Believe you me, I have plenty of excuses.

First, you know, I was hard at work studying Spanish. Ahem. Actually, I was spending my evenings chatting with an excellent fellow student, as well as some fresh-faced young leftists, some savvy and entertaining local bloggers and a great hotelier who indulged my curiosity about Mérida’s elite by taking me to dinner at the see-and-be-seen resto (and who, incidentally, first got in touch with me because she read this blog, not even realizing I worked for Rough Guides!).

And by then, Peter was here for the weekend. We hit such hot spots as the town of Ticul, where we made ‘too cool for school’ jokes and attended the annual Expoferia de Zapatos (Ticul has a booming industry in tacky shoes). Hot-out-of-the-grease churros were eaten, as was a bacon-wrapped hot dog and enough other things to make us a little queasy. It was like going to the state fair, but with shoes instead of livestock. Then we bought a DVD which will probably not play on our home machine, which is maybe for the best because it’s kind of a rodeo snuff film—”Bulls Gone Wild,” essentially, a compendium of the most gruesome rodeo snafus. We were similarly fascinated by the video of the annual bullfight in some neighboring town, which appeared to be the local equivalent of that video of Astorians celebrating after Greece won the European Cup in 2004, but with a lot more mud.

After I dropped Peter off at the airport, I drove to Campeche, where I spent a day and a half in the most compulsive guidebook-author mode ever: I walked every single block of the center, marking each one off on my map as I went. It was very satisfying in a fifth-grade brain-teaser kind of way. Still, however, I managed to find only one more vaguely decent hotel.

Campeche’s tourist appeal has outpaced the hotel business—or at least the savory hotel business. There are still plenty of places to stay that, while they may be only M$120 a night, have a clientele consisting of gas-huffing youngsters and older men in yellowed wife-beaters, and bathrooms that have not seen a mop in decades. I know that some veteran travelers see these places as a personal challenge, and feel a little surge of excitement when they step into a windowless room where the walls are smeared with something that may or may not be blood. But I am not that traveler, and I don’t think I’m writing for that traveler—though feel free to correct me, and I will give you the address of Hospedaje Teresita.

It was unfortunate, then, when two nice young Swiss travelers—not of the hardy veteran variety—approached me just as I’d stepped out of there and asked if I knew where they could get a good cheap bed for the night. I knew that my hotel, the beloved Colonial, the only respectable place without a/c and all the other unnecessaries, was full, so I sent them off to the Monkey Hostel. (But then any goodwill I had earned that night was canceled out the next day when I gave them completely wrong info about the sound-and-light show. Not a disaster, but now they probably think I’m a total flake. Sorry, Swiss guys! I will never again pass on info that I have not verified in person that very day.)

Another unfortunate moment in Campeche: I returned from a tour of the gorgeous luxury hotel in town, for which I had carefully dressed in my nicest remaining clothes, and discovered that my zipper had been down the entire time. Now that’s class.

After Campeche, I set off into the wilds of southern Yucatán…details to follow.