Mexico City

We were pleased to find a flight home via Mexico, rather than the more usual stopover in the US. It is one of Rachel's favourite countries, having studied here in 2001 and returned since, and nice to be there together and for Simon to get a feel for it. It was a gloriously sunny day and only slightly smoggy, which meant fantastic views of the enormous sprawling city and surrounding mountains as we came in to land.

It's hard to get your head round the scale of one of the world's biggest cities. We had a wonderful time exploring the centre for a few hours before our flight home.

Every other car isn't a Beetle any more as it used to be, they've stopped making them and there's been an influx of Chinese and Korean cars. It's still easy to spot the classic adopted Mexican vehicle though.

We headed for the Zocalo, the enormous central square, which was dominated by a temporary exhibition, due to open the next day.

The cathedral is a whopper by any standards.

The Museo de Bellas Artes

Our final joint photo in Latin America

There is still a ramshackle charm to the central back streets. Mexico City first appears to be a very modern and clean city, easy to travel around by metro. It's got beautiful, historic buildings and shiny modern tower blocks, but the great thing is, you're only ever two corners from a real sense of a vibrant Latin America, such as this back street flea market.

Mexican food

We were only in Mexico City for the day on our way back to the UK but we managed to pack in a few tasty treats.First up was a small, friendly cafe with good coffee, pastry and juice. We wandered on and stopped at one of the many juice bars, Mexican style, where Rachel reminisced and Simon had his first try of a delicious, cool and refreshing horchata, a rice based drink with cinnamon, lime juice and sugar.We couldn't visit Mexico without stopping at a street cafe for fiery tacos. You could order all sorts of cuts of meat, tripe featuring heavily. We opted for a straightforward pork. What makes them is the guacamole, chile and freshly squeezed lime. It didn't take too much searching to find a charming and very cheap local lunch establishment where we enjoyed several courses and refreshing lime juice served by a lovely, old waiter. It felt as though this place hadn't changed much in the last thirty years.We enjoyed soup to start, accompanied as always in Mexico with chile, lime and fresh tortillas.Next up was a plate of salad.
We were starting to flag under the quantity of food by the time we got to the third course, fish in a tomato sauce for Rachel. However, it was very nice so we happily stuffed ourselves before our long flight home. It was the perfect food end to our Latin American adventures.