When travelling Mexico it’s best to dispense with your purposefully bought flip flops early in the journey. One way is to loosen yourself up by drinking all night at the hostel beach bar before merrily wandering to your room sandal-less and jovially trashed. A cursory check on the sands the next morning will show no trace of your footwear, perhaps they were carefully stowed by the previous nights bar staff awaiting your triumphant return. Forget about that, use it as an excuse to go all Jesus on the situation. There’s nothing as surefooted as your own uh, two feet. Bare to the sands and roads of dusty Mexico. You’ll find that your first few forays into the streets will reward you with the odd painful encounter with an oversized pebble, but you’ll soon become adept at avoiding such catastrophes. You might also get the odd cut or graze, but think of the hippy status you’ll garner. Grin and bare it, the reward are wonderfully free toes, nicely aired and calloused against the worried roads of the world. Granted you’ll upset the odd bar or cafe by dragging dusty size 12 footprints about the establishment, but who gives a shit.

Next on the agenda is to ensure that you get the right kind of people to despoil your travelling liver with. When you find yourself gazing about the Hostel common room or playing people roulette with your roommates, look for the weary, yellow eyed drinkers. They are your people. If they look morose and sallow, but become enlivened and red-faced by indulging in the odd early evening cocktail, these are your people. Havoc and grand meetings will provide for the rest of your journey. You will become fast friends in the context of individuals travelling on potentially separate time-tables and itineraries, but those few days will be intense and well coupled. Not to worry, the same strategy will work down the line, in hostel after hostel. Miscreant after miscreant.

After even two weeks of such living you may find yourself in need of a break from the man child activities of binge drinking 2 for 1 sex on the beach cocktails with strangers. To get yourself into a more healthy and productive lifestyle, you need to hook up with the hyper active doing things hostel dweller. The guy who’s eager to journey to all the local site seeing spots, journey to Mayan ruins via bicycle or any alternative trip or means possible. Rewards will be reaped in jungle cycles, well versed bicycle renters and hidden beach Cabanas. The latter is my current position. Here I am, waves crashing, camp site bustling, dispensing of my white pallor (lobster red now). Tomorrow night the hippy tenants will have a session beneath the Mayan full moon. Only 25 days left till the end of the world, or era or some such. What better place to spend it then close to Carribean seas, snorkelling coral fields by moonlight. Engage in a more primitive lifestyle. One without electricity, blogging by candlelight. Health and merriment beckons. All achieved without shoes.

Note that I’m not intending on getting all new age on this shit, nor will I indulge in transcendental meditation or chakra hover hands. No I’ll just stick to sparse living secure in the knowledge that enlightenment living is still going on somewhere down the road. It’s nice to go offline sometimes…..
I programme me 