Maraposa Monarca

As always we are still alive despite the best efforts of the driving
public of Mexico, and we have had an exciting few weeks.

but it stick to the highlights probably the most amazing thing was to
see the the Monarch Butterflies in there winter habitat in the
mountains of Mexico. If you didn´t already know - every year hundreds
of millions of butterflies fly from Canada to Mexico to generally
chill out and when it gets warm again they will mate and then head
home ( the females that is the men prefer to die after sex) . Anyway
as it happens we got to go visit the mountains where they hang out
waiting for the sun, however the catch is the walk to the top of the
mountains- imagine ,if you will, a group of old and disgruntled
mountain goats getting together and thinking up a path up a mountain
that would challenge an "Olympic Champion Mountain Goat". hopefully
you will start to get an idea of a track that was never intended for
human transportationthat we had to walk/crawl up. However the
butterflies are more than worth it , there were literally millions
upon millions fluttering around the top of the mountain, they were
quite unconcerned by the humans walking around it was what I would
call a butterzard ( a blizzard of butterflies), Andy took hundreds of
photos and you should definitely check them out on his blog.

The other highlight of the last month was visiting the town of
Paracho- this is a town that for hundreds of years has specialized in
the making of guitars. Certainly the best guitars in Mexico come from
Paracho . Anyway I went in search of a new guitar here, after a long
afternoon of searching, inspecting and playing i finally found HER, a
beautiful "one of kind" guitar. Made of a specially imported wood
that the master craftsman had been carefully drying for 10 years to
ensure the best sound. He had then spent the best part of 3 months
making her. So when when his price for this work of "musical art" was
less then what i make in 2 hours it seemed almost criminal for me to
then bargain him done to half that price. Of course afterwards i
felt pretty guilty when i realised he also has several children to put
through school and a son with Down Syndrome (but not so guilty to then
get him to throw in a spare set of strings and a bag) :-) . Now you
would think that i wouldn´t have slept easy that night - but as it
turns out music really does sooth the beast and after several hours of
playing that evening i slept very well -

plenty of other things have happened including a Mexico Day parade in
Guanajuato, a terrifying night in a brothel in Leon and a new speed
record of 70.7km/hr going down the side of a volcano but those stories
probably warrant their own emails

i hope everyone is well, merry Christmas and don´t be shy about
sharing your own stories .

Andy