There is water wherever you look, but it tastes salty and won’t take away your thirst.
Water falls from the sky, but, on land flatter than a tabletop, it doesn’t run into rivers and down into the sea. Water seeps into the ground and collects in cenotes, underground caverns with stalactites and stalagmites, blue blue water, fish and turtles. There are rumors that ancient Mayans dropped their sacrifices into these cenotes weighted with heavy stones.
This history doesn’t deter us tourists from donning brightly colored snorkels and masks, showering, slipping into the cool waters, following rope lines into underground caverns lit from underneath with lights, over thirty feet deep.
This particular Gran Cenote is written up in guide books as having colorful fish, but, for the record – the fish are small, not in a multitude, and not at all colorful.
On this morning tour buses out front of the attraction are already unloaded, overweight men and women parading in swimming attire to the pools, Mayan descendants renting them towels and equipment.
There are a few scuba divers who can swim far underwater in the caverns, holding underwater lights, that swim farther than we can and see what the rest of us can only imagine.,
When they surface, they look exhilerated,
Places where the insides of the Earth open up have always attracted the curious.
I don’t see dead bodies but my shivers remind me there is much more we don’t see, than what we do.
You never know who you will meet on your morning walk.
This burro is grazing by the side of the road, and, moments earlier, posed for a photo with a young man and his girl friend, who then snapped this photo of Scott in reciprocity. The burro decides he isn’t pleased with us and kicks his hind hooves, warning me to stay the proper distance away.
He is a sturdy burro and in Nicaragua he would be hooked to a cart pulling sand and cement bags to a construction job.
Where you are born in this world makes a difference. You can overcome a bad birthplace, but, if I were a donkey, I would be perfectly pleased calling Tulum, Mexico home.
People call this boy an ass, but he has his world by the tail.
Today, the exchange rate is nineteen pesos to a dollar.
Along the Hotel Zone strip, ATM’s, when they are working, dispense pesos or dollars. If you need money, you walk, bike, or drive to a little pitched roof shack on the main road not far from the Hemingway Eco Cottages.
At the bottom of the front barred window in the shack is a little slot through which the girl behind the window pushes me a small cardboard box just big enough for my dollars. I push the box back through the slot to her and wait. Inside, she has a calculator, a money box, a chair, papers and a pen balanced on her right ear. She counts out pesos, puts them in the cardboard box along with a printed receipt on top of the money, and slides the box back out to me.
The U.S. dollar is strong today so the exchange rate is nineteen to one. The weakest currency is the Canadian dollar. The strongest currencies are the British pound and the Euro. In this money game, the more pesos I get for my dollars, the cheaper vacation I get.
When the girl in the booth sees me, I get a bright smile from her.
I always leave her a tip and she hasn’t made one mistake.
Is handling money all day and not getting to keep any the same as walking in the desert with a canteen and not being able to drink
Sales receipts are prosaic.
On most there are times and dates, food ordered and its price, balances due and how the bill was paid. There is a spot for taxes and gratuities. There can be series of numbers indicating stock numbers of merchandise, re-order times, discounts, adjustments, credits.
On this restaurant receipt, at the bottom, is the phrase, ” Keep Tulum weird. ”
This is weird for a number of reasons. Weird, according to the Oxford dictionary, should really be spelled wierd to follow the rule – i before e except after c. Wierd has been spelled wrong so many years that both spellings are acceptable.Weird is also pronounced – wird, so we have a screwy English language where how a word sounds is not how it is spelled.
“Have a good day” is often at the bottom of sales tickets
” We appreciate your business is sometimes at the bottom of sales receipts.
In Tulum,” Keep Tulum Weird ” is totally acceptable.
The creator of this receipt is probably a seventy year old hippie living an an airstream trailer in a fenced off lot on the beach bought in the fifties for several thousand dollars. He would sell but can’t move because his cat, Mister T, likes to nap on an old couch under the airstream awning, on top of a Pittsburg Pirates World Series Blanket.
For all its weirdness, Tulum is becoming very comfortable.
There is color here.
The beach is a blinding white slightly curving belt of sand holding the blue sea and green jungle loosely around the waist. The sky is a blue un-fenced playground for white soft clouds sailing like yachts. Sunlight is intense and filters through the rustling leaves of a green canopy. Shops, bars and restaurants wear colorful pinks,turquoise, yellow, magenta, red. Bright birds pause on dark brown wood fences. Tourists wear straw hats,purple sarongs,black thongs.
Food is colorful too. For breakfast there is white pineapple,orange and green cantaloupe,green apples,red papaya ,pinkish watermelon. Eggs are deep yellow and brown bread is baked locally.
Stiff brown coffee, the color of Mayan skin, tops off one’s morning meal.
Somehow, this breakfast looks and tastes better than a McDonald’s egg McMuffin.
Somehow,if you aren’t a prisoner, you shouldn’t be eating prison food.
The location of this old Mayan city was well chosen.
It is a place Mayan elite lived for the best part of the year,entertained visitors, enjoyed food and drink on porches as their sun sank into the Caribbean sea. There were simple platforms built on the grounds upon which slaves and servants lived in thatched communal homes. There are altars that still overlook cliffs where offerings would have been made to the Mayan Gods.
Most of the old city has crumbled and front porches have been claimed by iguanas, prehistoric reptiles that survived the dinosaur extermination.The iguanas bask on the stone floors in palaces off limits to tourists, their coloring matching that of the stones around them perfectly. They run oddly with their tails swinging left to right and legs moving like robot legs, surprisingly quick, tongues testing the air as they move towards food or away from danger.
The pyramids still standing here tell the story of this ancient Mayan culture.
On top of the wide base have been stacked smaller and smaller blocks. At the top of the pyramid is a single living unit for the head of the society. There is no agonizing discussion of equality and fairness. All major decisions come from the top of the pyramid and all below the top support the King until they can’t and the pyramid crumbles.
It is strange to walk in one of history’s graveyards.
We have better toys today but we play in the same sandbox the ancients played in.
The surf rumbles all day and all night.
Where water meets land, long white capped waves roll over, roll under, and roll onto the land like conquerors.
There are high and low tides and thin legged birds kick bubbles left by the waves like Colombian soccer players. In early morning there is a row of seaweed deposited on the white beaches and men with shovels, rakes, wheelbarrows, move the seaweed, cover it up with dirt or bury it so still sleeping tourists have the white beaches promised by tourist brochures when they wake up for their breakfast of fresh fruit and fresh squeezed orange juice.
The sand here is Caribbean, white and fine grained. It sticks between toes, clings to you like a cranky child.When dry it is soft to walk on, When wet, you can run on it and make sand castles to your imagination’s limits.
When pirates ran these coasts there was nothing left but vestiges of an old Mayan civilization.
Natives lived in the jungle, fished the sea,worshiped old Gods left them by ancients. Stone walls and stone faces have been overcome by vegetation and old, precise, mathematical equations are forgotten. Tulum is now a place of loose wires and knotted plumbing, wind generators and rusted fishing hooks.
Before you move here, you would want to stay a month in August.
The rain, humidity, and heat will make you understand why you have the place to yourself.
“Why is Yoga so popular, ” I ask?
” Tulum”, Angelique smiles,” is an old hippie colony – it grows out of that. People want to feel good. ”
There is plenty of feel good here with a huge European presence.
In the morning a large group of Europeans sits at a big table at the Canopi restaurant and talk in foreign languages, eat healthy, dress in flowing garments for the girls and shorts for the boys. By nine o clock most will be seated on mats on a wood floor in an open thatched roof room, assuming positions that stretch the body, holding those special hard to hold positions for excruciating minutes.
Along the main thoroughfare are signs for hotels, bars, restaurants, shops, renting bicycles, buying juice, shopping for land from Mr. Tulum, eating Vegan, There are words of advice and scheduled times for finding your inner person. It brings back memories of Akbol in San Pedro Town, Ambergris Caye.
” You’ll never forget this chair….. ”
” Be easy on yourself….. ”
” The first day of the rest of your life…. ”
” Fresh lobster….. ”
” Free Corona…..”
This is not a cheap place to be when you need water, a hot bath, internet, good food, fine wine and entertainment.Tapping into your inner person is best done when you have a stack of hundred’s in your wallet and a high credit limit.
Chasing Zen masters is sought these days mostly by people of substance.
Tulum has two faces.
There is the Hotel Zone which is a strip of bars, restaurants, hotels,and retail shops along the main road running along the beach all the way south to a biosphere nature preserve called Sian Kian. Then there is the Mexican town of Tulum where locals live. You can find tourists in the town of Tulum and locals in the Hotel Zone, but each is a different slice of Mexican pie.
This restaurant,Matteo’s, is in the Hotel Zone, towards the north end, and features, according to the sign, ” The Best Fish Tacos on Earth. ”
When questioned, these two kids maintain that the tacos are really the best in the Universe, but agree this would be difficult to prove since Mexico doesn’t send up space ships to verify.
In mid day, the restaurant is doing good business and fish tacos are swimming out of the kitchen.The kids give a thumbs up and let their picture be taken. I’ll be back for the best tacos on Earth.
Who would turn down such an opportunity?
At night, streets in Granada take a different character.
Familiar places look different and different places become familiar.
Granada is about to become past tense, about to become another disappearing city in the rear view mirror.
This evening the cities poor people come out of their houses and rock in wicker chairs on their front porches. Country people are cooking tortillas on front yard fireplaces and tending to the chickens, goats and pigs that sustain them through hundreds of years of political upheavals from domestic as well as foreign instigators.
This trip winds to an end but as long as reasons to go outweigh reasons to stay home, Scotttreks postcards will keep telling their small quiet stories.
Nicaragua, a place I wasn’t certain I wanted to see, has been a surprise.
Making new places your friend is an endearing part of traveling.
There is a bit of Columbus in all of us once we let ourselves sail, accept that we can be wrong, allow new things to season us.
One trip to a place, however, doesn’t make you an expert.
This country, like most others, bristles with undercurrents that can take you down and never let you come back up for air.
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