Practical things about our trip

Already 10 days we are travelling in Yucatan province in Mexico. We are still happy and succesfully following the road.

It is hard to describe where are we at the moment. To tell the truth, it is nowhere 🙂 It is one of the ranches in the middle of the fields. The nearest village is in about 3km, and it has famous name – San Francisko. The nearest village, which you may find on the maps – Panaba – is in about 8 km from our ranch. Today we have hitch-hiked to Panaba in order to buy some food and connect to the Internet after a long break (almost 1 week 🙂

The ranch we stay is owned by the doctor and the farmer Hildo. Nobody lives here at the moment, just his relatives and himself come daily to take about 90 cows. We may stay here as long as we want. We put our tent under the shadow, have coco-nut tree in front, and thousands oranges and tangerines on the trees. Hildo even brings as breakfast every morning 🙂 It is our third day there, but we will go back to the road in a few days.

In this letter we want to share with you a short summary about the practical things of our daily “routine”.

More details about adventures every day we hope to write as soon as possible.

Daily regime

The morning here starts around 6:30 (the rise of the sun), and it is again dark at around 6pm. It’s like in Africa – the sunset is very quick. One moment the sun is high above the horizon, but in 15 min it might be gone.

Usually we wake up between 6 and 7 am. It takes us 2 to 3 hours to get up, to eat breakfast, to pack and sometimes to make excercises. We are on the road before the midday. Until around 4pm we hitch-hike, buy some food in the random villages and maybe visit Internet cafe.

After 4pm it is the time to get ideas for the camping place. And we should inside the tent before 6pm. In the evening we cook food, write stories if possible – socialize with people.

Naturaly, if in one place we stay more than one day, everything goes more relaxed and slower.

Our diet

We will be open – we do not eat meat. Moreover, Katja cannot eat milk products and tries to avoid fish and eggs, unless eggs are inside the dough. The food we usually prepare ourselves. The american company MSR has supported us with a compact stove called Whisperlite International, which burns with any petrol from the filling stations.

Hot dish we cook at least once per day. It can be rice or pasta with lentils, nuts and different kinds of vegetables. Few time we have also made porridge of oats with fruits. Sometimes in the morning we also eat musli.

For the quick snack we buy maize tostadas. They look like 20 cm pancakes, but hard and thin. Almost a kilo of them costs around 1$, which is enough for 2-3 days, in case we cook only once per day.

The water

We need about 4-5 liters per days (for cooking and drinking). The cheapest water one can get is sold in the supermarkets – 1.5 l costs around 0.7$. We avoid byuing water, instead, we get it from the public toilets, or other places and purify ourselves by using purification pills, or disinfecting drops purchased here in Mexico. If it will not work, we should get diarrhoea in about 10 days…

The budget

Transport (we travel by hitch-hiking) and wild-camping in the tent are for free. Well, we are also considering to camp in official camping sites, in case there will be no other possibilities to get a shower and to wash clothes. Until now we have stayed in such camping only once (3$ per person).

We want to keep our daily budget as low as 3$ per person per day. We try to avoid spending money for unnecessary expenses. The total cost of cooking rice with other ingredients for two people is about 1-1.5$. The 600 ml bottle of petrol for the stove should be enough for about 10 times of cooking. 1 l of petrol costs about 0.7$.

Communications

Internet service in the places we have visited were more or less reliable. It is relatively fast and cheap: very often for 1$/h. If the place is more touristic, the price may go up to 1.5$.

When we had to contact our potential hosts in Cancun city, we used the telephone card of Mexican telecom “TelMex”. The cheapest card one can get is 5$. Price for the calls in the same city 0.1$/min, for other cities – twice more expensive. Calling to a mobile phone costs about 0.33$/min.

Buying a SIM card for the mobile phone seems to be not a good idea for the ones travelling around Mexico. The problem is that each province of the country is treated as a separate country. I.e., buying a SIM card in one province give a number with the pre-dial code of that region. When entering another province, the roaming service will activate and the fees for the services will rise significantly. Only the cost of sending SMS will stay the same (0.1$). Moreover, seems that there is a certain fee for receiving calls from abroad.

Equipment

In the backpacks we have everything for the warm and cold seasons. Each of us has two pairs of shoes, warm sleeping bags (shouldn’t freeze in the temperature of 0C, but too hot for current nights with 20-23C). As mentioned earlier, we have a tent (cheap and simple, which is possible to put even on hard surfaces, as there is no need to fix to the ground), and for soft sleeping we use compact and practical self-inflatable matrasses by Therm-A-Rest. As a rain protection for the tent, we use two big pieces of polyethylene.