After all the excitement with tropical storm Julio, La Paz is a little piece of heaven. It's the capitol city of Baja Mexico - which is the pointy bit that joins with California. It's a foodies heaven here, with all sorts of street food, little caf�s and bars with live music everywhere you turn.

We took your advice Ian and tried a Banderas. Banderas means flag and the drink represents the Red, White and Green of the Mexican flag. It's a sipping drink served in three separate shot glasses of Tequila, Spicy Tomato and Lime Juice and after the initial choke on the lime juice it's a good little cocktail and a great way to try to out the Tequila here. As a general rule the Tequila is excellent - nothing like the throat burning options we have in Australia and very cheap! We have also been trying out some of the non alcoholic drinks - they make a drink out of the Hibiscus flower called Hamaica - pronounced Jamaica, (H's are J's - yes Jeff still laughs about me pronouncing La Jolla with a J the first time we went to San Diego) that is wonderfully refreshing in the blazing sun - which is pretty much all the time. And I can happily report that the wines from Chile are readily available here and as good as everyone says.

The street food is damn good as well, we had a carne (meat) burrito from a street vendor, which was some of the best Mexican food I've had here, a little spicy, with meat and jalapenos, lettuce and salsa wrapped in a tortilla. It was 30 pesos (about $3) and so big that Jeff and I shared one. The other really yummy thing we trailed was a mango on a stick, cut like a flower and seasoned with salt and lime juice... sensational! Ok so enough about the food - nothing has changed I'm still obsessed by food...

What else is there to do in La Paz but eating and drinking? Well everything is based on or in the water here. The day after we docked after our tussle with Julio we were thinking about going diving but decided that the visibility would be probably not be so great and couldn't justify the $120 price tag, so we decided to give the snorkeling a go here instead. I'd done a little investigation and found the best spot according to the locals, which was about a 30 minute drive away.

Jeff, Marko and I headed out to catch a bus or grab a taxi - depending on how hard the taxi drivers would bargain and lets just say that the taxi drivers must be doing pretty well here because they didn't seem to interested in the fare at a price we were willing to pay. We ended up hiring a car for the afternoon - Jeff had some fun bargaining in the low season! We headed out to Balandra, which turned out to be a beautiful little cove, with very shallow water - how shallow - I could stand up in a lot of it ? There were lots of other folks - both locals and a few tourists - enjoying the serenity (for all you Aussies out there in true Castle style we'll all be heading off to Bonnie Doon shortly and the pictures we took with out new snazzy underwater camera that Marko gave us, will be going straight to the pool room).

We donned our masks and snorkels and headed off, after a bit of swimming we got to a rocky point that had some wonderful snorkeling around it, we ended up spending a couple of hours in the water and were rewarded with warm water and some great fish viewing. As you can see from the pic with this post we need to do a little fine tuning on the underwater colours with camera. I have to make a special mention of the jumping Manta Rays here - they literally do backflips 10 feet out of the water - amazing.

As with the rest of our stay in La Paz the Marina de la Paz where we are staying is bueno. The staff are the most helpful that we have come across, nothing is too much trouble for them - it must be something in the water here.

Today we are leaving the marina and are going to motor sail down to a couple of the local coves and anchor out for a few days and do a bit more snorkeling. We are without a mainsail and a headsail right now - both are with the local sailmaker being fixed. Once they are fixed and back on board we will be heading off to the Islas Espiritu Santu and Partida - a couple of Islands very close to La Paz that are great for snorkeling and exploring. Weather is forecast to be clear for the next 48 hours - lets hope so!