19th November
So, four weeks in Mexico, 2,800 miles, umpteen points of cultural interest, all faithfully recorded for our beloved readers. Enough already, we cried, and awarded ourselves a well-earned vacation.

We headed south from Mexico City to the Hacienda Cocoyoc, to meet up with Joan, Richard and Gaya, who had gone there to end their holiday in this part of the world. Cocoyoc is a town of either 8,000 or 18,000 inhabitants, according to which end of town you enter by and hence which sign you see. In any case, the Hacienda is the kind of place that makes you feel like most of them are working in one place. A special vote of thanks to Joan who allowed us to share her room and thus enter the lap of luxury for a couple of days.

Most of the other guests were Mexicans, which was nice, as it foiled my conscience's attempt to get me agitated about rich-western-tourist-and-impoverished-native syndrome. Our time there was spent mostly eating too much. David took in a round of golf - with caddies! - and Jan received a series of arcane "water treatments" in the spa. Mind you, it's not all easy: selecting from a choice of four pools is pretty taxing stuff. We also visited a posh restaurant in nearby Cuernavaca for a delicious slap up meal in beautiful surroundings.

Just to keep our hands in, we did a day trip to nearby Tapoztlan, an unremarkable but pleasant small town with a nice market and a small museum of preHispanics bits and pieces. We had a small adventure driving around a series of steeply sloping cobbled streets in search of the path up to the town's prize attraction, an ancient pyramid. We eventually found the path only to discover that it was closed, something which none of the various hawkers that we passed en route had seen fit to share with us. The oddest thing that happened there was that several girls came past riding elephants: perhaps they were advertising a circus?

We left Cocoyoc sorrowfully, although not as sorrowfully as our amigos bound for Heathrow via Dallas (snigger).