The Mexico Chronicles
Leaving from Tijuana to Mexico city was a good idea. It's a lot cheaper than flying out from San Diego or LAX. All you got to do is hop over the border past some indifferent Mexican border agents and go bumping and sliding around a couple of miles of Mexican highway with Mexican car drivers. Well, if you know anything about Mexican drivers, that last part can be kind of tricky. There is no shortage of potholes in Mexico and you can forget about traffic lights. There are a lot of stop signs which everyone agreed a long time ago to ignore. All you got to do is keep one hand on the wheel and one on the horn. Honk and accelerate simultaneously. It's the only way to go.
So, we get to the airport and wander around through a fishnet of customs, immigration, and all sort of other desks staffed by scowling state employees. Luckily, we had the foresight to visit Mexico earlier in the week and buy our pesos. We had plenty for the surprise baggage fee which we had to pay. So, after a bit of confusion and disorientation, we were on our way to sunny Mexico City.
Districto Federal. That's what Mexico city is called... the big D.F., biggest city in the world and home to a quarter of Mexico's population and to all of its pollution. We had another flight out of there to Cancun the next day so we only spent the night in D.F. We wandered around the Zocalo in El Centro and looked at the Cathedral there. We didn't do much the first day besides wander about and try to get climatized to the new culture. Luckily, it rained earlier in the day and that kept most of the pollution at bay. We ate some burgers at a place we thought looked pretty clean and slept in a cheap hotel nearby. Having stayed at worst dumps, I thought the room was okay for the price.
Cancun, the city without a soul, a gigantic tourist circus built because a computer decided it would be a great tourist attraction. The old fishing village that was once Cancun got run over by the Zona Hotelera, possibly the most grotesque Disneyland of American and European poor taste. On the isthmus that is the Zona, you can slam down tequilas at rowdy Tex-Mex bars all the while speaking English and spending greenbacks. If you've come to see Mexico, skip Cancun; if you've come to see how tacky a tourist trap can get, come to Cancun.
Anyway, Cancun was cheap to fly to and we spent the night there. Wandered around the Zona and looked at some of the beaches. Really pretty water and sand and soft as baking soda. We stayed downtown where the locals live and took a bus out to the Zona. We were surprised at how few tourists there were wandering around. I guess if you pay $200 for a hotel room, you're going to want to spend some time in it. We found the bus station and headed out as soon as we could.
Playa Del Carmen, small town with beaches as pretty as Cancun but without the tawdriness. We stayed at a campsite stocked with European refugee hippies. We rented a spot to sling our hammocks for about $4 and spent the day wandering up the down the beach and swimming with topless girls. Needless to say, I've done more unpleasant things. Weather was really nice. It made me drowsy and water was as clear as I'd ever seen. At nightfall, we went to a small club and had a beer while flirting with the female drummer. Not as many tourists as I expected. We went back to the site and slung our hammocks hoping to head out early the next day to Cozumel. Unfortunately, sleep didn't seem to be in the cards that night. The dope-heads spent the night playing very loud music and fighting over who owned the tequila. Ralph caught a couple screwing on the filthy bathroom floor. Some idiot from North Carolina spent half the night begging people for a rubber. The girl in the hammock next to me actually got naked right in front of me and performed her feminine hygiene chores. She was dog ugly and I really didn't care to get to know her that well. The mosquitos chewed me up that night and I couldn't get any sleep after what the girl did to me. I was too nauseated. By morning, I was fed up with the druggies and wanted to get the hell out of there. The wind kicked up that night onshore and since the hammocks were right on the beach, we got cold blasted all night and I began to develop a sore throat.
Cozumel, Costeau put this place on the map by alerting people to the beauty of it's reefs. Used to be only divers came here but now mostly everybody does. The first day there we set up at a decent hotel and rented some bicycles. We rode about three miles to a national park called Chankanab. We rented snorkeling gear there and paddled around for awhile. The fish are so friendly that they swim right around with you. We saw a barracuda also. Snorkeling was pretty fun but my sore throat was acting up as all that breathing through the snorkel irritated it. On the ride back from the park it rained. We rode through a lot of thick rain getting splattered. The bikes we were on were junk with only one gear and no splash guards. I got soaked and muddy. Sloshing down a narrow road in the rain with Mexican drivers whizzing past you isn't much fun. I bought some medicine for my throat and my mosquito bites at the local pharmacy. The stuff seemed to work pretty good.
The next day in Cozumel, we rented a moped and rode around the island. We made our way down this beat up road to a lighthouse. On the way to the lighthouse, I hit a sand dune and we wiped out. Ralph also took a curve too quick and bashed the side of the moped in a bit. As we were tooling along, my helmet came off and hit Ralph who was sitting behind me. Lucky for both of us the helmet hit Ralph in his helmet so it didn't knock him off the back of the moped. The road was tricky but we made it to the top of the lighthouse and took lots of photos. Later in the day, we took a SCUBA lesson. We had a good instructor and they took us out to a place called Paradise Reef. I was congested from my sore throat and getting caught in the rain so I had some trouble early on adjusting the air pressure in my head, but luckily that cleared up pretty well. We dove about 40 feet or so. The reef was pretty and we saw lots of fish and coral and an eel. The reef wasn't as big of a deal as I thought it'd be. I wasn't as excited about it as Ralph was, but then I'd seen similar stuff on Guam, which has plenty of reefs.
Chitchen Itza: major big ruins site. We arrived there by second class bus. It took about seven hours. A second class Mexican bus stops at every pile of rocks that stands for a town. People board will all sort of produce and livestock that they sell in the bigger towns. I was always amazed at how they could keep the livestock tied up and quiet for the entire trip. It ain't easy to tie a chicken up and keep him quiet, especially on a bus. I guess the animals are used to the bus trips. The biggest animal I saw tied and loaded on a bus was a calf.
Mexican bus drivers are something else. Never again will I wonder what those elaborate altars on the dash board are for. I'm talking about the dashboards with the blinking lights on the crucifix, and the rosaries, and flowers, and statues of various saints. I think St. Jude is popular with bus drivers. He's the saint of gamblers and lost causes.
Bus drivers go through this elaborate abbreviated rosaries with all the furious hand crossing and muttering. Bus drivers also work in teams. One guy drives and the other guy collects the money. How they determine the fare is largely a black art. We had this one pair of drivers: Laurel and Hardy. Laurel would collect money and Hardy would drive. Laurel was the funniest by far and Hardy was the straight guy. Laurel was tall, thin, and maybe just a little older than me. He had these bloodshot eyes and hair that looked like it hadn't seen the business end of a comb in about two hundred miles. I can still see his unblinking bloodshot eyes over a pair of furious swinging arms whipping a steering wheel around. Somehow, that sight never reassured me.
Hardy would take over the driving chores about half way through the trip. He had no hair so he didn't look to messy. Laurel had mastered the art of instant sleep. He'd collapse into the front seat and be instantly asleep. He would wake up to some internal cue every now and then to collect fares from passengers. I'll never know how he knew who'd paid or not and who'd gotten on.
We stayed at a nearby small town called Piste. It was pretty nice there and the food was good and accommodations nice. We toured some of the ruins just before closing when it's cooler. The ruins get hot and really humid during the day. The hotels in Cancun run bus tours to Chitchen Itza. Unfortunately, for the tourists, the buses arrive in the middle of the afternoon at the peak of the heat. So, we had fun watching these rich tourists stagger around trying to climb these huge pyramids. These tourists deserve every heat stroke they get. The arrived in these cute little fashionable shorts and sandals clutching water bottles without hats. First off, you need good boots to climb up these pyramids as it's easy to twist an ankle and come careening down a hundred and fifty foot pyramid. You need a hat too and lots of bug repellent and sun protection. It was so funny watching these red-necked Britons stumbling around and fighting heat prostration.
There was lots to see at the site. The best part was this huge ball court shaped to specific geometric specifications. There were these high rings that the players were supposed to hit a twelve pound ball through, sort of like basketball, but you can't use your hands. Needless to say, it was a very low scoring game and the losers got beheaded as a sacrifice. The court was designed to yield seven echoes and if you talked against a wall at one end you could be heard by someone listening at the opposite end of the wall about 150 feet away. We had lots of fun with that little experiment.
The next morning there we saw the remainder of the ruins in the cool air and headed out to our next town.
Merida, fifth largest city in Mexican capitalism and the Mayan cosmological fifth point (or center) of the universe. It's also called the 'white city', but it was hard to tell through the smog. The streets obviously weren't designed for car traffic and the leaded gas hangs tight in every intersection. Some Mexican traffic engineer decided it would be a good idea to extend the tailpipes of the buses to about nine feet off the ground. This means you get the blasted with the black smoke right in the face if you're on the curb instead of in the shins. One thing we learned early in Mexico: if it makes too much sense they don't do it.
This town was built on the backs of indian slaves who grew a type of fiber called Henequen which was made into rope in the days before nylon. Using the profits from the rope, the spanish built these huge haciendas and bought lots of guns since they wanted independence from central control at Mexico city. They gave these guns to the Indians to fight the Mexican army, but surprise, surprise! The Indians had this funny thing about remembering the torture and slavery the spanish put them through and turned on their masters. This was known as the Caste War and was one of the bloodiest wars in Mexican history. The Mayans have the distinction of killing the most Spaniards of any people. Well, the plantation owners went running back to central Mexican control to save their butts, but the Indians were just about to kick the hell out of them when they noticed a kind of grasshopper which heralds the start of the new planting season. Believe it or nuts, the Indians stopped right there and went to plant the crops to avoid displeasing their gods instead of beating the living daylights out of the spanish. Well, you can guess the rest. The spanish sure got lucky in Mexico with the Aztecs and the Mayans.
We wandered around the museums and markets in Merida. The central market smelled. I really mean smell. There were butcher shops stacked next to tortilla rollers butted up against flower vendors and jewelry stores. |
