Reforma is one of the main avenues in Mexico City, and is famous for its street art. A couple of years ago it filled up with decorated cows. Then came some weird and wonderful benches, which are still there. Following that was a more temporary exhibition of ornate skulls and now….chilis! Yep a whole load of decorative chilis, all of which I duly photographed! Just for you…

Click here to set the whole spicy chili set on Flickr!

Every Sunday a huge chunk of the centre of Mexico City is closed to traffic, and a circuit created to let the people of Mexico City take their bikes, skates, and other wheeled contraptions out for a ride. Free of car fumes and dodgy drivers. I’ve had my bike a few months now, but hadn’t quite found the time (or energy!) to make the trek up to the centre. I’ve got a thirty minute ride to Metro Taxquena to get a train there just to start off with. They only let you take your bikes on the metro (la ultima wagon, por favour!) on a Sunday, by the way.

But yesterday I packed my little Fuji camera, got on my bike and went up there. And I had a great few hours! It was fantastic, having the whole road to cycle on, along with hundreds, maybe thousands of other cyclists. I have decided that every single city in the world should do this. Any country who doesn’t have at least one major city closed on Sundays for cyclists should be added to Bush’s Axis of Evil list, and threatened with invasion!

The circuit goes all the way from the Zocalo, past Bellas Artes, down Reforma by the Angel of Independence and on to Chapultepec Park. And then back! That’s a pretty long ride I can tell you. But hey, I got some exercise, caught a little sun (yep, I have a bright red face!) and took loads of photos. I really went to town with the post processing with some of these snaps, and even if I say so myself, I got some especially good results for once!

Click here to set the full set of photos on Flickr

I’ve been reading a lot lately about photographers rights. The basics are, in the UK, USA and Mexico at least, that you can photograph anything or anyone providing you are on public property. It doesn’t matter if the person is on private property, it’s where you are standing and taking the photos from that counts. One of my favourite online photographers, Thomas Hawk, seems to have a regular bitch at people who don’t know the law and attempt to stop you taking photos in the street. There’s also this buffoon of a security guard making a pratt of himself on a Flickr post.

Why am I mentioning this? Well yesterday, while out on my bike ride through the Centro Historico, I came across a bizarre little pink art deco type house. Well worth a photo! So I snapped one. And then I wandered off snapping other things in view. About thirty seconds later a man appeared at the doorway shouting “Hey, no fotos” or something of similar effect. No photos? Of his house? Dude, you own a bizarre looking house right in the middle of the city’s tourist zone. It’s going to get photographed. I did the only thing one should do in such circumstances. I took another photo. His bark was clearly worse than his bite - he didn’t move from his doorway. So for being such a grumpy old fool, he ended up with not just one photo being taken of his property, but two. And a whole blog post with the photo of his house. Idiota…

Click here for the full size original.

Yesterday I finally bought myself a pre-pay Metro card! Whilst this might seem old hat in most cities, it’s something that is very new to Mexico City’s metro system - it only came out last year. Before then you just bought the 2 peso tickets. No such thing as a daily, weekly or season travelcard! I use the metro plenty, so it seems worth the effort. It cost 10 pesos for the plastic card which I then put 90 pesos of credit on. That works out at 45 journeys. Once I’ve used it up I can just recharge it.

You don’t really save any money though. There’s no discount, and I’ve mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, it’s a scheme that could save the system a lot of money if everyone used one. On the other hand, the metro is incredibly cheap already, so why complain. Meh.

The biggest persuasive factor for me though came yesterday. The entry gates you slip your ticket in often become jammed, and if enough of them become jammed, huge queues build up. Yesterday this happened to me at Cuatro Caminos. Literally hundreds of people all in a line waiting for someone to fix a gate or two and get things going. I was cursing all the people who kept jumping over the metal queue dividers and pushing in, rude bastards, until I realised….they had the plastic metro cards and didn’t need to insert a ticket. Just press the card against a seperate card reader and through they went. The gates were only broken for us suckers who needed to ticket insert machine thingy majig!

My actual card, scanned for your viewing pleasure!

I’ve started a new book today. I bought it in Sanborns for the princely sum of 120 pesos. Which is about 12 dollars, or 6 British pounds. The same price as every English language book. I don’t usually post every time I start a new book, because I read a lot of books and it really isn’t a big deal. Except this one rather is a big deal. Big as in 991 pages. With each page having a tiny font and minimal margins. If it were printed in a John Grisham font, this’d be a good 1,500 pages! I must confess this is by some marging the longest book I’ve ever read - if we can exclude the Bible which was rather forced on me at school. Meh - I can’t knock the Bible really. If ever you run out of smoking papers, a few Psalms are the next best thing!

But anyway, I’ve read a few 800+ page books, a reasonable handful of 700+ page books and plenty of 600+ page books. But never a 991 page book. Actually, I’m a little disappointed it doesn’t top 1,000 pages. Seeing as I’ll be going so far. I can’t even say the subject - fiction set in 12th Century England - or author are my normal cup of tea. But there is a moral to this story. I’ve saving up for a summer of weddings, computers and cameras! Anything I do spend now has to give me maximum value for money. It’s got to last! And Ken Follett gives me double the value, almost of Stephen King!

Two of my favourite travel series on TV over the last couple of years were Equator and Tropic of Capricorn, both starring Simon Reeve. To be honest Capricorn wasn’t up to the standards set in Equator in my opinion, but purely because the places he visited were not really quite so fascinating as in the first series. But, one does assume, he will complete a trilogy and do the Tropic of Cancer too? Surely he must!

And that is well worth waiting for. Hawaii, Mauritania, Mali, Algeria, Niger, Libya, Chad, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Oman, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar (Burma), China and Taiwan. How is that for a list of countries?! If he doesn’t do it soon, I’ll be tempted to strap on my rucksack and do it myself! If someone will give me the money to do it, anyway…

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Of course, there is one more country to add to that list! Any guesses? Of course - Mexico! Cancer hits Mexico’s Pacific coast near Mazatlan and also cuts through the colonial ghost town that is Zacatecas. Which actually has a monument marking the tropic of Cancer, as seen in the photo below. Let’s hope someone cleans off the graffitti before he gets there.I now have another mission though. Can I get to that monument and get my photo next to it before Simon Reeve?

If you’ve been reading my blog a while, you might remember my slightly bizarre world record attempt to travel the entire Mexico City Metro system in the shortest time ever. And how mean the Guinness Book of World Records were to refuse to recognise my record attempt even though they do recognise London and New York.

Well I’ve found an alternative way of getting recognised! There is a new website that records record attempts, and it is entirely user generated. WhatsYourRecord.com let you submit your own records without intereference from any Guinness killjoys. So I have belatedly submitted my own little record….hopefully it will show up soon!

WhatsYourRecord.com » All Records from Gary Denness

Every now and then I get sore eyes. Sometimes it stings quite a lot, but never for long. But for the last few days my eyes have been so damned painful! Open or closed, they have been stinging non stop, but I think I have finally sussed out why. I had always put it down to tiredness or staring at my laptop for too long! But nope….it’s the damn pollution in the air.

It’s been very hot lately, and there’s been no wind, so the contaminants which are so prevalent in the city are just hanging in the air. I’m sure that cycling along the roads for several miles on Tuesday, and going up to the even smokier north of the city on Wednesday have severaly aggravated the problem.

One of my students told me this morning that there are high pollution warnings at the moment - this means that owners of cars with certain license plate numbers are not allowed to drive them on certain days. They have to go by metro - which is like travelling in a toaster at the moment with the heatwave that we’re having! I love the dry season, but I have to say, for the sake of my poor eyes….roll on the rainy season! Only a month or so to go.

How I feel at this very moment…

I must confess, I didn’t take the photo below myself. So I can’t upload it to Flickr, which is just for my photos. I’m a bit possissive about things like that. But it was just too nice a photo not to post somewhere, so here it is. It was taken by Paola (I assume) on her recent trip to Playa Ventura, which lies on the Mexico’s Pacific coast a few hours south of Acapulco.

It’s not just a nice picture. It also sums up all the reasons why I prefer little coastal villages to the mega resorts. Firstly, this guy isn’t walking along the beach trying to sell the fish. He’s just brought them back from his boat, from which he caught them himself. He’s smiling, ahppy to have his photo taken, not trying to charge anyone for the privilege.

And it’s just normal daily life for normal people who were born here, will probably live all their lives here and will one day die here. The tourists came here to see him, not the other way round. Shortly after this photo was taken he took the fish home to cook with his wife, and if you ask him nicely he’ll probably invite you to eat. It won’t be massed produced tourist dinner, it will be a freshly cooked home dinner for the family. Vive Playa Ventura!

I really haven’t been having much luck with my purchases over the last six months. Firstly I bough a TV - well that was back last August - which lasted about two months and then died. And no, we haven’t had it back from the repair shop yet. It’s always going to be ready ‘next week’. Then there’s my nice and shiny Benotto bicycle which lasted about two months before the chain snapped. That got repaired for just 10 pesos, but now it’s slipping the chain so badly it’s virtually unrideable.

And no the harshest blow of all. My iPod. Last night it went dead, without any warning and for no apparent reason. I plugged it into the PC. Nada. I put it into recovery mode and then tried to restore through iTunes - Error 1604 and nada. Tried a new Windows user account. Nada. Tried uninstalling and reinstalling iTunes. Nada. Tried ZiPhone unlocking software. Nada, nada, nada.

The one thing I have learned is that there are thousands having iPod Touch problems. Apple have a somewhat dodgy reputation for building reliable products and I appear to have found this out the hard way. It’s dumb. How to make sure I don’t buy a nice expensive iMac - sell me a crappy non functional MP3 player. Even if (hopefully when) I do get it working again, my iPod has just had too many issues. Too many people are having too many issues. It’s not just me. I will never buy Apple again. One bitten, twice shy as they say….