Christmas in Merida - The Tale
Traveling is exhausting, exhilarating, expensive and utterly essential to the healthy functioning of all human beings.
It had been bothering me immensely that I had lived in this divine country for five months and not stepped foot outside of this city (bearing in mind that this city is probably larger than 30% of countries). My excuse was money - teaching is fun but not lucrative work - but the wanderlust was eying my closeted visa card with increasing fervour.
Which is about when darling Pavel announced, with absolutely no fanfare whatsoever, that he had bought me a ticket to Merida for four days over Christmas.
The heat, he warned, would kill me. "You don't know the PAIN," he howled at me periodically (a warning which, once there, would morph into, "Here comes the PAIN!"). He recommended I bring two t-shirts for every day there - one for the morning and to change into in the evening - and not to bother with anything vaguely resembling warm clothes. I packed 65 SPF sunscreen and he bought me a beach hat.
And the adventure began.
I spent Christmas grinning maniacally at all the Spanish being flung about in the desperate attempt to convince everyone I understood them (a fallacy that did not escape the attention of P's 4 year old niece, who thought it was hilarious that I was also having to ask her "what? sorry? again please?"). We ate beets and cold spaghetti and they assured me this was traditional dinner. His parents even bought me Christmas presents.
And I slept at night on the itsy bitsy bed in which Young Pavel had dreamed dreams of escaping Merida, while Current Pavel cocooned himself in a nearby hammock.
Merida itself was... charming... and vastly different from the roaring splendour of the big city. Christmas morning we slept in, had a leisurely breakfast with the folks, caught the milkrun bus into the city centre, wandered around, had ice cream beside an American tour guide braying to her lemmings that it was okay, this ice cream parlour was "safe", wandered some more... - all before noon. Time is a vacuum in Merida: I was convinced my watch had stopped.
It was not, however, hot. Ah yes, says I to Pavel, I forgot to mention my freakish luck with weather. Do you all realize I have never been to Vancouver (as an adult at least) and had it rain?
Over the next couple of days, we went to Celestun to see wild flamingos and met a lot of P's friends, I did more maniacal grinning, and generally enjoyed it muchly. On the way back to Cancun on the 28th, we stopped off for a night in Valladolid, where I got to swim with da fishes in an underground lake and where we attempted to take in the chasmic Chichen Itza with 45 minutes until closing (at least there was no cover charge given the late hour).
Thursday morning, en route to Cancun, P says to me, well, 12:30 should be enough time to check in given that we only have carry on. Okay, says I, thinking, yeah, if we have no luggage then 90 minutes is more than enough time. Where exactly I got that our flight was at 2pm remains a mystery for the ages.
We're standing in line, quarter to one, when I mutter something about needing to buy postcards but, hey, I'll have the time to do that after we check in. No way, says Pavel. Flight's at 1.
By the time we'd frantically talked our way up to the front, the flight was closed and it was going to cost us $3000US to buy a replacement flight. Each.
Now, I am hideously horrible at changing plans with short notice; I go into serious snitfits, pouting matches, silent stormy rages. I remember watching a show once about the King's Cross fire, and how psychologists figure that so many people died because they had woken up that morning thinking, I will take the train to King's Cross, I will leave by the south elevator, I will turn right..., and they were unable to break from their scripts despite dire peril. That, my friends, is me. I would have died in King's Cross had I not been thousands of miles away at the time.
Yet my first thought at this point is, hey, we can stay!
And I am thinking this fervently to myself when P turns to me and says, hey, we can stay!
And so we do.
We spend two days in the beachfront condo of his friend (her father owns the hotel), with morning ocean swims and reading on white sand beaches until sunset. We daytrip to the fabled ruins of Tulum where I decide I don't actually find touristic ruins that interesting and successfully eat a fish with a head. My brain completely explodes when I go snorkeling in another underground lake, Gran Cenote, and what I thought was a shallow little ring of water turns out to be the gateway to vast underwater cathedrals. Friday night I lose my bank card in a fit of unbelievable stupidity (so pleased was I with my ability to withdraw money, I walked away from the machine without retrieving it). Spent the next three hours freaking out on the phone with my bank, who finally coach me on how to take out money on my visa without a PIN number. I do this Saturday morning, en route to the bus station, and all is happy.
Saturday we trundle our way back to Merida (four hours) and spend five pre-planned, leg-stretching hours having a surprisingly tasty spaghetti dinner (I was desperate for a tortilla-free meal, but skeptical of the quality offered) and a wander around the two so-called "sodomy parks" due to their reputation for gay pick ups. I dole out our limited money: a third to completely-broke P (he had emptied his account on the plane tickets originally, so everything post-Cancun was on me), a third to me, and a third in a hidden pocket for life once we return. Midnight rolls around, we hop on the bus for Palenque, in the state of Chiapas, and doze off happily for most of the eight hour journey to Chiapas.
Sunday morning we find ourselves a semi-fleabag hotel in Palenque and I go to get my cellphone so I can call my parents and tell them I'm alive. But it's not there. Oh my freaking GOD, I think to myself, first my bank card and now my cellphone! What kind of scattered idiot am I? It's not until I notice that all my cables (my phone charger, my iPod charger, my USB) are all gone that I start to get suspicious, because how do you lose something from two separate pockets?
The bastards.
Final count was my cellphone, my cables, my camera, my hairdryer, and all my money, including that in the hidden pocket. I was using my iPod at the time, so I still have that, though I can't recharge it. Pavel still had his third of the money and camera, although the thieves cut into his bag with a knife sharp enough to not only cleanly slice through the bag but two shirts and a pair of underwear as well. We're assuming it happened while we slept on the bus: we were in the second-last row, and it's not uncommon for pros to ride night buses and calmly rob the people in front of them before hopping off at the next stop. My bag was on the rack above me, which no one told at the time is an incredibly bad idea, so the guy probably casually grabbed it, took it to the bathroom, and went through every inch of it. Pavel's was on the floor in front of him, meaning that the guy most likely went through his legs, under the seat, with the knife. Makes me marginally happy we didn't wake up. I'm now counting on karma to sort them out.
So there we were in Palenque, almost all of our money used on the first night in our fleabag hotel, and several days to go until the bus home (thankfully, paid for back in Cancun). I sobbed for twenty minutes while Pavel watched in wide-eyed helplessness, then began the transition to "good story" and "adventure." Luis (my other roommate) wired us $250, giving us about $400, and I had my visa - it wasn't so bad, really.
We did some arithmetic and decided on the following plan of action: we would use my visa to pay for a hotel for the rest of the time there (which would require moving, as the fleabag was cash only), we would eat peanut butter and refried beans (not together) for the rest of the trip, we would spend two of the days just relaxing, and we would spend the remaining $200 on a day trip to the Palenque ruins (which are AMAZING - just incredible) and a couple of waterfalls: the epic Agua Azul and the magical Misol-Ha.
Things I learned while in Palenque: I, the original urban princess, don't mind eating refried beans and tostadas while sitting crosslegged on a hotel bed, and the only hotels that take visa in small town southern Mexico are 5-star resorts with swimming pools, mudspas, tennis courts, and inclusive buffet breakfasts (and amazingly only $1000 Mexican a night for both of us, which is more than I can afford but way less than it was worth).
So we're home now, tired and with about $20 between us in small change. Still, we're safe and alive and we've had an adventure, which is more than a lot of people can say.
There are pics up on Flickr if you're interested: www.flickr.com/photos/enorrie. And, without my darling camera friend, they'll be the last new ones up there for awhile...
And there's my story.
It had been bothering me immensely that I had lived in this divine country for five months and not stepped foot outside of this city (bearing in mind that this city is probably larger than 30% of countries). My excuse was money - teaching is fun but not lucrative work - but the wanderlust was eying my closeted visa card with increasing fervour.
Which is about when darling Pavel announced, with absolutely no fanfare whatsoever, that he had bought me a ticket to Merida for four days over Christmas.
The heat, he warned, would kill me. "You don't know the PAIN," he howled at me periodically (a warning which, once there, would morph into, "Here comes the PAIN!"). He recommended I bring two t-shirts for every day there - one for the morning and to change into in the evening - and not to bother with anything vaguely resembling warm clothes. I packed 65 SPF sunscreen and he bought me a beach hat.
And the adventure began.
I spent Christmas grinning maniacally at all the Spanish being flung about in the desperate attempt to convince everyone I understood them (a fallacy that did not escape the attention of P's 4 year old niece, who thought it was hilarious that I was also having to ask her "what? sorry? again please?"). We ate beets and cold spaghetti and they assured me this was traditional dinner. His parents even bought me Christmas presents.
And I slept at night on the itsy bitsy bed in which Young Pavel had dreamed dreams of escaping Merida, while Current Pavel cocooned himself in a nearby hammock.
Merida itself was... charming... and vastly different from the roaring splendour of the big city. Christmas morning we slept in, had a leisurely breakfast with the folks, caught the milkrun bus into the city centre, wandered around, had ice cream beside an American tour guide braying to her lemmings that it was okay, this ice cream parlour was "safe", wandered some more... - all before noon. Time is a vacuum in Merida: I was convinced my watch had stopped.
It was not, however, hot. Ah yes, says I to Pavel, I forgot to mention my freakish luck with weather. Do you all realize I have never been to Vancouver (as an adult at least) and had it rain?
Over the next couple of days, we went to Celestun to see wild flamingos and met a lot of P's friends, I did more maniacal grinning, and generally enjoyed it muchly. On the way back to Cancun on the 28th, we stopped off for a night in Valladolid, where I got to swim with da fishes in an underground lake and where we attempted to take in the chasmic Chichen Itza with 45 minutes until closing (at least there was no cover charge given the late hour).
Thursday morning, en route to Cancun, P says to me, well, 12:30 should be enough time to check in given that we only have carry on. Okay, says I, thinking, yeah, if we have no luggage then 90 minutes is more than enough time. Where exactly I got that our flight was at 2pm remains a mystery for the ages.
We're standing in line, quarter to one, when I mutter something about needing to buy postcards but, hey, I'll have the time to do that after we check in. No way, says Pavel. Flight's at 1.
By the time we'd frantically talked our way up to the front, the flight was closed and it was going to cost us $3000US to buy a replacement flight. Each.
Now, I am hideously horrible at changing plans with short notice; I go into serious snitfits, pouting matches, silent stormy rages. I remember watching a show once about the King's Cross fire, and how psychologists figure that so many people died because they had woken up that morning thinking, I will take the train to King's Cross, I will leave by the south elevator, I will turn right..., and they were unable to break from their scripts despite dire peril. That, my friends, is me. I would have died in King's Cross had I not been thousands of miles away at the time.
Yet my first thought at this point is, hey, we can stay!
And I am thinking this fervently to myself when P turns to me and says, hey, we can stay!
And so we do.
We spend two days in the beachfront condo of his friend (her father owns the hotel), with morning ocean swims and reading on white sand beaches until sunset. We daytrip to the fabled ruins of Tulum where I decide I don't actually find touristic ruins that interesting and successfully eat a fish with a head. My brain completely explodes when I go snorkeling in another underground lake, Gran Cenote, and what I thought was a shallow little ring of water turns out to be the gateway to vast underwater cathedrals. Friday night I lose my bank card in a fit of unbelievable stupidity (so pleased was I with my ability to withdraw money, I walked away from the machine without retrieving it). Spent the next three hours freaking out on the phone with my bank, who finally coach me on how to take out money on my visa without a PIN number. I do this Saturday morning, en route to the bus station, and all is happy.
Saturday we trundle our way back to Merida (four hours) and spend five pre-planned, leg-stretching hours having a surprisingly tasty spaghetti dinner (I was desperate for a tortilla-free meal, but skeptical of the quality offered) and a wander around the two so-called "sodomy parks" due to their reputation for gay pick ups. I dole out our limited money: a third to completely-broke P (he had emptied his account on the plane tickets originally, so everything post-Cancun was on me), a third to me, and a third in a hidden pocket for life once we return. Midnight rolls around, we hop on the bus for Palenque, in the state of Chiapas, and doze off happily for most of the eight hour journey to Chiapas.
Sunday morning we find ourselves a semi-fleabag hotel in Palenque and I go to get my cellphone so I can call my parents and tell them I'm alive. But it's not there. Oh my freaking GOD, I think to myself, first my bank card and now my cellphone! What kind of scattered idiot am I? It's not until I notice that all my cables (my phone charger, my iPod charger, my USB) are all gone that I start to get suspicious, because how do you lose something from two separate pockets?
The bastards.
Final count was my cellphone, my cables, my camera, my hairdryer, and all my money, including that in the hidden pocket. I was using my iPod at the time, so I still have that, though I can't recharge it. Pavel still had his third of the money and camera, although the thieves cut into his bag with a knife sharp enough to not only cleanly slice through the bag but two shirts and a pair of underwear as well. We're assuming it happened while we slept on the bus: we were in the second-last row, and it's not uncommon for pros to ride night buses and calmly rob the people in front of them before hopping off at the next stop. My bag was on the rack above me, which no one told at the time is an incredibly bad idea, so the guy probably casually grabbed it, took it to the bathroom, and went through every inch of it. Pavel's was on the floor in front of him, meaning that the guy most likely went through his legs, under the seat, with the knife. Makes me marginally happy we didn't wake up. I'm now counting on karma to sort them out.
So there we were in Palenque, almost all of our money used on the first night in our fleabag hotel, and several days to go until the bus home (thankfully, paid for back in Cancun). I sobbed for twenty minutes while Pavel watched in wide-eyed helplessness, then began the transition to "good story" and "adventure." Luis (my other roommate) wired us $250, giving us about $400, and I had my visa - it wasn't so bad, really.
We did some arithmetic and decided on the following plan of action: we would use my visa to pay for a hotel for the rest of the time there (which would require moving, as the fleabag was cash only), we would eat peanut butter and refried beans (not together) for the rest of the trip, we would spend two of the days just relaxing, and we would spend the remaining $200 on a day trip to the Palenque ruins (which are AMAZING - just incredible) and a couple of waterfalls: the epic Agua Azul and the magical Misol-Ha.
Things I learned while in Palenque: I, the original urban princess, don't mind eating refried beans and tostadas while sitting crosslegged on a hotel bed, and the only hotels that take visa in small town southern Mexico are 5-star resorts with swimming pools, mudspas, tennis courts, and inclusive buffet breakfasts (and amazingly only $1000 Mexican a night for both of us, which is more than I can afford but way less than it was worth).
So we're home now, tired and with about $20 between us in small change. Still, we're safe and alive and we've had an adventure, which is more than a lot of people can say.
There are pics up on Flickr if you're interested: www.flickr.com/photos/enorrie. And, without my darling camera friend, they'll be the last new ones up there for awhile...
And there's my story.
Comments
I reading all the back posts as I have just found your blog via Viva Veracruz.
regards,
Theresa