Gulch

Lessons Learned the Hardway: Taxicabs in Paradise

We had not taken more than a dozen steps inside the Tulum bus terminal when Jen realized that she was missing the small pouch that she had been using as a wallet. We quickly turned around. In front of the bus station was a solid line of white, identical looking taxicabs. It seemed like there were at least 50 of them, all small sedans with red stripes, and they were constantly coming and going. It had only been a minute or two since one of those white taxis had dropped us at the curb and pulled away.

“I had set it on my lap and it must have slid off and fell on the floor,” Jen informed me. “My credit and at ATM cards are in it.” Luckily, her passport was in her money belt.

While I waited with our backpacks, Jen (with her superior Spanish accent) went to see if she could track the taxi down. She returned moments later, looking flushed.

“Do you remember the number of the taxi?” she asked. “If we can figure out what taxi we were in, the drivers can track him down for us.”

“I don’t,” I replied.

“Well, one of the drivers will take one of us back to the hotel just in case someone there saw which taxi picked us up.”

She took her pack and introduced me to Antonio, a young guy who looked to be about ten years younger than us. We arranged that Jen would stay at the bus station just in case the taxi came back.

I climbed into the front passenger seat of Antonio’s cab. He made a u-turn across the highway and piloted us toward the hotel zone along the beach.

We rode along in silence and then he asked, “Do you remember what type of car he was driving?”

“It was small – maybe a Nissan. It was white and it had a red stripe.” I replied in my clumsy Spanish.

“All taxis in Tulum are white and have a red stripe,” Antonio replied with a smile. He slowed down as we passed a taxi.

“Was that it?” he asked.

“Um, I don’t think so.”

“Well, what did the driver look like? Was he young, was he old?”

“Um,” I said, trying to remember but I had not taken the time that morning to see the driver as a person. In my mind he was just an anonymous Mexican taxi driver.

Antonio looked over at me. Based on the heat coming off my face, I’m sure it was red.

“Don’t worry, friend, people leave stuff all the time in taxis.” He slowed down as we passed another taxi. I looked at it, but it looked just like every other taxi in the whole area.

At the hotel, Antonio hopped out and talked to the staff people in fast, rapid fire Spanish. They shook their head. We got back in the cab and drove a mile down the road. A small dirt road led a few hundred yards through the jungle to a clearing where four or five cabs were parked. The turquoise water of the ocean could be seen through the trees.

Antonio pointed to where the drivers were lounging at the side of the clearing.

“Are any of those guys him?” He asked.

“I don’t think so.” I answered.

“Can you remember anything about him?” He asked. “Was he bald? Was his hair like mine?”

I thought about it again for moment.

“I think he had a mustache,” I said weakly.

Antonio got out and talked to the other drivers.

“No luck,” he said when he returned.

We drove slowly back to the bus station, with Antonio slowing down even more as we passed each taxi and I scrutinized it for something that might look familiar.

At the bus station, Jen’s luck had been non-existent as well. Antonio suggested that we might want to go back to the taxi headquarters, where they had pictures of every single taxi driver on file. Despite having no clue of what our driver had looked like, we agreed.

The taxi headquarters (we were never sure if it was a company, union, or co-op of owner-operators) was in the second floor of a rebar and concrete building that looked half finished. We were ushered thorough a muggy reception area where a few middle aged men lounged and into a side office where a man was sitting at a desk.

Antonio spoke to the man. The man looked at us and pulled a couple of three ring binders off the shelf behind him.

We opened the first one to find it filled with Polaroid snapshots of the heads of men staring straight ahead. Their name and what must have been their cab number was written under each picture. There were hundreds of faces.

We flipped through the pages. Here there were old guys, young guys, guys that looked tired, guys that smiled at the camera, bald guys, the occasional woman, guys who shared cab numbers, and an amazing amount of guys with mustaches. It went on and on.

Jen and I finally admitted defeat. We got the email address of the guy who was sitting behind the desk just in case someone turned in her wallet and Antonio drove us back to the bus station. He pointed us to an Internet café where we could call the U.S. and suggested that we cancel the credit cards right away. We thanked Antonio for his help. A few days later, Jen emailed the taxi manager but she never heard back.

A couple of weeks later, Jen and I returned to Tulum to end our vacation with a few more days on the beach. Stepping out of the bus station, we spotted the long line of white taxi cabs. We peered up and down the block hoping to see Antonio but we didn’t spy him.

A friendly, middle-age man who was going a little bald on the top helped us load our gear into the truck of his cab. He asked us where we were going and we told him the name of the hotel and then settled into the back seat of the taxi. Taxi 214 to be exact.

Of Cities and Floods in Far Away Places

Overall, the city did not leave a big impression on us. It was noisy and busy and modern. Its squat buildings and concrete bridges seemed to reflect the cold sterility of the 1950’s rather than the warm charm that we had found in the colonial cities we visited earlier on our trip. And yet, the city itself has worked its way into our memory.

Four years later, here’s what I remember about the city of Villahermosa:

On our last night in the city, we climbed the narrow steps to the second story bar that we had noticed early that day. It overlooked a small plaza and had hung signs advertising itself as a “video bar” in English. At the top of the stairs was a medium sized room with tall tables and bar stools. Around the room, TV’s hung from the roof and blared Spanish language videos filled with scantily clad women, cowboys, and Latin lovers.

At the entrance to the bar, we noticed a vending machine that sold single cigarettes for a peso or two. Out of the novelty, I bought one. I'm not a smoker and my smoking experience was mainly limited to breathing in the second hand stuff. When a young, dark-haired waitress came to take our drink order, I asked her for a light. I tried, with my bad Spanish accent, to sound as cool as the countless smoking tough guys I had seen on tv over the years.

She took a lighter out of her pocket and, rather than handing it to me as I expected, with a fluid flick of her wrist, she struck the lighter and held the flame towards me. While I had seen plenty of guys light girls' cigarettes, and had even lit a few myself, I wasn't really sure what the procedure was when it was reversed. I paused and tried to figure out how to light the cigarette in the coolest manner possible and then I stuck the end of the cigarette into the end of the flame. It glowed red but did not light.

“I think you have to inhale,” Jen said helpfully. I placed the cigarette in my mouth.

The waitress shook her head and laughed. Above us on a video, a suave looking cowboy sung about unrequited love or, more likely, what a fool some gringos are (my Spanish wasn’t good enough to tell for sure).

I also remember the combi’s – those Volkswagen microbuses that sported spoilers and flames and seemed to be the most common form of public transportation in the city. Even today I think that if our public transport had flames and the intimate personal touch of, say, 15 people crammed into the back of a micro-van, it would be a lot more popular. I'd take it more often.

We’ve been thinking about Villahermosa a lot, because in the last few days it has become a disaster zone. After some of the worst rains in 50 years, it is literally underwater. Some news reports describe a mass exodus of the city – in which half the 750,000 citizens have fled their houses.

The state of Tabasco, of which Villahermosa is the capitol of, is 80% underwater. It’s estimated that more than a million people have been made homeless by the floods. The governor has said that the state has a 100% crop failure.

The U.S. Government has so far pledged $300,000 to the relief efforts (the equivalent of what we spend every 3 minutes in Iraq).

Sometimes it’s easy to feel apathetic about a disaster in a far off place. I’ve found that a side-effect of travel is that you can no longer feel that numb about a place you've visited. Even a city that was one of the more unremarkable places we visited in Mexico, I find myself remembering the good food, the crazy combis, and being laughed at by a dark-haired waitresses. And as the flood waters recede, I hope that all will be well in that city again.

The Most Beautiful Fruit in the World

Manuel noticed Jen staring at the fat, pink bulbs hanging down above us and he went to grab a machete. We were eating breakfast in the back courtyard of the Casa San Juan, a Spanish colonial house, in Merida, Mexico, which was built in the 1800’s and lately renovated into a guesthouse.

The back courtyard of the Casa was a lush oasis from the noise and heat of Merida’s streets. Jen and I were the only two guests that morning and we lingered, sipping our coffee and fresh juice that Manuel brought us. A tall tree grew in the middle of the courtyard and provided shade for Jen and I and the couple of shy cats that called the courtyard their home.

As only seems to occur in tropical or rainy climates, the tree itself was home to a number of epiphytic plants and cacti. Epiphytes are plants that live on trees without being parasites and they turned the tree near our breakfast table into a vertical garden. Bromeliads and cacti spilled from the lower branches of the tree, making it seem like we were eating breakfast in a rainforest, rather than in the middle of a concrete city with over a half million residents.

Long, green ribbons of a type of holiday cactus hung down from the tree, anchored in the air by fat, pink fruit the size of a fist. This type of cacti lives in tree branches where, even if it rains constantly, the water drains off the branches so that the cactus itself actually lives in a dry, almost desert like environment.

Manuel noticed Jen staring at the bulbs, went off towards the kitchen, and came back with a wickedly long machete. He quickly cut a bulb off one of the cactus ribbons and put it on a plate. In a smooth motion, he placed the blade along the bulb’s equator and neatly sliced it in two.

Inside each half of the fruit was a perfect circle of a white filling with black spots, which in my mind looked like chocolate chip ice cream. Manual handed us spoons and indicated that we should eat. We dipped the spoons into the filling which had solid yet soft consistency.

“What is this called?” Jen asked.

“Se llama la fruta mas bella del mundo,” Manuel answered. It’s called the most beautiful fruit in the world.

And so we ate the most beautiful fruit in the world, dipping our spoons into it and eating the insides much like one eats a kiwi fruit. The taste was subtle and mild, only slightly sweet in comparison to most fruit. There was some irony to be found in the fact that something so beautiful has an almost plain flavor.

As we traveled across Mexico and Guatemala, we continued to see the bright pink bulbs both growing from cacti and being sold in markets. The pink, rubbery skin hid the black and white center and we were glad to know what secret hid in such a beautiful fruit.

Years later we were surprised to find the most beautiful fruit in the world being sold at markets around corner from our Chinatown apartment in Victoria. They lie, individually wrapped in plastic, inside of cardboard boxes labeled "Dragon Fruit."

The proper name, the Internet tells me, is pitaya or Hylocereus undatus. The fruit grows in most tropical regions of the planet but likely originated in the Southern Mexico/Northern Central America region in which we first discovered and devoured it.

In addition to dragon fruit, it is also called the apple cactus, the rose cactus, the strawberry pear, nanettikafruit, and various other names. But for us, it will always be la fruta mas bella del mundo, the most beautiful fruit in the world. And from time to time, we’ll go around the corner to the market and buy one, put it on a plate, and slice it open with a kitchen knife. We’ll dream that our knife is a machete and that our kitchen table is outside under a vertical garden and we’ll consume the bland taste of beauty.

Tales from the Yellow City: All Hail the Fire Parrot

For a brief second, Jen looked shocked. Tears formed at her eyes, which she wiped away. Struggling with her typical self control, she looked me in the eye, and gave me an opening: “Do you want to take it back?” she asked.

***

When I travel, I always carry far too many guidebooks with me (my all time favorite being this one). The idea that I might not see the best and most interesting things a place has to offer because a particular author decided to sleep in rather than go out researching in the heat and the sun is simply a risk that I hate to take. Whereas the risk to my back from the extra weight the books add to my luggage is more manageable – back surgery is improving all the time.

Thus, during my recent trip to the Yucatàn, I found it rather odd that every single one of my various guidebooks referred to the color of the buildings in Izamal, Mexico as “egg yolk yellow”. It's uncanny, really, that they all use the same term; perhaps the writers went out drinking together and copied their entry for Izamal from the same tourist brochure. To me, anyway, it’s a sunny yellow – not something you’d eat but something you’d recline under. It’s the shade of yellow that kids pick out of their 148 crayon set to color in the sun. It’s a warm yellow, a happy yellow.

Izamal is a small town of about 15,000 people located three hours away from the tourist zone of the Mayan Riviera. The city was once a religious center for the Mayan people and was home to 12 pyramids. The Catholic, as they were good at doing, knocked down the largest pyramid and built a huge yellow convent on top of it. The town continues to serve as a religious center today and in 1993, the Pope visited and gave a benediction at the convent.

The hour and a half bus ride from Valladolid to Izamal traveled though the heart of Yucatan. On secondary roads, the bus passed through small villages where people still live in Mayan style huts, single room oval cabins with thatched roofs and stick walls. Chickens and turkeys wandered behind crumbling stone walls.

When the bus arrived in Izamal, Jen and I stumbled out into the hot, sunny air. Our various guidebooks warned us that no taxis existed in town and that the place we were staying was a long hike from main zocolo and bus station. Thus, when a man approached us and asked if we wanted a ride on his bici-taxi, we decided to do it. His bici-taxi looked like it was homemade job - a bike in the back with a small metal-welded rickshaw in the front. Overall, it appeared like it could transport no more than a week’s worth of groceries, much less three people and two full backpacks.

“Are you sure?” I asked the man in Spanish. “Our stuff weighs a lot.”

He looked at us like we were crazy and indicated that we should get in. We loaded everything onto the bici-taxi and, with obvious effort, he won the battle against inertia. We began rolling down the quiet streets. We passed the sunny yellow convent, rolled past a row of parked real taxis, cruised along streets lined with sunny yellow buildings, and five minutes later we were at the guest house. All in all, it was about a five minute walk to the center of town, thus supporting my theory that the authors of our guidebooks had been "researching" the local tequilas the night before they came to Izamal.

The next day Jen and I explored many of the sights of Izamal. Like the shade of yellow most of its buildings are painted, Izamal is a warm, sunny town. Its colonial streets are quiet and free of the heavy traffic that clogs most cities in the Yucatan and its restaurants serve some of the best regional cuisine, such as pumpkin seed salsa or, my favorite, panuchos. The main sights in Izamal are the pyramids and the convent. The pyramids are interesting for their urban setting. They are tucked in and behind the regular buildings and houses of the city. It’s an odd feeling to be standing on an ancient pyramid and see that literally across the street is someone’s house.

The largest pyramid in town and the second largest in the whole Yucatan Peninsula is Kinich Kak Moo (sometimes spelled Kinick Kak’mo). One of our various guidebooks stated that Kinich Kak Moo translated to “Sun Eye of the Fire Parrot,” while another specified Macaw rather than parrot, while a third blandly explained that the pyramid was originally a temple to the Mayan sun god.

At any rate, the Fire Parrot definitely seemed to be spreading its wings that day. It was hot and the sun glared down with the type of fiery anger that makes most weak mortals – or at least pale vacationers from northern climes – crawl into an air conditioned room and grab a cold drink (preferably one made out of blended ice and tequila).

Jen and I, hot and sweaty as we were, decided to climb up the massive structure. Steep steps led up to what we thought was the top. However, upon reaching the summit, we discovered a massive flat area, which seemed larger than a football field, covered with grasses and trees. At the far end was another, steeper pyramid. Iguanas scampered out of our way as we crossed the field.

As we climbed the second narrow set of stairs, I couldn’t help think about how cool this whole place was. We were the only people on the entire pyramid which was the size of a small mountain. I thought about a guy I knew who got married at one of the Catholic cathedrals ruins in Antiqua, Guatemala and wondered if the locals ever got married at this place. “This would be a cool place to get married,” I said out loud.

“No, it’s too hot, but it would be a good place to get engaged,” replied Jen, which after 11 years of dating is the type of thing she sometimes says and that I usually ignore.

Now, I need to be clear here: when I made that comment I was in no way thinking about myself. I have put off thinking of getting married for so long that I didn’t even consider Jen and myself at all when I mind drifted to the topic of weddings at ruins. I had absolutely no plans, nor I thought, desires to get married. My main goal for the future of Jen and my relationship was to go see a movie in Valladolid that night (which, as it turns out, would take some convincing on my part as the theater was only showing horror movies).

Still, when Jen made that comment, something changed. There we were, standing on a huge pyramid in the middle of a city that had been occupied for thousands of years surrounded by a deep green jungle that stretched to every horizon around us. I looked up, and the Sun Eye of the Fire Parrot stared back.

Something felt right.

Thus, half way back down, I looked up at Jen (she was crouched, scrambling down the steep steps above me), and asked her to marry me. For a brief second, Jen looked shocked. Tears formed briefly at her eyes, which she wiped away.

I must have looked panicked. I felt panicked.

Struggling with her typical self control, she looked me in the eye, and gave me an opening: “Do you want to take it back?” she asked.

I did not.

So, by the time we reached the bottom again, Jen and I were soundly and permanently engaged to be married. It was a really, really hot that day and perhaps Jen acquiesced solely so she could get out of the sun and go get something cool to drink. Perhaps I asked because I was moved by the history and beauty of this foreign place. The Fire Parrot works in mysterious ways.

After 11 years of dating, I finally “know Jen well enough” to make the big leap. Since we’ve been together for so long, I really doubt much will change. Still, there is something different about just being together and declaring our intention to always be together. This is perhaps not the most romantic engagement story I’ve heard, but I truly feel like I am the luckiest guy around: Jen is my best friend, an amazing travel buddy, and my true partner in life.

And, as long as there are still pyramids in the Yucatàn, she always will be.

Oh Mexico, I've Never Been There But I'd Sure Like to Go. . .

Actually, I've been lucky to have been to Mexico quite a bit. And as a bleak January turns into a drab February, I've been thinking a lot about warmer climates. We have several friends taking vacations in Mexico this spring and I finally decided to go through my old files and scribblings and write some recommendations for a more popular part of that country. Thus, I'm please to announce a new chapter on the Gulch Guides site - The Gulch Quick and Dirty Guide to the Mayan Riviera.

The Mayan Riviera (also called the Riviera Maya) is the sunny strip of white beaches and green jungles that stretch 127 km from Cancun to Tulum. If you're lucky enough to be heading down there, drink a cerveza on the beach for me. Like everything on the Gulch Guides site, the things that we have recommended come from our own experiences and are our very favorites.