I’m quite chuffed indeed with how today’s project went of updating the look of nourishing nutrition, a health and nutrition site for a mate of mine, Jenny, in Santa Cruz, CA. It now features WordPress as a content management system and should be much easier to update. It also looks prettier thanks to basing it on an open source template and adapting it to the corporate branding.

Last night sita and me went to see Children of Men (again). Fantastic film that definitely bears a second viewing thanks to the rich visuals and nuanced acting. And big explosions… Today, hopefully round Anel & Claus’s for some kind of barby. And tomorrow the Flickr meet up. All continues to be well…

according to El Informador which I found via Living Without Borders which in turn I found because they got wind of the fototour and have complimentary things to say about my flickr photostream. Bless em. If you’re surfing in from there for some reason, then yes, in all likelihood it’ll be a Spanish speaking event, but there’s always the universal language of photography and beers. I’d have posted a comment over there but they have comments disabled. Anyroad, all are welcome. It’s nothing too formal and none of us know each other outside of Flickr commentaries and the occasional Flickrmail.

Anyroad, got to go. The home made pizza’s burning. Pizzas No’tardamos aren’t open on Wednesdays…

Blimey, 5+ peeps have signed up for the photo tour on Saturday along with a few maybes. If you’ve happened upon this blog, understand the language and have a camera, come along on Saturday at 1 – 1h30 to La Fuente cantina, Calle Pino Suarez in central Guanatos for a few hours wandering the streets snapping photos and cotorreando. Or post-photography chat in Los Famosos Equipales (Juan Alvarez 710) around 4pm. César, ¿te late?

Yesterday was busyish with translations, webdesignery and the nascent stirrings of an Oklahoma property listings service website that may be in the offing using Open Realty open source software. Also There’s a fancy new element to the site here you may or may not have noticed courtesy of snap.com. If you hover the mouse over links on the page you’ll get a preview popping up that shows you a thumbnail of where the links go. If it says check back later, try again in 15 seconds or so so snap has a chance to screengrab that page. Muy fancy as we say round here…

I’m thinking of organising a Flickr meet up for Tapatian photographers this weekend, it’d be nice to meet some of the folks who share their photos round this way and swap favourite places around Gwod. More news as developments become more solid…

Also, Atticus might well be coming to live in Gwod for a few months, as carry-on luggage in March. Sally and Martin deserve a break from him after 18 months or so…

Spanish phrase of the week: “Ganar la rifa del tigre” to win the tiger raffle. Whereupon it seems like you were very lucky to win the raffle, but the prize is a tiger. Which eats you. So ganar la rifa del tigre means seemingly good luck which turns out to be very bad.

Let’s start by saying there are two roads to Barra de Navidad from Guadalajara. One is “la libre”, 80, which turns off from the toll road to Colima 10 minutes after the Plaza Outlet Mall thing. This is the one we took as the signs said “Barra de Navidad this way” and looked good to me, despite Sita shouting “don’t turn off here!”. Depending on the traffic and the competence of the driver this windy, twisty, convoluted, corkscrew route will take around 6 hours and you’ll see more topes than you should ever have to see in one day (see video in César’s blog). That said, it’s a stunning drive through the mountains. We set off late and arrived after dark, Sita and Monica checked out 5 hotels or so before settling on El Marquez de Santana which was perfect. Clean rooms, close to the beach, cable, secure parking, A/C, friendly staff and a pool for 60 bucks a night… bargain.

We wandered into town and had an outstanding meal at a restaurant whose name I forget, which overlooked the lake. Then continued on to Rocktavios where there was live music and a few tequilas on the beach. Next day was quiet, breakfast on the beach where the (short/long sighted/ blind?) waitress said I looked like Ricardo Arjona of “Pinguinos en la Cama” notoriety. Then shopping for trinkets. Then beers on the beach, pozole, nap, beers, DanceDanceRevolution, meal, wander, bed. Lovely day.

Yesterday we set off in search of Tenacatita to check out the mangrove swamps. It was a lot further along the coast than the bloke at the hotel said, so we had breakfast in Cuastecomate and watched pelicans doing their thing in a gorgeous natural harbour surrounding. We eventaully got to Tenacatita and had more food and then hired ourselves a lancha and lanchista (300 pesos, 16 quid an hour) who showed us round the manglares at high tide. A lovely refreshing ride, with none of the fauna we expected (no crocodiles nor snakes) but a fair few crabs and different coloured garzas (storks, i think)… High tide meant dodging the low hanging mangrove roots but was fun all the way…

After all that, back to Gwod. But not on the 80, we went to Colima on windyish roads, then pretty much 5 star roads from there on taking about 4 hrs all in all.

Monica’s got an alternative version of events over here. and there’s plenty of pix as usual at Flickr central.

Here’s a low res virtual tour of the Manglares de Tenacatita: