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Photo by Gail Harvey, no reproduction without permission
Mexican Taxis One minute you’re gazing out the window of a Mexican taxi at Mayan stick houses and ocean and the next, your view is of the still-iced millpond. Not the cool bright ice of a lime paleta, but the frigid grey-white of Canadian winter water. Travel is surreal. I love that, but I can imagine there are people who don’t care for it, because there’s a dreamlike aspect to it that shakes the soul. Usted esta acqui and then not. Someplace else, back home, time-machine style. On a train trip you see the miles clock by. Feel them, too. A ship: the endless ocean drive till land draws near. A road trip involves stops for gas, food, leg stretches and canyon-gawks. But planes: you board [eventually, anyway: Air Canada seems to believe passionately in the importance of delayed gratification] and emerge someplace new. A hotter world with dry wind and bright yellow sunshine in February. Amazing. How the other half lives: in warmth, in poverty, in grace and work-to-live not live-to-work. We found a piece of paradise and borrowed a corner of it for some days.
Nohoch Mul where the French wife cried and turned back from the climb while around us, young’uns in flip-flops scampered up like goats. I have random vertigo but I made myself do it. No step-ladders for me but I can now say I climbed a temple in the jungle. There may be no more perfect place for rest meets restlessness than Yucatan. I think the phrase ‘impossibly blue’ has been beaten to death in poetic prose over the years but that’s what the Caribbean Sea is. The hotel was home to four dogs, one of them an Aztec Hairless, an ancient breed considered powerful enough for the trip to the Underworld after death. Guiding their Maya owners, protecting them always. This is what passes for small talk on Boca Paila, day one. I loved that.
Daily sunrise walks with our canine beach-guide Saba were the best. To be chosen by an animal when miles from home is a particular joy. It made me think of adopted cats in France. And thinking of France in Mexico made me smile. Saba was an expert coconut wrestler with some sort of old grudge against sandpipers. She would walk as many miles as we could, and back.
On non-exploring days I read a beautiful novel called The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. Slim and packed with energy. I knew as soon as I began reading it that I would be sad when it ended. There are very few reading experiences like that, where you ache before the writer is done. That was another funny thing about the hotel: not one single person was reading trash. Trade paperbacks were everywhere, from A Tree Grows In Brooklyn [which made me like the woman reading it even more, instantly, the way a book can do that] to Balkan Ghosts. I rolled over on the beach-bed one morning and the guy on the next platform was reading Roberto Bolano. Had I seen children by the pool reading Tolstoy I would definitely have consulted a doctor. I had the most vivid dreams there. I attribute this to the forever feeling in the air, the oldness of eyes. We had a wonderful man named David who took us to Coba and drove us to the airport when it was time to leave. Whose eyes lit up when I asked him if he knew Carnes de Monterey on Avenida Tulum. Es muy bueno.
By the time we return I will speak more Spanish. As a verbose and curious person it does not sit well with me to stumble in language when there are so many things I could be asking. I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy the saltwater shower. So used to bleaching my flesh with Canadian water, I suppose. Now I wish we had a saltwater shower. And access to Mexican fruit popsicles. The lunch place, Pollo Bronco, had the yummiest rice. Where we chowed down watching squads of gringos walk by in those “I’m here on vacation!” cowboy hats pre-crumpled to make you look...what exactly? I’m still trying to figure it out. Like you just climbed off a stallion? Like the air-conditioned tour bus was too rough for words all the way down from the mall hotel at Playa del Carmen?
There was a sacredness to Muyil I won’t soon forget. If not the opposite of Chichen’itza then different enough to have been an excellent choice. Then thundering through the forest a group of German tourists, one of whom marched right up the temple steps as if climbing the stoop to his own house. We laughed, slipping back into the forest.
It’s amazing when you come home from someplace so blue and salty and warm and venture to, say, the post office round the corner. Where everything is so small and easy, so familiar. There’s a moment of sad boredom when you realize that asking for the mail will not require pre-rehearsal of nouns and verbs in the mind. Quietly thinking the Spanish word for OPEN as you push through doors of stores, hurrying past President’s Choice salsa which you will never eat again, not now that you know the taste of the one that accompanied comida. Home is fabulous, of course, but it is the shocking fact of a winter holiday that you will willingly fling yourself back into brown, white and grey after being surrounded by orange and red blankets and tropical bird alarm clocks and twilight walks with your toes in the warm water. There are far worse plights to have. For example, earning in a week or a month what someone foreign throws away on a holiday dinner. Waiting for hurricane season when your walls are half-constructed because concrete is way more expensive, more out of reach, than sticks.
The beautiful thing about the priority of travel is that it can’t be taken away. The memory of it vibrates in the heart for long years after [or can, anyway] and it can’t be snatched like a possession. Mine mine mine doesn't work in that realm. Because even two people traveling together are on two different trips which they can tell each other about, if they are lucky. Using hand gestures, photographs, whatever it takes. If there’s a heaven, which no one knows for sure, I hope it sort of looks like a lobby in a great hotel. When you arrive and set down all the crap you thought it was essential to drag around in mortal life, someone takes the bags away, offers you a limon paleta and asks, “So, how was your trip?”
Listening to: Nothing's Shocking, Jane's Addiction
Reading: 2666 by Roberto Bolano
It's always a good idea to stop willfully ingesting, re-visiting or reading that which makes you feel spiritually unwell. Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
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