Pammie meets her travel mates in Mexico City

That night we met our tour guide, Jessica, who is a Mexican girl who looks all of 14 years old but was actually 23 I think, she had just finished her BA last year in fine arts, majoring in painting. Predictably unemployed as fine arts graduates tend to be, this was her first time working as a tour guide but she has been to all the towns we were visiting and seems pretty competent, very conscientious, and well organised. One thing though, she doesn’t ask us for our travel insurance details (which is good on the one hand since I didn’t get any and the brochure threatens to leave you behind if you don’t get insurance, so I was hoping to pass my medical insurance off as travel insurance. On the other hand this is also bad in case all of us are engulfed in a giant fiery bus accident, then no one at the tour company has our insurance details….). In addition to Jessica, we have local guides at each place we visit so it is no tragedy if she doesn’t know all her facts and figures. She also loves food and enjoys translating all the menus for me and if she is not certain about the details she asks the waiter for us. She indulges my choices for restaurants and seeks out the very best for me, or looks at my recommendations. This is good because the restaurants I want to go to are a little more on the expensive side, but no one else ever realises the difference since Jess and I make all the restaurant decisions (it’s always wise to leave it to the experts). I’m pleased with this because often people take budget travel to the extreme and live on discarded scraps of food, but are quite happy to fork out endless supplies of money for cigarettes, drugs, and beer. I have my priorities….Anyways Jessica is great, very conscientious and with so many people asking questions and translations she gets a bit flustered sometimes and speaks in Spanish to us and English to the wait staff.

Our guide Jessica. Too cute.

There are 10 of us on the two week tour including the Jessica. Unusually enough there are two South African women, one a Chinese lady and the other an Indian lady, but both in their 50’s and born in South Africa, and both overweight. The Chinese lady is built like a walrus and her tiny feet can barely support her weight, and if she gets her upper bulk out of balance with her lower half then her tiny feet have to scurry to catch up with the momentum of her mass until they are in equilibrium. Their accents are funny...they don’t speak Afrikaans as first choice although they know it, but they have an unusual accent. They are both from Port Elizabeth, the Indian lady will later be referred to as the pizzatarian.


Then there's an Australian boy who works as a psychiatric nurse and is a bit of a hippie spaced out druggie love child (he smokes pot and does magic mushrooms the whole time we are there. Another thing our guide forgot to do was tell us the rules about no drugs, etc) and carries his guitar every where and sings songs to match every situation we are in. It seems we have quite a few singers in the group so the Australians sing along with him, and also sing Australian national songs, which I enjoy listening to. He doesn’t drink, which is a plus, since Australian male drinkers can be a bit of a problem sometimes. He is on the trip because he is following the Australian cricket team on their tour of the West Indies and was in the neighbourhood. He's also cut his own hair and ran out of energy or forgot to do the back, so he has this weird clump of hair sticking out of the back of his head.

My travel mates. From the bottom left we have the pizzatarian, the walrus, the comb-over, the drug-boy obscuring my roomate, the Irish builder and his wife to the left, the annoying Argentinian, and Jessica.

Then there's another Australian, a guy who works in the complaints department of a phone company despite having a degree and an extensive background knowledge in politics and history and is an exact reincarnation of one of the engineers at work (Moonie): same pale translucent moon-like skin, same manner of speaking, delivering abrupt definitive statements brooking no argument whatsoever in a piercing voice that could penetrate one end of an in flight 747 to the other, but about 50 kg overweight and thinning greasy unwashed hair with the dreaded comb over. A major know it all, like Moonie, but blessed with more accuracy and breadth of information which makes it more bearable.

Then there's an Australian girl, a lesbian, also overweight, who works in a hardware store. It turns out that she is my roommate and she is quite reasonable, and easy to get along with. She’s a diabetic though and suffers from the infrequent and oddly spaced meal times, and gets a bit aggressive if her insulin schedule gets out of whack.

The worst one of the group is an Argentinean girl who moved to Australia as a child, she speaks Spanish which is handy for translations but not good when talking with Mexicans, because nearly all Latin Americans dislike Argentineans for being arrogant. She is one of those non-stop rapid-fire talkers, laughs hysterically at every comment to the point of physically collapsing on the nearest supporting victim, and monopolises the guide in Spanish with urgent and lengthy complaints about the unsophisticated Mexican service.

Then there's another overweight Australian girl who is on her honeymoon with an overweight giant of an Irishman also living in Australia, a builder, who is nearly impossible to understand, with such a thick accent. All in all, a pleasant enough if slow moving and out of shape group of porkchops, although I think the Argentinean will be the pain in the ass.