tapped away at my laptop. Or at least… I tried to. It’s hard to tap away at your laptop when you’re in a hostel: my attention span is hot garbage when I’m in a silent, empty room, let alone a busy dining space with backpackers cooking spaghetti. I have an uncannily potent ability to become distracted. You could bundle me into a sensory deprivation chamber and leave me floating for 24 hours in some black void with nothing but a laptop opened to Excel, and I’d still find a way to slack off for half the day: prodding the veins in my hands, twiddling my beard, doing silly voices to nobody, cracking my knuckles, farting horrendously then saying “oh goodness” and finding myself very funny.
Continue readingSerbia | Why Is Everybody Around Me Always Getting Slung Out Of Places?
Jack and I left Sarajevo the morning after our grand day out, and took a bus several hours north, to a town called Tuzla. Neither of us particularly wanted to go Tuzla, but a one-night stopover there split what would have been an nine-hour bus ride to Belgrade into two bus rides of only four hours or so.
Continue readingBosnia | World Serpent
Jack snores like a maniac. I shared a room with him all the way through Bosnia, and each morning he’d wake up, stretch, and say something like “Dude, I had the best night’s sleep ever, I slept like a baby”, and I’d look at him and say “Nice”. I figured out a way to stop his snoring, eventually: whenever he began to honk and wheeze, I would take my plastic water bottle and thwack it against the wall. The sound was enough to wake him, but wasn’t enough for him to remember why he’d woken up. Then he’d shrug and fart and roll over, and I’d have a peaceful thirty minutes before the snoring began anew.
Continue readingBosnia | Welcome to Heck
It was a curious jaunt to Sarajevo. After a long day sweating in the hostel garden in Mostar, I set out with my new travel buddy, Jack, and a French guy who I think was called Adrian. We lugged our rucksacks across town in the 42C heat, found our train was delayed by five hours, lugged our rucksacks back to the hostel, melted a bit more, and then in the evening boarded our train. The view from Mostar to Sarajevo is meant be fantastic – big swooping mountains all the way – but the train had tinted windows for some reason, and in the twilight we couldn’t see shit.
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