Month: March 2013

A Quite Exclusive Perfumery In An Average Size Mexican Town

Post author By Matt Armstrong
Post date 13/03/2013

In the morning we head back to the food stalls for a quick breakfast salbute and hit the road, driving first along the long grey ugly strip of hotels that make up the zona hotelera. We stop briefly at a shopping mall called Liverpool (slogan: es parte de ma vida, which well I guess it sort of is…) and buy indifferent coffee at Starbucks. It is time to get out.

We drive the cuota — toll road — to Valladolid. It is a long straight highway lined with low vegetation that reminds me a little of Cuba. There are almost no other cars on the road, and there is nothing to see except the occasional signs telling us there’s a service station in 84km — quite some walk if you happen to run out of petrol. This makes for an easy but slightly dull drive. We will later discover that there is a parallel non toll road that the locals prefer. A rather more interesting route, it passes through a number of pueblos along the way. But the price for driving the free road is the need to slow to a crawl in each village, punctuated as they are every few hundred metres by topes, Mexico’s lengendary speedbumps.

Our home in Valladolid for the next two days is a quite exclusive perfumery in an average size Mexican town. It is, quite simply, beautiful. This is a hotel of one room — above the shop — and when Susanna, the manager, leaves for the evening we are left in charge of both shop and hotel. There is a step ladder for accessing our giant raised bed, chiffon curtains that billow like something from a Chanel ad, a huge roof terrace overlooking the town, private plunge pool and a giant vintage bath. I could get used to this.

Downstairs in the shop it feels as if you have stepped back in time. Everything is displayed on vintage cabinets under giant glass bell jars.

We split our time between chilling on the roof terrace watching the birds ride the currents above us, exploring the perfectly preserved colonial town on foot, eating salbutes at the market (only 8 pesos!) and taking advantage of Susanna’s restaurant recommendations. It’s tough.

Tags Honeymoon, Mexico, Valladolid

Central America Mexico Travel

Cancun

Post author By Matt Armstrong
Post date 09/03/2013

It is only when we arrive in Valladolid that it feels like the holiday proper has begun. It is a beautiful, sleepy little place, all colonial architecture, tiny streets and little squares, and couldn’t be more different from the grey concrete jungle of Cancun.

It had never been our intention to stay in Cancun, but it’s really the only realistic entry point to this part of Mexico, and with our flight arriving at 5pm, we didn’t think it terribly wise to set off on the road to Valladolid and drive for two hours in the dark. By the time we have obtained our small red motorised metal box from Hertz at Cancun airport and set off for the town, it is already going dark. Half way into town, it begins raining. Hard. Visibility is reduced to a few metres, and, in a scenario that will be repeated throughout Mexico, we cannot find our hotel. The Tom Tom, we later discover, is directing us the wrong way down the right street. We pull over at a farmacia and I run out in the torrential rain to ask the locals if they know where our hotel is. Even though the hotel is on the street we are on, and I am waving a piece of paper with the street address written on it, the staff at the farmacia do not know where our hotel is. They tell me to keep driving in the wrong direction.

Some time later the street becomes a different street and we realise we must be going the wrong way. We stop again. This time I ask a man in a garage who at least directs us back in the direction we came from. At this point I spot for the first time that the piece of paper in my hands also contains some GPS coordinates. We drive back towards the coordinates, and again–briefly–fail to find the hotel, before realising that it is almost where the coordinates say it should be, just on the opposite side of the road. We pull into a parking spot out front and check in.

Eschewing the dubious charms of the zona hotelera, we are staying for our one night in downtown Cancun, in the hope that we might discover some local colour. For dinner, we head to nearby parque las palapas and hit the food stalls: we try salbutes and panuchos — small round tacos cooked fresh to order, topped with your choice of meat, tomato, onion and salsa picante. We quickly decide that salbutes con conchinita pibil (marinated pork) are our street food of choice (slightly softer than the panuchos, which seem to break when you try to fold them over), although for some reason Sal is unable to remember their real name and will call them salt-em-bancos for the rest of the trip.

After filling up at the food stalls for the equivalent of about 7 aussie dollars, we find a couple of bars, chat to one of the owners, drink our first tequilas of the trip, and discover our new favourite Mexican beer–the beautiful chocolatey delight that is Bohemia Obscura–while listening to a band play covers of rock classics in a bar called the “route 666 bikie bar”, just down from our hotel. The bar is full and we are the only gringos there. A waiter asks where we are from and we tell him that we have just arrived from Australia.

“¿Es su primera día? ¿Que te parcece?”

What do I think? It’s pretty good, I tell him, finishing my beer. It’s pretty good.

Tags Cancun, Honeymoon, Mexico

Los Angeles Travel US

Los Angeles

Post author By Matt Armstrong
Post date 06/03/2013

Our trip begins with two very pleasant days in LA. It is our second visit to a city that everyone seems to have nothing but bad words to say about, but once again we have a ball.

Even after a lengthy wait to clear customs and immigration at LAX, we arrive at our hotel in Santa Monica several hours prior to leaving Melbourne (thank you, the international dateline), and head out to explore. We spend our first day wandering in and out of the shops and spending some US$ travellers cheques left over from our 2008 trip to South America–this was our emergency fund, but as we never had an emergency we now have a small present from the us of five years ago.

Every time we produce one of these relics it sends the shop assistant into a spin. “Travellers Cheques? No one uses those anymore”. Each store somehow has a different procedure for cashing them, but one by one they accept them and we leave each store with free stuff, and free US$.

As the sun sets we walk out to the beach–past the wooden Baywatch huts–and down to the end of the pier, past the rickety funfair, past a caricature artist who shouts an offer to “make me smaller” and Sal taller, and a guy dressed as Uncle Sam playing music and pulling funny faces. We stick around to watch the sunset before heading for dinner at the quite excellent Tar & Roses, where we sit at the bar eating beautiful glazed ribs, lamb belly and roasted chicken.

Later we retire to a bar called Chloe where we help the barman–an impossibly handsome young man with a floppy fringe that seems as if it is straight out of a daytime soap or some teen pop band–to name a new cocktail, and chat to his girlfriend about her love of Top Gear and her plans to visit the UK to see it being filmed.

On our second day we collect our convertible from the hotel a few blocks away, and set out to drive the city–first to Rodeo Drive, where the shop assistants are all too friendly for us to have the opportunity to say “you work on comission, right? Big mistake…”, and then on into the hills, along Mullholland and Ventura, past the lookout down to the city and the Hollywood Bowl, where we hear a tour guide point out the alleged houses of Meg Ryan and Ice T.

We travel on to Sunset, along Hollywood past the Chinese theatre and the stars, before looping back to Venice, to the indie boutiques of Abbot Kinney, which reminded us of Brunswick or Smith Streets. All the while ignoring the Tom Tom’s insistence that we take the shortest route–the freeway–instead choosing the suburban back streets where we admire the large Spanish style houses and manicured lawns. I had been nervous about driving in LA but it turns out to be easy and fun. Having the top down on a sunny day probably doesn’t hurt.

Tags america, hollywood, Honeymoon, santa monica, travel, us, usa