i was trying to calculate how far i have come so far by train, bus, pickup, and boat, and on the back of a mexican bike, and while i don{t have all the distances down exactly due to a lack of proper maps, i estimate its somewhere near 5,000 miles in the last 47 days. how many hours i have spent bouncing around and watching bad american movies like Earthquake in new york and hoping the dog or person sitting next to me doesn't vomit on my feet, i have no idea.

i am in merida right now, and i will be takinga night bus to the ruins of palenque in a couple hours. everyone tells me these ruins are the best, better even than tikal. i saw chichen itza a couple days ago, and it was pretty lame, i thought. it is a p�pular day trip from cancun, so the place was swarming with americans and germans, but thats not why i didn't like it. it just wasnt very interesting. so boring in fact, i decided to spend part of my day walking 2.5 miles to a mayan religious cave nearby.

i started walking along the road i thought led to the site, and after about a kilometer, i came to a crossroad, and i was pretty sure i knew which way to go, but i thought i�d ask someone just in case, and there happened to conveniently be a mexican waiting there on his bike. i asked him, and he said i was going the right way, so i asked him if it was much farther, and he said only a kilometer or two, and then something in spanish i didnt understand. then he patted the back of his bike, and i realized he was offering me a ride, which i of course gladly accepted, and this man then peddaled me about 1.5 miles part of the way up a hill, under the sun, in 90 degree heat, for nothing.

the cave was neat, very humid and smelling of incense from the ceremonies they conduct there, with at the end, this big stalagmite reaching the ceiling surrounded by all these little stalagtites so it looked like you were standing under a tree. there i met a retired mexican man driving aroudn in his pickup with the hardtop camper on the bed, and he gave me a ride back to chichen itza. Along the way we stopped at a cenote, which is a limestone pool the Mayans used as a water source in this riverless country. It was very inviting but I didn't want to go for a dip and ge the inside of the nice man's truck all wet. <>to backtrack a couple days, i started out in tulum, along the caribean sea. i had come from belize the night before, when i sent my last noticias. As I said I took a cab to the beach walke up and down the beach at 10pm looking for a cabana. I was just about to give up when I ran into a contemplative Dutchman named Jeremiah who was doing the same thing, and after a short discussion, we decided to pool our resources. We had no luck so we went back to the outdoor restaurant wher he left his stuff. There sleeping was the guy he met on the bus up from Livingston and all he knew about him was the he was Hungarian and Mad and possibly a criminal. So that's where I spent the night.

The next morning we woke up and went to the rental hut and the guy told him 130 pesos, which was about double what we were hoping ot pay. He told us one should be available later. so J. wandered off to check other places and i watched our stuff.

He came back with the Mad Hungarian(MH) and we decided to wait for a place to open up. I had yet to speak with MH (my first conversation with him went like this

MH: do you know anything about dreams. i am having a dream about making the bread. you know the way they make bread here. i am dreaming i am making the bread in this way. what do you think this means.

Contemplative Dutchman: i think bread means money

MH: ah, so i am going to be making the money. that is good news. if i am making much money i will become a vegetarian again. it is not so cheap here to be a vegetarian, you know.

and we decided to go 3 ways on a room, with the hungarian paying more because he wanted an actual bed, while i had my sleeping bag and the dutchman a hammock. so we finally finagled a cabana, which was nothing more than some sticks stuck inot the sand, tied together, and covered with some palapa leaves. it did have a chain and padlock though. except that you could move some of the branches enough for a child to squeeze thru. so i decied to leave my bag in the office.

i went for a swim in the sea and talked to the dutchman, who along with being a vegetarian, is also a filmmaker who makes non-narrative driven films. I asked him about MH. he didnt even know the guys name. the hungarian apparently has 3 p�ssports and a bunch of wild stories.

later we were all eating lunch, and we asked the MH his name. he says, call me any name you want, i have many names. finally we got it out of him that his name way alfred, and he told us how in germany, where he is a head waiter, he and a friend once put on blue workmans overalls, walked into a casino with a dolly, put a defective sticker on one of the slot machines, and wheeled it right out without arousing any suspicions. after he got up, the dtuchman turned to me and said, you know, this guy is a total criminal, but for some reason im not worried about sharing a room with him. i said i felt the same way.

later the hungarian and i snuck into the ruins at tulum, not because we didn{t want to pay, but just to sneak in, which required climbing along a cliff over the water and going through a barbed wire fence. He took me to dinner that night at the restuarant we slept the first night and he told me by the time he was 21 he had been on every continent. He is a head waiter in Nuremberg and spends six months working and 6 months travelling. He speaks 7 languages, four fluently. He was married once but his wife couldn't put up with his wanderings so now he has a girlfriend who is okay with it. He caught malaria in Thailand and in Indonesia once ate bugs for money so he could pay for a ferry off an island. He said he fucked his way from Jakarta to Bangcock and never used a condom and the one time he did it broke and he got ghonneria. He wanted to see some big Mayan ruins but thought Chichen itza was too far away since he had to been in Cancun and catch a plane it two days. I told him there were some big ruins called Coban about 45 minutes from here but there were no buses and we'd have to hitchhike.

So the next day we went out to the main highway and got a ride in a pickup. The ruins were incredible. They're mostly unexcavated so you feel like Indiana Jones. The only drawback is there is a club med hotel there. When we all went out separate ways the next day, he gave me his address and email in phone number in Nuremberg and said anytime I'm in the area I'm welcome to stay at his place.

well, they appear to be locking me in to the internet place now, so i suppose i should go. jim