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i just gave myself visions of billy bragg singing to the tune of gangsters paradise... i think i am having karaoke withdrawals.

well, cuba ain't heaven, but it makes mexico look like surfers paradise. actually cancun already looks like the gold coast. if you're anything like me and prefer the aesthetic of industrial collapse, you will enjoy old habana.

it's my 4th day here. i spent the first two moving casa and figuring out the system. there are two currencies, for no reason i can figure... i am told there are more, but they exist in other levels of bureaucratic space-time. some shops take both currencies. some take neither, only cute 1940s style ration books. my third casa particular is with a lovely couple who are very helpful, a good outcome of talking to a stranger in a cafeteria (these only rarely sell coffee, only rum, cigarettes, and sometimes one kind of beer) where i was hiding from the daily tropical downpour.

i left you in san cristóbal de las casas. i had a great time in that little town, which my aussie hostess and all-round awesome new friend described as 'bourgious heaven,¡ onb account of the easily available handcrafted things and cheeses and whatnot. there is a lot of ethical-ethnic carft, but some genuinely good projects in amongst it. i met punks, made cynical toasts to mexican independence, made a few friends, got suckered into getting my shoes shined, wandered the markets, enjoyed the mayan museum of traditional medicine, which is attached to a project defending traditional rights to plant medicines against corporate patents, and marvelled at the thriving indigenous languages and culture. and appreciated the good coffee. i even liked the anarchist street clowns and the reggae.

okay, maybe the reggae was a bit much. after a week i made my way up to palenque, which is a wonderful and annoying place (the latter partly on account of the reggae). the ride up there was in the back of shared camionettes, the campesino style of travel. i passed through amazing mountains and zapatista liberated territory which i hope to explore a little when i head back to chiapas. the ruins themselves were nice and jungly, though it is hard to get a sense of ancientness when the guides tell you things like 'this restoration is being funded by the state-owned petrol company' and you have to dodge pressure hoses to get to them.

it was too hot so i sat under a waterfall and listened to distant monkeys. i think they were monkeys. then made my way up the west side of the yucatan peninsula pretty rapidly. Hitch and bus to Campeche (cool forts, pirate history, souvenir pirate heads made from coconuts) Merida (hanging with glue sniffing rasta punks in an anarchist bar where old men folded antistate propaganda in the corner), Chichen Itza (more ruins). I hit my ruin threshold.

Actually Chichen Itza reminded me of going to Australia's Wonderland. Maybe it was the turnstiles, the stupidly priced icecream, or the capitalist shame of having brought my own lunch. Maybe it was the bus tours of sunburned gringos waddling around in the hot sun, parents placating their bored tweeners who just want to sneak off and get drunk. anyway i was suitably impressed by the extensive site, particularly the theory that the elephantine trunks on some of the buildings (and other similarities to angkor wat) demonstrate that the mayans came from asia.

but if kuyulkan really does come back in 2012 i think he will be pissed to find himself in such close proximity to the gold coast.

so then cancún for five minutes (too long) and the plane to cuba. there is no boat to cuba. don't listen to the mexicans, they don't know what they're talking about. this and the weather and the price of bikes have thwarted my admittedly foolish plans to bike my way around. this country is complicated enough already.

the plane was funny. russian fire extringuishers from the 1970s! and my seat didn't stay upright. and lots of water vapour hissed into the cabin on takeoff, which terrified three french girls and made everyone else laugh.

i could write about the happenings in calle virtudes, which i watch from my balcony, for hours. A boxing match, a basketball game, a man welding the bonnet of his 50s chevy, a bicycle laden with flowers for sale, a game of stickball, two dozen beautiful girls in minimal attire, a government van pumping Beyoncé, a little boy dressed in the all-white attire needed to call down african saints, who looks like a tiny gangster. two sisters dancing to regetón across the street (regetón is a virus). this never stops. no-one seems to work or sleep. every other balcony on the street is occupied by someone watching stuff happen. Cubans do this a lot, and i don´t blame them.

the flipside of this is being watched. The humbug is a new flavour here, so it doesn't piss me off yet. and if someone is bothering you there is always a friendly policeman nearby to spirit them away to some mysterious socialist bottom drawer, ie jail. cops do this even when you actually want to talk to the person you're talking to, so it's very hard to ask directions, let alone make friends.

but i managed to figure out how to catch a bus, so i went to hemingway's house to get my literary pilgrimage out of the way. the place is apparently just as he left it, but suspiciously clean. there are over 9,000 books, shelves crammed into every room. rumours of their imminent decay are ferociously denied by the proud cuban security ladies who police every window ensuring that you don't take photos unless you bribe them. there are also a lot of animal heads on every wall.

he had a tower to write in. a tower!

excuse me A TOWER!