Mexico City, or DF—Distrito Federal—(like Washington D.C.) is an amazing city in many ways. There is a lot to see and do. Much more than you can manage in a year. The same is true of Mexico as a whole. That’s why I’ve tried to get out of the city and visit different places whenever I can. So far, I have visited Queretaro, San Miguel de Allende (for El Grito—more on this in another blog), Morelia (for an excellent film festival—an awesome vacation for film buffs), Acapulco, Tepoztlan, Puebla (site of the “Cinco de Mayo” battle), Parras and Torreon (to meet Ale’s parents). All these trips were great, and at some later point I may find the time and energy (and the photos) to share my experiences on this blog site. But for now, I would like to discuss the most memorable trip so far, the week I spent on the Yucatan Peninsula during the Thanksgiving break.My Thanksgiving break sort of started on the Thursday before the holiday when I went to Pittsburgh to attend a conference for work. Though I had to spend my days in the standard uninspiring educational conference, I really enjoyed Pittsburgh, which was quite a pleasant surprise. We caught “light-up night” there, when the entire city officially turns on their Christmas lights, along with a multitude of simultaneous events and celebrations. The mood of the town is festive to the point that the entire staff of our Thai restaurant was hammered by the end of our dinner, bringing us a hot water without any tea in the pot, and other silly mistakes. The next night we took the trolley up the hill to have dinner overlooking the city—a must if you ever find yourself in Pittsburgh. Despite the good times, I was looking forward to getting home on Sunday night and preparing our trip to the Yucatan the next morning. Instead, a half an hour connecting window and a huge Atlanta airport conspired against me, and my entire group was forced to stay overnight in Atlanta and catch a flight home the next day.
Ale went ahead without me on our scheduled flight and I caught up with her late Monday night in Merida. Merida, capital of the state of Yucatan, is a large and largely colonial town located on the northern tip of the Peninsula, about 45 minutes or so from the beach. It’s often called the “white city” due to the orderly and clean conditions there. After tossing Ale about in the hotel room, (this was the longest we’d been apart since we met) we went for a walk and then took a cab to a nice Italian restaurant. Merida seemed a nice enough place, but lacked any significant personality as far as I could tell on first glance. (The fat/old American tourists we saw milling about the next day seemed quite at home.) As you can imagine, I was slightly disappointed that the town was dead by 1 pm and so we headed back to the Hotel Caribe for the night. It was sunny and warm in the morning, so after an early run we headed up to rooftop pool for a swim and some sun. Afterwards, we had lunch in the plaza in front of the hotel and went on a short shopping stroll. With the beach calling to us, we rented a car (the completely less than enthralling Nissan Tsuru—the standard cab in Mexico) and headed due east for Playa del Carmen.
The map we were using in my guide book appeared to indicate a road off the main highway to Cancun heading toward Playa del Carmen. If you think you see such a road on any map you are using while in the Yucatan—disregard this false impression or you will be stuck driving to Cancun before you’re able to travel south along the coast to Playa. While doing this, I kept thinking I saw police lights in my distant rear view mirror and kept speeding up to get out of range of this hound, only to have this dogged pursuer reappear—even after making my turn onto the southbound coastal highway. It was sometime later that I realized that the shaky mirror and tinted back window were creating an optical illusion that had me feeling tense for an hour an a half. (Duh!) We got to Playa and found our hotel, Hacienda Paradise, with little trouble. We showered up and headed out to meet our friends Tim and Monica for dinner, drinks and dancing. Tim is a buddy of mine from ASF who teaches fifth grade. Monica is his adorable Mexican girlfriend. They had been in Cancun for a couple of days already and had arrived in Playa earlier in the day. We strolled the very boardwalk-like Fifth Avenue before having drinks on the beach; then we eventually settled on (another) Italian restaurant.
Afterwards, we hit a couple of outdoor bars. I got crazy with the new camera I bought in Pittsburgh and took about 80 pictures of Ale and Monica having an animated conversation. I had this brilliant idea that I would create some sort of comic art by creating faux captions matched to the expressions. (Yeah…with all my spare time.) When the waiter brought a madras we didn’t order (or maybe Ale did but wouldn’t admit?) he threw a fit and wouldn’t take it off the bill. Since the cost of the drink and the tip were exactly the same, I told him it was one or the other. He kept it on, claiming he couldn’t take it off because they would charge him for it. When the tip was absent (I’m nothing if not a man of my word) he stormed off, “no es justo!” like a little Nancy boy. Later, he somehow managed to be able to afford another madras we didn’t order and slammed it on the table. I told him, “I didn’t want the first one and don’t want this one either.” Still, Tim and Ale, at this point well inebriated, began drinking the “free” beverage. Only later did it dawn on me to contemplate the foul unholies that were likely present in that drink. We capped the night off with some dancing on a platform on the beach. Tim, Monica and I enjoyed watching some sex-pot grab Ale and dirty dance with her, to the dismay of her goofy boyfriend.
The weather was cloudy and drizzly the next day (not the norm for that time of year) so Ale and I ended up accepting a pitch to a time share promotion in exchange for a free snorkel trip in Cozumel (the island right off the coast of Playa del Carmen.) For anyone whose done it with zero intention of buying, you know what fun it is to dash the hopes of the sales person who goes from Stepford-wife nice to insultingly disappointed—“this lifestyle isn’t for everyone, and not everyone can afford it” she said with disdain. Tim and Moni went to check out lodging in Tulum, 45 minutes south, and ended up staying for the night. Ale and I enjoyed a ridiculously copious dinner of Steak and Lobster before hitting the sack early.
After a quick swim we headed for the ferry to Cozumel. While waiting I struck up a conversation with a Gringo pitching hats and tee-shirts as fundraisers for the local fire company. I assumed he was a fireman being a relatively young and fit guy, but he said, “god no—I’m just retired here and looking for something positive to do with my time.” Fiftyish, tan, smiling and retired on the Mayan Riviera; some people are clearly operating with a thought out life-plan calibrated for optimal success and happiness. Fucker…
The snorkeling was fun, though due to intermittent clouds and rain, not as good as it could have been (and certainly not as vibrant and dynamic as the reefs I had experienced in Belize). Afterwards, we rented a scooter and spent an hour an a half zipping around the island—much of it still a nature reserve—before hitting a restaurant and then catching the ferry back to the mainland. The rains picked up on the way back and became torrential on our barefoot walk back to the hotel. Ale lucked out when we took refuge in a dress shop on Fifth Ave and she ended up with new beach attire.
Due to the rain, we ended up arriving in Tulum later than planned (10:00) and learned with some degree of panic that the hotels, or rather the cabanas,” stopped accepting new guests at 11 pm. We hurriedly settled on a very nice, but on-the-pricey-side place called Margherita Posada. If you are wondering why we didn’t make a reservation in advance, it was because we had heard stories about how hard it was to select a cabana online. Tulum is a relatively pristine stretch of beach on the southern portion of the eastern Yucatan. (Yucatan is also the name of one of the 32 Mexican states. It encompasses the northeast part of the peninsula, while Playa del Carmen and Tulum are located in the nearby state of Quintana Roo—pronounced “roh” for some unfathomable reason.) Twenty years or so ago, it consisted of a smattering of literal cabanas—Gilligan’s Island style huts—along the beach. Today, many “cabanas” are simply detached hotel rooms with air conditioning and hot running water, with a central dining area. There remain only a few on the truly rustic side, with limited electricity and shared bathrooms, but even the nicer places are small and unobtrusive compared with your standard beach town strip of blinking hotels and trinket shops. In fact, the actual town of Tulum is some 5 to 15 minutes inland, depending on how far north or south you are on the coast. So, even an average “full” cabana-hotel has only about 16 guests and an essentially empty beach front, surrounded by jungle. If you prefer Island Beach State Park to Long Beach Island, this is definitely the Mexican Riviera beach for you.
We had heard from some friends of ours who were down their earlier in the week that some cabanas were demonstrably better than others, so rather than book site unseen, we opted to go sin reservaciones. This would likely have been less of an issue if we had managed to arrive some time other than 10 pm the day before Thanksgiving. (Always using the thinking cap, this one.) After getting the no-room-at-the-inn treatment for an hour, we decided to take the pricey, but available, Margherita as the clock ticked toward the witching hour. This cabana was, in fact, a very nice place and we thoroughly enjoyed our stay there, having breakfast on the beach before laying about and swimming. It’s run by two Italian guys—I’m guessing gay due to their apparent living circumstances, but honestly, my gaydar remained unexcited during my stay—and it is also staffed by several Mexicans and three large and loveable dogs.
Not having money to blow though, we checked out the next day and went down the strip, checking out a variety of cabanas. Most were full, and the ones that were not were either too pricey or too rustic. At once place, we spoke to a guy at the front office who seemed a bit of a retard. We’d ask him a question and it would take literally seconds for him to respond in slurred speech while his eyes wandered. We wondered what his deal was and who left a whacked out dude in charge of a beach front motel.
Eventually we found a place nice place at half the cost of the Margherita in a single unit place in which the retired husband and wife lived in one room and rented out the remaining three. We took a walk down the empty beach, stumbling upon a movie being shot on the beach—not much actual action—then returned to join Tim and Monica on a trip to the Grand Cenote not too far up the road. Cenotes are underwater ground springs that sometimes have visible and accessible openings above ground. Since much of the Yucatan consists of limestone as its bedrock, the frequent jungle rains filter down into the natural underground cisterns. The Maya (being good at Math, Astronomy and calendars, but apparently not so hot at geology) thought these caverns were entrances into the spiritual underworld. For us, they were nothing sacred, just bitchin’ places to swim, and snorkel.
Which is what we did (after some hilarious and highly animated “discussion” between Tim and Monica about which way, in fact, the Grand Cenote lay). While the cenotes are cool enough on the surface, sometimes providing a place to jump off of cliffs and swim in crisp clear waters, the real thrills come from swimming in the caves beneath the water With a mask you can clearly see the amazing rock formations that make up the caves. Of course, if you have scuba gear and a light you can get really crazy swimming through the labyrinth of caves that connect the cenotes, but I understand that is some dangerous shit that you need extra cave diving certification to do. We really enjoyed it and I highly recommend this experience to anyone who ever gets a chance to visit the Yucatan. Eco-warning: don’t show up with sunscreen or hair gel to the cenote. They’re trying to keep the fragile waters clean and clear. Sadly, if you were to show up with this stuff it is unlikely that anyone would stop you from entering—enforcing rules and laws is done leisurely in Mexico (more on this in future blogs)—but I figured decent folks like you would want to avoid ruining things completely if you had a choice.
That night we met our friends Pete and Cyndi, and Matt and Amanda, along with Tim and Monica, for dinner at the Mezzanine restaurant, in part to celebrate Ale’s birthday. The Mezzanine is a high end place featuring Thai food and the only place featuring dancing on a deck on weekends. It was a good time but everyone was not up for a late night so we headed out around ten.
On the way back down the dark strip through the jungle Ale and I stopped into the Zebra cabana, which had a central bar among the cabanas. While chilling at the bar, who walks out of the darkness but the retard we had met earlier in the day! As we suspected, this was no ordinary mental case, but a guy who had suffered a traumatic brain injury in a motorcycle accident at 19 years old. He spent nine months in a coma before suffering through years in recuperative therapy, after which time his parents bought him the cabana for him to run. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, his speech actually improved with each drink, though he still mostly appeared a retard. Poor bastard. Then again, he is living in Tulum on the beach, in the sun… so maybe things have worked out for him afterall. Who knows, maybe without the accident he would be working his nuts off in the human rat race, miserable.
The next day, Ale and I lay on the beach for a bit, and then checked out of our place. When we got to the car we found a cooler of beer sitting there, left by the other couple who had been staying at the cabana. Nice people. And what a set of jugs on this broad! Ale and I went back and forth about whether they were real or fake. I suppose in the end it doesn’t matter, nice is nice. Anyway, we headed up the road to visit the Tulum ruins. These Mayan ruins are unique in that they were built right on some cliffs along the coast. It’s a pretty impressive site, no doubt, though it lacks the enormous pyramids present at Tikal or Chitzen Itza. While there we saw some nut-jobs standing at the edge of the complex facing the sea, doing Tai Chi or Yoga, or some cockamamie thing or another they learned at their local New Age community center. What made ridiculous sight even funnier was the family of (typically) fat Mexicans picnicking only two meters away, stuffing their faces with potato chips, watching and laughing at them. The modern day Mayans apparently don’t seem to share the same spiritual reverence for these sites as some gringos do.
We hit the road toward Valladolid (the road we actually should have taken from the highway on the way our there) in the hopes of checking out the ruins at Coba. When we arrived, time was running short (all these parks close at 5 pm) so we opted to skip a second ruin site and hit the nearby cenotes instead. This was a good call because these cenotes were completely underground and worth seeing. You actually went down a long stairway into a hole in the earth to get down there. I was disappointed that there was no snorkel gear but happy to see two jumping platforms along the stairs, one at about 30 feet and one at about 50. Having jumped from 30 feet at the Grand Cenote, I could not skip the higher one. And this mo-fo was high! I mean, up there. And to compound matters, it was so dark in the cave, and the waters so perfectly still, I couldn’t tell where the surface of the water lay. I spit down a couple of times hoping to get some sort of ripple to help gage my landing, but failed to get much going. Even though Ale and the one other family there couldn’t have given a shit one way or the other if I jumped or not, I knew I’d be a pussy if I backed out… so off I went. After two seconds in the air, and no sense of where the water actually was, I was having a minor heart attack, but plunged in safely into the water without crushing my legs on any rocks below.
Ale was not so lucky. She’s not much of a daredevil, but she does love me, and thus allowed me to convince her to jump off of the lower platform. She stood up there for a while, wondering what in God’s name she was doing this for, while I kept reminding her that, “it’s only water honey, it’s not going to hurt!” When she finally jumped I snapped a picture of her in midair, confirming for posterity, the worst. Having never jumped into water from such a height, she maintained a seated position upon entry, smacking her thighs and ass on the surface of the water like a lower body belly flop. When she came to the surface I yelled, “see that wasn’t so bad,” to which she whined, “that was a mistake!” As an easy bruiser, the purple body art created on her by this folly was magnificent. The cenote park soon closed. We passed the natives who worked there riding their bicycles out of the jungle on their way home. As we exchanged waves I pondered how little they were probably paid to spend their days minding these natural treasures, probably less than five dollars a day. Writing this now, I wish I had tipped them.
On the way to Valladolid, I did two things I rarely ever do: drink beer during the day and drink beer while driving a car. I got the idea from Tim who had a beer on the way up to the Grand Cenote the day before. Other than the phantom five-o that was chasing me on the way to Cancun, I had not seen much police at all on the roads, save for a couple of military run drug checkpoints, at which we were always hailed through without a second glance. I had a cooler of cold beer in the car, it was hotter ‘n hell outside and I had a long stretch of straight road through the empty jungle before we arrived in Valladolid. So I cracked open a beer and started driving. It was such a pleasant experience, sipping my beer, smokin’ my cigarette, (feeling Irish) smelling the hot jungle air. Any other traffic was practically non-existent. Ale napped and I stared at the empty road and blue sky as the miles passed by under the tires. The only other thing left to do was to read the ubiquitous signage along the roadway, advising us, ad nauseam, to “obey the signs,” “wear our seatbelts,” “don’t vandalize the signs,” “maintain our distance” and this important ditty, my personal favorite: “no deje piedras sobre el pavimento”—“don’t leave rocks on the road.” God love these Mexicans.
We rolled into Valladolid a couple of hours later and checked into the Meson del Marques, which was a recommendation from Pete and Cyndi, who had stayed in Valladolid on the way to the coast and eaten in their restaurant. Some of the rooms were 75 to 100 dollars a night, but we managed to get one of the tiny ones for 40 dollars. We had dinner in the beautiful open air courtyard at the hotel, then took a stroll around the main plaza.
It was about ten o’clock when we got out there, just in time for the town cultural arts show attended by about 30 or so of the over 60 crowd. This included a traditional ribbon dance followed by some “Mexican karaoke.” Various individuals handed over a cd of music to the dj and hopped up on stage to sing. A young girl was very good, a young man sucked ass. But the highlight for me was the old Indian farmer guy, the kind who worked like a dog every day of his life and who had probably never heard of Ricky Martin, Hilary Clinton, Babe Ruth or Neil Armstrong. He was decked out in a cowboy outfit right out of a western movie. I saw him earlier in the night and thought how silly he looked in his getup. But, when he jumped up on stage and began singing his heart out, I realized this was his performance attire. I could not believe how dramatically this old coot was belting out these “Norteno” songs. Norteno music is one of the things about Mexico which I decidedly do not like. Marichi can be cool at times, but this stuff—similar to Mariachi, but featuring the accordion and an oompa-loompa beat—is the pits. It’s more polka than anything. Apparently, it’s a style that originated in northern Mexico–from the Revolutionary corridos, or popular story songs--and the southern U.S. Where ever it came from, they should ship it back. Nonetheless, this guy sang three or four of these gems like his life depended on it, occasionally busting into an enthusiastic jig during the instrumental parts that had me splitting a side. I ran up to take some pictures. I could tell he felt like a rock star with someone taking his photo up close, but I still felt a bit guilty for taking pictures with the express purpose of laughing at them later. By 11:30 the plaza had emptied out and the town was dead as a doornail. After a long week, we hit the sack in order to get up early and visit Chitzen Itza before we headed for the airport and the DF.
Having seen Mayan ruins in Belize, Guatemala, and now Tulum, I was wondering if Chitzen Itza would be able to deliver. It did. Like Tikal, the size and scope of the site and of the individual pyramids are hard to pooh-pooh. My natural instinct, of course, is to climb these monsters, but some dim American woman who fell to her death some years ago (and whose family “naturally” attempted to sue, no doubt) made sure that climbing the pyramids was no longer allowed. More New-Agers meditated at the site, much to the chagrin of our tour guide, who was worth every peso. The ball court here is ridiculously large. In fact, it’s the largest one in existence. It extends some 545 feet long and 225 feet wide. On each side stands a huge wall. Extending out about 16 feet up on each wall is a single ring, about two feet in diameter. The Mayans would play for days in order to score one winning goal by popping a ball through one of the rings using body parts hips or lower. The best part about the game was that the captain of the winning team had the “honor” of being immediately sacrificed via heart removal. Talk about motivation to throw the game! Another point of particular interest at Chitzen Itza is actually located in the visitor’s center. It’s a large, but simple old dredge. It operates like one of those mechanical claws you maneuver to try and win a stuffed toy out of a machine on the boardwalk. Some industrious American adventurer, Edward Thompson, brought the dredge through the jungle here in 1901 in order to search the large cenote at Chitzen Itza. He wanted to locate the gold and treasure he’d heard locals say the Mayans used to throw in the centoes with young sacrificial virgins. His efforts were rewarded and he promptly took the treasure home and left the dredge behind.
Soon we were off to drop off the car and get on the plane. We gave the remaining beer in the cooler to the car rental guy who drove us to the airport. In no time at all we were circling over our crowded, smoggy city. Despite a fantastic week of fun and sun, it was great to be home.
This first blog entry is, admittedly, excessively long. I wrote it while on my Christmas break when I had the luxury of reminiscing at length and included an array of tangents and details. Hoperully, future blogs will be shorter. I recognize that few of you will read this one from start to finish. That’s fine. Read some, read none, what do I care? It’s your life.
Related pictures of this trip can be located at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/miguelito2066/sets/72157603569756196/
I suggest you click “View as Slideshow” and then click the info icon in the middle of the first picture, which will bring up some explanations/descriptions.
