The Christmas Gift

Puerto Vallarta, after a month-long series of thoroughly foreign, undeveloped villages, hits us in the head like a giant bag of tinsel.

Not entirely unpleasant, but not entirely comfortable either. And shiny. We stay there long enough to recharge amongst 'civilisation' and dance our way to a Hula Hoop Show business proposal, which we say we'll think about.

We meet an American called Ben, who stumbles in to the hostel and can't talk. We want to know where his party is. He hails from Sayulita and returns there as soon as he's sober enough to order another beer.

We think about it for a bit. Leave without asking directions.

Two minutes after getting off the bus at Sayulita's small, sandy bridge, we bump into Ben again.

He and his friend Gabe are drinking beer. As is the majority of Sayulita's American population at 2pm on this sunny Monday afternoon.

I'm terrible at afternoon drinking, but it is three days before Christmas. So we buy hammocks on the beach and string them up between palm trees next to Gabe's tent, committing ourselves to a four-day long party and a Christmas to remember, for one reason or another.

We dream of home and thus people keep inviting us to theirs. Sayulita conceals benefactor hoards who bestow gifts of barbequed fish, free beds, smokes, a telephone call to a long-lost boy in England. The town is one big festival and a day is all that is needed to become a local.

We teach hula hoop to chubby children in the town square. They steal our hoops for hours while we sit in the dust talking to la banda - the street performer and artisan crowd that squats every town square in Mexico.

As above, so below... The words whisper through my thoughts and I don't know why.

I want to get them tattooed but I am scared. I am thinking about this on the afternoon of December 23rd as I trek down the street for water to wash the night away. My throat is tacky.

A bookshop rears to my left and my instincts tell me to enter. I try to explain to my instincts how thirsty I am, but they will not listen. I give in, turn back and hop down the stairs to the basement shop. I'm not surprised to find I've missed closing time by about three minutes.

I am drawn to the shelf on the far side of the shop. The first book I open is called The Secret. I laugh out loud when I see what is written on the inside.

As above, so below.
As within, so without.
The Emerald Tablet, circa 3000BC.

The book is about the Law of Attraction. The law that states that you create your own world through your thoughts; that you can attract anything you want, as long as you focus on it hard enough. The law that I've been going on about all year and never actually put into words.

See how the circles settle.

This law gave me the events that actually put that phrase in my head in the first place. And it has just proven itself by playfully handing me the words in my head.

I pay for the book under a sign that says 'Julia's Coffee' and go back to tell my tale.

Unadulterated Joy

We stick to the chairs of the San Blas bus station, flicking through our guide books in the manner of teenagers before GSCEs. Our last minute revision, as always, comes to nothing but a head full of possibilities.

City or beach? Jungle or mountain? I throw a peso and prostrate to the fates. Eva catches it and flips it onto the back of her hand.

A giant finger reaches from the sky and pushes us towards the City.

Decision made, we relax into our benches and eat glistening Mexican cheesecake.

Three dirty children play in a patch of sunlight on the tiles, dust motes hanging above them in the light. One of the girls is tiny, about half the width you'd expect for her height, with legs thinner than my wrist and a slightly deformed face. She looks like she might break if she moves too fast.

I smile at her.

The bigger girl comes up to me and stands very close, holding a pink balloon in front of my face.

I dutifully blow it up.

Every breath is monitored by pairs of shining eyes. I finish and she holds out a sticky hand.

Instead of giving it to her I pull the mouth of the balloon apart so it makes a extended, high pitched squeak.

The energy of their reaction takes even me by surprise.

The kids are besides themselves with laughter; abandoned, hysterical laughter, that rings out and incites involuntary bubbles of mirth from deep inside me and those around. The noise breaks the staleness of the bus station air with sweet, cheesecake smiles.

She makes me do it again and again. Each time the reaction is the same, gleeful abandon.

By the time my bus pulls up, no one in the waiting room has been able to repress the urge to laugh. I wave goodbye to twinkling eyes and everywhere I look I see joy.

You make your own world

A quick word with the San Blas Accommodation Gods and they lead us ten minutes out of town, where we find the real-life resurrection of the hostel in our heads.

Stoner's Surf Camp. Hammocks on the beach under a pelapa (palm leaf) roof for 50 pesos, surf lessons by Mexico's longboard champion. Wooden kitchen with a range of chilli sauces. A variety of friendly dogs.

Sleeping in a hammock is so good our body clocks actually morph to absorb another few hours of sleep. In the same way I used to persistently doze in my university room until I ached, I take up the soul nurturing habit of lying in my hammock long before I need to sleep and hours after I wake, listening to the rhythm of the sea and squinting against the low sun reaching in under the palm branches above.

In the mornings the mist hangs in white drifts over the sand, the sea a pale mirror under a vague, glowing sky.

We pass days on the long yellow scoop of sand, swimming and hooping and idly cooking ourselves extended afternoon feasts of quesadillas and banana milk. We dish out hula hoop lessons to Germans who look like they are children imitating tornadoes. Our twirling figures silhouette on deep red sunsets until the evening mosquitoes send us in to prawn dinners. We eat on the sand, stars low overhead.

We feel the place drawing us in. But the pace is so slow it makes us stumble.

Tinny Christmas tunes blasted out dithyrambically from every corner soundtrack our moves. The glitter of fairy lights makes us dream the kind of comraderie that San Blas has yet to deliver. We leave hunched under the weight of our bags, picking our way through families who wait for a Nativity play in the town square. They crowd in small, loud patches under the leafy shade.

We are not quite sure where to go, only that we want a change of scene. Something a little more meaningful.

Five minutes before the out of town bus is due to leave, we are approached by a baseball capped, guitar-slung Oregon punk with a dirty blonde mohican and arms scribbled with tattoos. He is called Brian and he smiles with his eyes.

Our conversation flows instantly and he answers my questions with words that take a second or two longer than expected to emerge. He considers so visibly what he is about to say. It contrasts starkly with my manner of saying the first thing to come to mind.

I find this interesting.

I tell him to come with us on the mystery bus and he replies with an offer of a free house for the night. Our fragile plan is easily twisted. Eva, I and another Englishman named Miles, who has tagged gratefully on to our party, follow him down the cobbled street.

Brian and Cherise, of blonde dreadlocks and a warm welcome, have just paid the lease on a San Blas flat for one month. Their road trip down from the states has been halted by the loss of Cherise's dog, Chloe, who had been hers for ten years. She was last seen on the beach in Brian's care.

The sadness and underlying blame drives them both deeper into their own, unique worlds.

But they have to stay to find the dog.

In the meantime, they drink too much, cook great pasta and philosophise. Their soundtrack is 90s hip-hop and Rage Against the Machine. Except for the mornings when they are woken promptly at 10am by mariachi ballads, blasting through the hole in the concrete from the cantina next door.

Each has their own demons. As of course have we all. We connect in that way of new friends that makes your heart expand and your laughter free. The night digs deep into emotions and our individual perceptions of our worlds.

We can never truly be free, for at the very least we have the boundaries that we set for ourselves.

We all make our own worlds. Whether it be the falsely soft safety of a beer or a joint, to guard against the void inside that you're scared of facing, or the lifetime devotion of one to a best friend, who barks instead of speaks and has the ability to turn one's life upside down by running away.

Or the determined journey of a traveller who seeks to find more, but instead finds a world that is a constant reflection of what she has in her head.

It seems whatever I think most about, I receive. What is without, reflects what is within. Wherever I travel, I find people who show me the place I was dreaming of. The thing I was craving. The enlightened phrase or the exact words I needed to come across at that point.

"Breathe. Breathe deep. Breathe, because that's all you can do. You are only human. All you can do is connect with the world as deeply as you can, because you and it are the same." We drink to the freedom of the traveller and splash into the sea under a sky heavy with stars.

Brian points down at the waves. There are stars underneath the water.

Bluegreen sparks jump off our bodies, sliding down our chests as the waves crash into us and the plankton release phosphorescent cries of alarm. Everything below water glows.

We get deep enough to tread water and swim in circles with our arms spread out, so that trails of sparks spray from our hands.

It looks like we are sorcerers, waving our arms to magically create an image of the sea at night.

As above, so below.

As within, so without.

As I said, your world reflects your head. But not often does life reflect thought so blatently and so vividly, beautifully, as dreamlike as this night.

I am the magician.

Creating my own world.

In loops of circling stars.

The Armadillo Stories

As if something somewhere knew that I was on the hunt for more stories to tell...

I hold in my hands a perfect moment.

A man crouches on the dusty edge of the motorway, holding an empty sports bag open and shouting animatedly.

I stand near him, Eva next to me, our rucksacks on our backs. The sky is pink, the air warm.

We had been walking the rocky rumble strip towards the remains of the sun, changing between motorways for the next bus to San Blas. The scenery in Mexico can only ever be the stage for something captivating. But this is prime time entertainment at its finest.

Man. Motorway. Armadillo. Combine and stand back.

I am almost doubled up with laughter.

The gesticulating man's compadre is running in figures of eight, chasing a small armadillo around the empty road.

All it lacks is some comedy music with a liberal splash of whistles and bangs. I am laughing so hard I'm asphyxiating myself and that's making me laugh even more.

He gets close to the scuttling creature and it changes tack surprisingly quickly for something that looks like it's wearing its dad's armour. We jeer encouragingly, although more for the continuation of the scene than the success of either party.

The armadillo peddles its way away as fast as it can. The man dives after it.

We put our bags on the floor so that we can laugh even harder.

The armadillo is forced to perform a quick skid turn under the wild swipes of his pursuer .

The man catches up again but seems scared of actually picking it up.

The other man remains poised with the open trap that looks less and less likely to be used.

Hand and scaly skin come close. But the moment is missed.

With a final crescendo of cartoonish drama the armadillo leaps into the hedge to bury itself in our minds forever.

And Tom and Jerry sing to us the entire way home.

Drifting...

A very old woman, frail yet earnestly able, has shared the last two buses with us.

We are in Teacapan, Nayarit. A few millimetres below Mazatlán on my map. Narrow dirt streets. Rocking chairs on doorsteps. Sound of a distant trumpet catching in our ears.

Everywhere, the smell of the sea.

Her daughter-in-law rents rooms. We obey her unblinking, conjunctivis eyes and birdlike beckoning and waddle to a bare-brick, three-roomed box of a house, where we are welcomed with honest smiles and the offer of a free bed.

The parents, two sons and grandmother sleep in one room, us in another. They somehow squeeze themselves into two single beds. We don´t realise this until the following day, by which time it is too late. They won´t have it any other way.

A pile of hotcakes and gloopy Maizena sends us to a milky sleep. For me, it is another night of naps interspersed with lung-emptying coughs.

I am disturbingly reminded, as I have been every night since I arrived, of my mother before she died. My mid-choke worries that I´ll never get my breath back pale to the nostalgic reality that her nights really were shadowed by death, whereas I am simply trapped in a dream-like paranoia.

I roll over and drift into a vividly undulating landscape of conscious, unconscious and the vague surreality in between.

At 4.45am the father leaves for his morning´s work on the fishing boats.

At 5.30am I hear everyone next door rise through the mosquito-net wall, and the all-night background noise of cockcrows crescendoes to a symphony.

At 6am the house opposite announces the start of the day with a cheerfully loud Europop/Mariachi mix and I know it is time to give up on the night. Breakfast is delicious Mexican standard - scrambled eggs, frijoles (refried beans), tortillas and salsa, this time jazzed up with frankfurters and our first real coffee in days.

We realise the house has no running water. We stand outside to brush our teeth and pour buckets of well water down the toilet.

Thus begins our five days of idyllic tranquility on the lagoon shores of Teacapan.


The sun is the only thing in the blue, blue sky, apart from the zopilotes and pelicans that molest the boats in swarms. I lose count of the number of fish that jump out of the water as we walk past. We make ceviche on the beach with freshly caught prawns and lime juice, eaten with gooey fingers and moans of unrestrained delight. Eva catches her first two fish, and presents them to the family with a wide smile of pride.


Days are spent in steamy exhaustion, beached upon the palm-backed sand. We watch sunset after jaw-dropping sunset in the meditative flow of our hoops, feet splashing the water into glittering gems of amber that seem to hang in the air around us.

We wash from a bucket. Laugh hysterically with our new friends. Watch a thousand shooting stars fall from the sky. We are warmed by the palpable love and unending generosity of the family.




The only shadow on these light-filled days is the persistent knock of hammer echoing around newly constructed villas on the beach.

They say in twenty years Teacapan will be bigger than Cancun.

This fills me with something akin to grief.

I struggle to convey my feelings in Spanish. But it is the same everywhere. Mexico´s paradise coastline is the playground for the rich, the devouring gringo with his crushing concrete and insatiable hunger for all things bright and wonderful.

The serenity here drifts like the sweetest smoke, fragrancing our minds with peaceful submission. But everywhere, the underlying stink of rotting raw beauty and the devasting stench of blind foreign investment.

When we leave we are close to tears. But we know it is time to move. As they said themselves, they would sleep five in a room for ten years if we wanted to stay.

Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air...

Baja California, that finger of desert reaching starkly down from its better-known cousin in the states. Our fantasies are filled with its turquoise waters.

But the hard-faced girl behind the counter breaks the news like an egg over our heads. It will cost two weeks´ sleeps-worth of hard-earned pesos to get the ferry there.

Disappointment drips viscously.

We go to the beach to think. The journey is short and takes us through sandy marshes crawling with oily-looking pelicans. A short walk from the bus stop and we are blinded by our first sight of the sea. I´ve been longing for this moment ever since I left Cornwall, over two months ago.

The calm folds over us like a wave.

We fall silent and pass the afternoon bathing in its ripples. The sandy hours sift through our fingers. We twirl in a hoopy heaven and languish thickly on the wind-blown shore. I wash the confusion of the last few weeks away in the sea.

A dead dolphin is heaped on the sand. My approach lifts a cloud of vultures into the sky.

I breathe through my mouth and stare at the dry skeleton lying in a pile of leathery skin, like an elaborate costume, discarded.

We watch the sun bleed a melodramatic death from the back of a pick-up truck. The wind whips our hair and smacks us with exhileration. We are dropped in the centre of the quiet town, to seafood scents and a decision to be made.

I am, as ever, paralysed by indecisiveness.

I flip a coin.

Thus I find myself that evening not on a ferry but a coach, going south. Mazatlán. Home of launderettes (to wash a backpack´s worth of clothes worn consistently, all at once, for the last two weeks) and doctors (who after two visits and several hundred pesos spectacularly fail to cure me.)

Our hotel room has bars on the windows. A scum-marked toilet and shuddering shower almost directly above the bowl. And a half-dead cockroach on the floor that Eva forces me to kill with a shoe.

85 pesos a night each and use of the kitchen paint glossily over it all. We are extremely content and complacently lazy, the excuse placed comfortably on the shoulders of my illness.

It is in Mazatlán that I am told of the death of Israel´s puppy. That little dog didn´t leave my side the whole of my time in Real de Catorce.

The news makes me uneasy. Uneasy because all that time, although he was completely healthy, I somehow knew he was going to die. I kept finding myself trying to protect him in my helpless human way. I even wrote about it.

I decide not to dwell on it and lose myself in the sights and smells of the city.

Our five days there are largely transactional. We stock up on vegetables. Visit the beach daily. Have minor altercations with the patroness. She begins to ration matches, withhold crockery.

We leave when she starts to ignore our daily cries of Buenos Dias and head south down the coast, from bus to bus, following the advice of the locals.

Time to cast the guide book aside.

A world with no England

I roll over to find a spoon in my face, dripping sticky gold liquid. Open my mouth obediently. Grimace as the cough mixture runs down my throat.

Shortly after, a second swallow of surprise as she jettisons Vicks in an enthusiastic splurge over my chest.


She places both bottles on the tiles next to my trestle bed and makes me swear I will have more in the night.

And that I will drink all of the water in the bottle in her other hand.

And that I will take the pills concealed in her palm.

I dare not ask her what I´ve just swallowed. Do my best impression of a back-shelf nodding dog. Lie back, sniff, turn a few times in my musty nest.

I´m in a world of menthol. The fumes rising from my chest keep me awake. I can hear the steady breathing of Eva, asleep by my side, and Norma, the old lady´s daughter, under a towel on the sofa. Quesadillas sit heavy in my stomach.

A few hours ago we were lost in Los Mochis. Now we are in the blanketing warmth of Norma´s family. Norma, of wide eyes and worried, O-shaped mouth. Norma, who approached us slowly in the train station car park, with a blank stare and eyes that grew even wider when she heard of our predicament.

In exchange for use of our phone we have use of her family. Another of life´s trump cards, produced with a flourish and accepted with that nervous trust one is constantly forced to adopt in this situation.

It seems we are the best entertainment they´ve had in years. Eva parries the onslaught of sometimes baffling questions, from a family that seems to grow bigger every hour. They want to know everything. "Where are you from?" they ask again. "Yes, we know you said England. But what country?"

She and her impeccable spanish go to great lengths to explain the existence of Europe, with the aid of an invisible map that hangs in the air in front of her whenever she meets a new family member.

It is one of the more amusing dialogues I´ve had the incredulous pleasure of observing. "England is near France. No? Germany? Spain? Switzerland? Yes, there are lots of countries in Europe. It´s across the Atlantic, between Asia and Africa. The Atlantic is the sea that starts at Veracruz and Cancun. Sorry? Veracruz and Cancun? They are on the other side of Mexico."

They laugh unconcernedly. "We don´t even know where Chihuahua is!"

The old man is the only one to show any sign of recognition. "Rome is in Europe!" he says with excitement. The family gaze at him proudly.

While we might find it unbelievable that some people have never seen a map, it has become clear to me since then that this is by no means unique in Mexico. The pressure to go to school just isn´t there. As Eva wisely says, ignorance breeds ignorance. An illiterate family will likely produce illiterate kids. Although obviously not the same all over the country, it will be years before this country - indeed, most countries in Latin America - produces a generation where going to school until the age of sixteen is more common than working or roaming the streets.

Norma´s mother is 67 and has lived here all her life. She has eleven children. I wonder how.

More importantly, where did she keep them? The house is formed of just two rooms, with an outhouse for a toilet. People keep emerging from the bedroom. The most compelling is an old woman who shuffles towards us, lip-licking, blanket-wrapped, to hold our hands and mumble meaningfully. "You can swim?! My, my, you have been around!"

The morning feeds us hotcakes with honey and fried tortillas with egg and chilli sauce, eaten with a few spoons scrounged from around the house. (Imagine my constant joy at mealtimes here eating amongst a population that largely ignores cutlery. I baptise myself with salsa twice a day.) We are overwhelmed by their generosity. Offers of food- and medicine-money are brushed away with waving hands. "A friend of Norma´s is a friend of ours!"

We daren´t remind them that we met Norma just minutes before they arrived the previous night.

More family and friends arrive on the conveyor belt to wish us luck. We are sent smilingly on our way with biscuits, antibiotics and a lift to Topolobampo, the closest town on the coast.

We tumble out of the car to a shimmering heat and the smell of salt on the air. We have finally reached the sea.

The vertigo of the canyons

Sub-zero air slams my consciousness like I´ve walked into a wall.

So much for my pilgrimage to health-giving climes.

I leave the coach and take approximately four minutes to explore the only two streets in Creel covered in concrete. During this time it starts to snow.

I start to swear.

It settles on the hood of my only jumper. Cruelly seeks out the gaps between my eight t-shirts with icily prying fingers. I retreat to the hostel and throw myself dramatically on the bed to cough pathetically and dream of England.

I cry. Just a little.

I wish for a friend. She walks through the door.

Eva is softly spoken, blonde, fluent in both spanish and poetry. A stud through her lip and a thirst for her trip. Almost immediately she exclaims; You have a hoop!

Those damned coincidences. She is one of the only hula hoopers I´ve ever met.

She is only eighteen but at this moment infinitely more grounded than me. Her path mirrors the vague ideas I have for mine - except hers are backed by essential criteria that my distracted mind has failed to notice.

Apparently the train we want doesn´t go until Thursday. It is now Monday. Thursday it is, I chant. And thus our friendship is soldered clumsily together. Wanderers, joined by the need for another´s back to lean against whilst facing the world alone.

Her enthusiasm reveals just how cynical I´ve become in two weeks. Sparkly-eyed raptures remind me that snow is usually received with pleasure. And, despite her sometimes hesitating manner and gently slurring speech, the girl has balls. On her lead we ditch all the tours, to the surprise of the town, and go it alone. We skip through the snowy valleys to a glinting lake surrounded by globular rock columns, over which we scamper and bask like lizards.

I teach her hoop tricks in the sugar-dusted forest. We make it our mission the next day to create one for her from water piping and electrical tape. A mission achieved so easily, in fact, that we plan to fund our wanderings by flogging them to rich gringos.

Thursday dawns bright and pushes us onwards to Divisadero, the meeting point of three of the biggest gorges in the world and part of a system of rifts so huge that it could swallow four Grand Canyons.

It is incredible. Like someone tried to bend the earth too much and it cracked, like a giant butterscotch brownie.

We climb into the train at two and hang out of the window like dogs until seven.

Sun drips lensflares onto my photographs. Breath is whipped away with the slipstream. Scenery rushes and looms.

Tongues leave mouths as the sun starts to sink. I can barely see the top of the canyon through the window. It looks like it is about to collapse in on itself. A kind of reverse vertigo turns me upside down and shakes me, slowly.

The train trickles tentatively down the side, doubling back on itself to process the terrain at its own pace. Sunset touches the peaks with fire.

Eva retreats to her seat with a frozen head but I linger on for another hour, until the sky becomes sprayed with pinprick stars and the canyon is a smudge in the dark. The train coughs diesel smoke into my mouth. I cough it determinedly back out again.

When my lungs finally give up I return to my seat. Plug myself in to a bubble of music. Watch the silent movie playing out all around me.

We are ejected at 11pm to a dusty carpark a few kilometres out of town.

Los Mochis, Sonora.

Dirt roads. Warmth. Neon. A state ruled by cartels and subject of warning from many.

We stand in the middle of a dwindling crowd and wonder what the hell to do next.