Richard Jernigan -> RE: Modelo extra and plantain chips (Nov. 10 2013 20:29:35)
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Since Charles Vega ("Carlos Francisco" in guitar marketing mode) has expressed interest in traveler accommodations, I will post a little about the first place we stayed in Merida, before we went off to Chichen Itza, Isla Mujeres and the jungle. But first I will set the scene to explain why we stayed in such a lousy dump. Isla del Carmen is at the very south end of the Gulf of Mexico. Two big rivers flow into the bay behind it. Today Ciudad del Carmen is the center of the oil business in the southern Gulf. You are likely to see guys in the hotel restaurant wearing baseball caps, eating hamburgers and speaking in pure oil patch Texan. In 1961 the island was nearly deserted. There were no bridges connecting it to the mainland. The highway traffic crossed the channels on low freeboard dinky little ferries. It was time to make camp by the time we got onto the island. The miles of deserted beaches looked inviting, so we drove off the road, through a little low brush and onto the sand. I cooked dinner--rice and beans. We went to bed and slept the sleep of the just. After breakfast the next morning there was a little rain shower. When we fired up the pickup it sank into the sand up to the rear axle. We fetched fallen palm fronds, put them under the wheels, moved two feet and sank into the sand again. This process was repeated a number of times until it got too hot to work at about 10 AM. We waded neck deep into the Gulf to cool off. Jim went back to the truck for his fishing rod and discovered there was a school of pompano just off the beach. Good luck! One of the tastiest fish in the ocean. After sundown we set to work again, and kept at it until about 3 AM. It became clear we were going to be stuck for days if we had no outside help. Although we had a month's supply of rice and beans, plentiful fish off the beach and about eight gallons of drinking water, we began to worry that we would run out of water if we were stuck for days. The next day we flagged down a couple of trucks. They sympathized but wouldn't risk venturing onto the sand to pull us out. The water problem was eased a bit when Don explored the grove of coconut palms across the road. The coconuts lying on the ground were mature and didn't contain much juice, but the monkeys in the trees were annoyed at Don's trespassing. They pulled fresh coconuts off the trees and hurled them at him. When I commented earlier on Don's expert rock throwing he explained. He was a scrawny kid--still not very tall at age 20, and skinny. To defend himself against the neighborhood bullies he became an accurate and forceful rock thrower. Chunking pebbles at the monkeys drove them into a coconut hurling frenzy. Don returned with armloads of fresh drinking coconuts. Still it looked like a number of nights' more work to get the truck back onto the road. On one of his coconut expeditions, Don noticed the track of a small bulldozer on the highway shoulder. We convened an investigation and debated which way it had travelled. Finally it occurred to us to flag down a car and ask whether they had passed a bulldozer along the way. They said there was one apparently broken down about five miles back down the road. It was too hot to work, not time yet to fish for dinner, so we flagged down a car going the other way and bummed a ride toward the bulldozer. The machine sat beside the road. Its operator was seated on the ground leaning against it, with his hat pushed down over his face, apparently enjoying a siesta. We approached cautiously, uttered a polite greeting, and told our sad story. The driver said the bulldozer had broken down. He was waiting for the mechanic, whose arrival time was unpredictable. I told him I would give him twenty pesos if he would pull us out of the sand. Without further ado, the driver arose, drained about a cup full of water from the fuel tank, and fired up the bulldozer after it belched black smoke and steam for a while. We rode back to our camp in style. The truck was pulled onto the road promptly. I gave the driver the promised 20 pesos. He thanked me and asked for some water. We gave him a cup full. Instead of drinking it, he poured it into the fuel tank. The bulldozer chugged and burped to a stop. When we drove away, the driver was back in full siesta mode, waiting for the mechanic. We got to Merida about sundown, tired, hot, hungry and salty from our days and nights at the beach. I saw a casa de huespedes sign and pulled over to the curb. We inspected the room. It was terrible. There was one big bed, with neither sheet nor blanket. The bare mattress was covered with little brown spots, a sure sign of bedbugs. The bathroom was dark, dank, moldy and overrun with swarming cockroaches. But we had our jungle hammocks with mosquito netting, and in those days all cheap hotels in the tierra caliente had stout hammock hooks in the walls. We negotiated a price of 15 pesos ($1.20) for the three of us. We braved the cockroaches and the mold to shower, and felt much better. It was Saturday night, so we unpacked our suits and put them on. When we asked directions to the town square for the evening paseo the ill tempered old woman running the dump surveyed our suits and ties, then announced that the price was 15 pesos for each one of us, not 15 for all three. We turned without a word, returned to the room and started packing. The woman followed us, observed for a couple of minutes and relented. On our arrival at the town square I was particularly struck by the first incident. There were four or five shoe shine artists seated on a bench at the corner. One got up, approached, greeted us politely and offered his services. I responded just as politely that we meant to walk about a little bit first. What struck me was that without further conversation, the shoe shine man said, "Gracias, jovenes, y buenas noches," and returned to the bench. There were no tourists at all in Yucatan in those days. None. Cancun was still just sand dunes. There was one small travelers' hotel on Isla Mujeres. When we spent the day at Chichen Itza, we were the only visitors. Eleven years later my wife and I visited Yucatan. There were tourists then. We couldn't set foot in the street without being assailed by souvenir vendors, various kinds of touts, con men and kids asking for a handout. They wouldn't give up pestering us as long as we were in public. But in 1961 people still had good manners. We patrolled the plaza. The paseo still worked as it had for centuries. The young men circulated in one direction, the young women and their chaperones strolled the opposite way. We got smiles and a few giggles, but no chaperone was going to let her charge converse with strangers, much less obvious foreigners. About midnight we went back to the dump where we planned to sleep. It was hot. The windows had no screens, but there were no mosquitoes. Presumably Merida was being regularly sprayed with DDT, as were cities in Texas at the time. To get the most benefit from the scarcely existing breeze we hung up our jungle hammocks without the mosquito nets. Fortunately, before we dozed off a thunderstorm passed through and cooled things down. We put up the mosquito nets. The next morning I awoke with one elbow near the mosquito net. On the net, waiting patiently for the elbow to contact it, was a bug. I had never seen a bedbug in person, but I took it to be one. Nearby were dozens of other bugs, also waiting. In a line up the hammock rope was a further contingent of bugs. We packed up and got out of there, heading east for Chichen Itza, Isla Mujeres, and eventually the high jungle of Quintana Roo and the Petén of northern Guatemala. I hope you are sufficiently impressed by our choice of lodgings, "Carlito". We got to know not only the price gouging ways of the old bitch proprietor, but also the customs of the local bedbugs. RNJ I should add that I have stayed at a number of very nice inexpensive places in Mexico, and enjoyed warm hospitality. At age 17 I spent the summer in Mexico traveling by myself. I stayed at the Casa Maravilla in Uruapan, sadly long out of business. It was a good sized private house converted into a nine-room hotel. There was a tropical garden in the patio. The clean and comfortable rooms were arranged around the patio. Under the wide eaves of the roof beside each room door there was a cage with singing jilgueros (linnets in English). The owner's family ate in the dining room with papa at the head of the table. There was a pretty and slightly flirtatious Indian teenager who waited tables….
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