Photos 2

What we got up to in Fort Lauderdale, Florida




















Cactus everywhere in Mexico - we even ate some!



Mexico City is very big



Pyramids at Teotihucan



Spider monkey at the Pyramid of the Suns - Teotihuacan







Fresh springs at Herve el Agua




Petrified waterfalls at Herve el Agua




The finely tuned athlete







Beach and view from where we are staying in Puerto Escondido




Puerto Escondido

Mexico City to Puerto Escondido

Lost in Translation...so its been a while.. We are in Mexico, we have left behind the 1st world luxuries, thirsty Stead and English!

Our journey to Mexico City started at our awesome little hostal "recommended by Kath". It was like having a personal tour guide. He started us off on the Rodeo Drive of Mexico City. We soon realised that is one of the very few luxury streets in Mexico - we spent our time zigzagging through the historical district of the mammoth city to Almedia Central - Mexico´s Central Park. We then made our way through the 2nd hand parts for washing machines district and into the Zons Rosa - the pink zone - so cute (camper than CT!) and down the drag to an area called Condesa where we had dinner and chilled and learnt more about Mexico´s history.

So if we weren´t shattered enough from exploring the city we headed off to Mexico´s largest pre-hispanic empire. Where I had Sweaty Betty marching up the ancient pyramids of the sun and the moon at an altitude of 2,200m which made the climbing pretty tough but they were all worth it as you realised it´s the only time you are going to have to climb it and not part of your everyday sacrifice to the God´s.

After exploring Mexico City´s streets once again we were off to Oaxaca (Wah-hah-kah) City. Oaxaca is a really arty and cultural city and the home of Mezcal. We spent our time exploring quaint streets and the many plazas filled with markets and Mexican music. We ended up at a Mezcal bar. Mezcal is supposed to be like a more refined and flavoursome version of Tequila. This is where we met a couple who had just survived a major accident which involved rain, steep cliffs and several buses and were celebrating life. We just happened to be on the same wave length!!

Spent the next day doing tourisy things exploring some more ruins, carpet factories, 54m diatmetre cyprus trees, a mezcal factory and petrified waterfall and baths which was a pretty cool day learning useless interesting facts.

We have just completed the 10 hr crazy bus journey (Shands likes to discribe it as driving along Chapmans Peak for 10 hours in terrential rain, fog and several landslides)down to the east coast to Puerto Escondido which serves up Mexico´s pipeline consistantly to all the surfers gathered from around the world. Time to test if I´m still a finely tuned athelete, well tomorrow - surfing lessons begin for us! Still time to enjoy the sun downers now!

P.S Sash we also know what it feels like to be lost all the time. Never so much as when we enter a restaurant....asked for menus and instead received a 4 course meal - the main being meat and veg wrapped in dried fish. WOW. Karyn bring on your fish pie anyday!!

USA East Coast Round Up

Greg's favourite place: Charleston, South Carolina
Shandy's favourite place: Willmington, North Carolina & New York City
Distance travelled: 2,889 miles; 4649kms
Flights taken: 0
Food: 5/10 too much quantity and not enough quality
Average price of beer: $4; 2.60 pounds; R34

- There are possibly more churches than there are people
- Everything and everyone is supersized
- The pharmacies sell beer
- God blessed America

Photos

Flatron Building, New York


Central Park










Niagara Falls






Harley Davidson Factory


War Vets Cemetary, JFK and Jackie Onasis are also buried here


White House


North Carolina


Charleston, South Carolina


Savannah, Georgia


Swamping








Palm Beach, Florida


Nick's pup Stella


Nick and Greg having cocktails on the beach


We all know this face....


Later....

Ocrecoke Island to Daytona Beach

Hello folks.

Sweaty Betty and I never got stuck in Ocrecoke we headed on to Wilmington! For those of you who don't know Dawson's Creek and One Tree Hill were filmed in Wilmington. Oh how fortunate we are to have been there. For those of you who have seen Dawsons Creek Shands tells me it is exactly like Wilmington is. It has loads of creeks and canals.

We have been making our way down through beach towns via Coastal highways and local ferries. One of the places I hit was Myrtle Beach where we met up with the equilivent of matric holidayers. The only difference is they are not of legal age
to drink and don't have anything else to entertain themselves besides sizing their
cars up against each other, their sound systems or how low their pants can go! Who said underage drinking was bad for society.

We got conned into a timeshare talk but we received 2 show tickets for Good Vibrations which was very good. We also got 2 free nights accommodation in any US location but the 4 hr hard pitch sale in 40 degrees the next day was quite a price to pay.


Into real South Carolina and into Charleston. Home of Bubba Gump and smokey ribs. Charleston is a beautiful historical city with loads of character and southern hospitality. Only in the US could you see two black teenagers playing the violin ( very well) to background rapmusic- they drew quite a crowd. Charleston is the town were the plantation owners used to buy and sell slaves straight off the boats from Africa.

From charleston Sweaty Betty and I pushed on to Savannah another historical town also filled with character but where it really gets interesting is when we spent the night in St Mary, a one horse town in Georgia. From our pirate themed B&B to the trailer park family sharing a sundowner with us at the pub. Let me elaborate it's something off the Jerry Springer show. At first the dynamics of the family was a bit difficult to work out but when they happily told us the daughters were actually lovers too. At a later stage we fortunately found out that the one was adopted. Fortunately. Jerry Jerry Jerry...

This morning we went to Okefernokee Swamp which was really interesting and beautiful we saw carnivous plants, alligators, soft shell turtles. Definately going to do an overnight kayak in the Everglades.

I have shed my burnt skin so we are off to Daytona Beach, Florida. For those of you who haven't realized Sweaty Betty and I are having loads of fun in the sun.

Hope you are well. Look forward to hearing what you have been up too.

Washington to North Carolina

Thank goodness I booked the car rental with air con! The further south we head the hotter it is getting, and humid.

Ok so from where we left off in Washington. We spent last Friday in DC mainly on the trolley tour because it was bucketing down. DC is all about the government (White house, Pentagon, FBI, Capitol Hill etc) and history of the country. It was actually really interesting but a pity about the weather because it would have been cool to walk around a bit.

Anyway on Saturday we headed towards Virginia - Virginia is surprisingly beautiful massive farm houses lakes and creeks. We ended up in a town called Williamsburg which is around were America won the fight for independence - there is still a bit of Williamsburg which they have left as it was under British rule same old buildings and cobbled streets. We were only going to stay one night but ended up spending the weekend it was just so beautiful we found this beach on a lake shore on Sunday where we spent most of the the day. Greg forgot that he is now British and burnt himself medium/well done and has been hiding from the sun since.

We finally moved on to Virginia Beach ( where Top Gun is filmed) for two nights. Unfortunately I got the flu and Greg was still avoiding any sunlight so we didn't get to enjoy it as much as we would have liked. We did get to see a really cool band called Vinyl Headlights playing on the beach the one night though.

Today we left Virginia Beach and took a scenic drive along the Outer Banks of North Carolina - a bunch of islands and really fantastic little surf towns. We are staying in a place called Orcacoke Island and I could see us getting stuck here..

Still no Internet access where we candownload photos (this is all being typed on our iPod) so we will have to do a big upload when we get to Nick in Florida on the 19th.h

New York to Washington

Hey all. So here is the first "on the road" blog. Our first week has been a mixed bag of sights. New York was awesome think we walked a few milion miles so the fitness plan has got off to a good start. The weather has been perfect so we spent most of the time just wandering around Central Park, hiring bikes to ride round the park and just chilling in the park watching baseball games. We ended up meeting many South Africans in a bar in Soho to watch the Super 14 finals (Barks we bumped into Kerry your old housemate - small world!) We also found a cool rock n roll bar where you just chuck you peanut shells on the ground. But it hadn't just been all about the bars...we visited the Natural History Mueseum and the Mueseum of Modern Art but that was closed so we found another great little bar called Livebait.

Next it was road trip time. We didn't get off to a great start - we were delayed by 3 hours as Shands didn't call to confirm the rental car pick up time! Ended up driving all the way to Niagara Falls to avoid staying in some arb town only to discover that Niagara Falls town is a real hill billy town. I think our motel room doubled as a curry house but the shower pressure was good and it was cheap.

The falls are amazing we saw them illumated at night from the Canadian side and by day from the US side. If anyone plans to visit Niagara I would recommend staying on the Canadian side. We did the Cave of the Winds tour which sends you in a elevator to the bottom of the falls and you can basically stand under the falls if you can handle it given that it has a flow rate of 225,000 litres per second. Not for the scared or faint hearted (or the weak and fat :)).
We also took a drive up to Lake Ontario - one of the great lakes- and discovered a town called Lewiston on the Niagara River a playground for the rich they have all the toys from jet boats to yatchs - my kinda town!

Next day we were back on the road to Southern Pennsylvania where we stopped in a town called Hershey build by mr Hershey himself. The town is a lot like Pleasantville and almost surreal. We went on a tour of the Hershey chocolate factory and then headed to York for the night. In York we went to the Harley Davidson factory and walked the assembly line. The robots and pressing machines were awesome - the bikes were pretty cool too.

Next stop dinner with the Obamas in Washington...