Tales Of The Quintana Roo
Our more worldly readers will know that our current location, Chetumal, is in the state of Quintana Roo, as is the rest of the Riviera Maya (Cancun, Cozumel, Tulum…). I love that the name sounds alien enough that James Tiptree Jr. used it as a title for a collection of science fiction short stories, Tales of the Quintana Roo, and Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne named their daughter Quintana Roo. Because Betty was apparently taken.
Chetumal is a little different than our previous stops, as the focus here is much more on natural splendor than culture. The city itself is on the coast, tucked below the Riviera Maya right at the Belize border. Sadly, although we’re a five minute walk to the Malecón, the bay isn’t swimmable. There’s enough pesticide runoff from nearby farms to have made the water unsafe.
But the entire area around Chetumal is a paradise. There are Mayan ruins, cenotes, Taam Ja’ (the world’s second largest blue hole), and a manatee sanctuary. Bacalar, known as the Lagoon of Seven Colors, is swimmable (as long as you don’t use sunscreen) and under 40 minutes away. It’s a 90 minute ferry ride to Ambergris Caye in Belize and its barrier reef. And unlike the Riviera Maya, it’s not inundated with tourists. We’re about six hours by bus from Cancun, and over three hours south of Tulum. The kind of tourists who do the Riviera Maya just don’t come this far.
While there’s plenty to do here, our rhythm is decidedly more chill than it’s been so far. Part of it is that much of what’s special here is nearby, but not in the city proper, so we’re not constantly out engaging with the culture. Part of it is the heat. It’s been right in the neighborhood of 90° every day, which incents a fair amount of torpor. Our typical day involves getting up, going out for a walk before the heat sets in, and then hunkering down in our apartment until dark, when it’s safe to leave again. This is siesta weather, for sure.
And part of it is that Dorothy’s hips have taken a turn for the worse. We’re waiting to schedule the replacement surgery in Chicago, and will bail from wherever we are as soon as we have the date. In the meantime, her walking capacity is limited, so taking it easy is best, for all of the various reasons.
Our Apartment
Ooh, this one’s nice. It’s a bedsit, so it’s the first time we haven’t had a bedroom with a door, but that’s less bothersome than I thought it would be. It’s nicely appointed, with new furniture and plenty of shelves, drawers, and cabinets. And it’s pretty well equipped. We always buy some housewares when we settle in, knowing we’ll leave them behind, and this apartment has needed close to nothing. A mixing bowl, a few storage containers, and a small table fan. That’s about it.
We’re the apartment at the end. 
Looking from the dining area to the front door. 
Our second apartment with a full-size refrigerator. Unlike Cuba, there’s enough food in the mercados here to fill it. 
Looking from the dining area to the bedroom. 
Living room. 
Nice teak bathroom and step-in shower. 
Bedroom, with lots of hanging room and storage. The first time we haven’t had to buy more hangers.
The Neighborhood
We love our neighborhood. We’ve had really good luck on neighborhoods so far. Every one has turned out to be exactly where we’d have picked if we’d known the city better. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than smart.
As mentioned, we’re only a few blocks to the Malecón. We walk there almost every evening, to enjoy the cooling ocean breeze. And once again, we are right next to an ice cream shop. We’re only half a block away, which is our closest so far.
I was reflecting on our good fortune, when my niece, Amber, pointed out that it was probably less good fortune and more the relationship of Latin American culture to ice cream. It’s probably hard to be too far from an ice cream shop here.
I imagined a visitor to the US, going from city to city and marveling that no matter where they stayed, a MacDonalds was right near by. We would just shake our heads.
There are plenty of restaurants either walking distance or a short, cheap cab ride away, and we’re right by the Centro, the main business district in town. We’re also fairly convenient to mercados here, but we’re not as close as we usually are. It’s about a mile and a half round trip to the closest mercado, which is a little longer than is comfortable for Dorothy at this point.
That’s OK, though, because the taxis here are so plentiful and cheap. The round trip cab ride to the closest mercado is only 50 pesos, about $2.75. Round trip to one of the supermercados, which are a little further out, is only about $4 USD. And the supermercados have their own cab stands, so getting back isn’t an issue. We’ve yet to need it, but Uber works here, in the event that we couldn’t find a cab, and is no more expensive than hailing a street taxi.
But the mercados here have a weird quirk we haven’t seen elsewhere. They’re structured just like the mercados we’re used to: big square-block sized buildings broken up into stalls, with everything from clothes to housewares to restaurants.
What’s missing, though, is fresh produce. We’re used to the local mercado being the primary provider of produce to a neighborhood, but the mercados we went to had two vendors each selling fruits and vegetables. It was the weirdest place to find a food desert.
It took some sleuthing, but we finally figured out that there was a constellation of produce vendors ringing each of the mercados. If you didn’t come at the mercado from the right side, you’d miss them, which is what happened to us. So, mystery solved, except for the mystery of how that particular pattern has come to dominate the local landscape.
The Malecón
Besides its shape, and the whole seawall thing, the Malecón in Chetumal doesn’t actually have much in common with La Habana’s Malecón. The biggest difference is activity.
Getting anywhere in Habana is hard. Cars are expensive to operate and taxis are priced for tourists. That leaves bikes and feet, which is also how most Habaneros get to work, suppressing the desire to walk or bike for leisure. People go out, but not in the volumes you’d expect. Combine that with the absence of street vendors, and Habana’s Malecón is much less activated than Chetumal’s, especially at night.
What the two Malecóns do have in common is that they’re very, very pretty.
One of the other differences is that Habana’s Malecón is just seawall and water, whereas Chetumal’s has mangroves growing right at the shoreline, so tropical vegetation is part of the landscape. Habana has lots of little parks, especially in Habana Vieja, but Chetumal definitely feels more lush and tropical overall.
Part of that shoreline lushness is the birds. There’s a black bird that looks almost like a crow, but when it flies its tail feathers spread in a very un-crowlike manner. I don’t know what it’s called*, but it has a particular song, a puh-weet that’s ubiquitous here.
*I do now. We ran the audio through the Merlin app, and it correctly identified the birds as great-tailed grackles, also known as the Mexican grackle. Thanks to our friend Lisa for the recommendation!
At dusk, hundreds (thousands?) of these birds nest in the mangroves, and the collective birdsong will give you nightmares.
Sadly, this photo doesn’t even come close to capturing the Hitchcockian onslaught of these birds as they settle in for the night.
We’ve fallen into a funny rhythm where the Malecón is concerned. We take a walk every evening after dinner, right before sunset. Then we sit on the seawall for about half an hour. We’ll probably get up and move to a different spot at some point, but it’s about half an hour total. And for that half hour, we do… nothing.
We might chat a little. We haven’t taken a vow of silence. As if. But we’re pretty quiet for that half hour, enjoying the sunset, the view, the ocean breeze, and the sound of the water. It’s finally occurred to us that we are actually doing something: we’re being still.
Which sounds silly, but being still is hard to come by under normal circumstances. Of course, our current circumstances are anything but normal, and they appear to be conducive to stillness, which is a lovely side effect. We’d hoped this adventure would help us learn to live more in the moment, and our evening bout of stillness is proof we’ve made progress.
Night time is also when the Malecón comes to raucous life, and when we’re done being still we’re delighted to be in the thick of it.
Every night of the week, there’s a row of food stalls running along one section of the Malecón. There are tacos and tortas, hot dogs and hamburgers, & chips and fries.
But the real attraction is the sweets. These stalls feature a kaleidoscope of local specialties: Marquesitas, Machacados, and Chamoyadas.
So far we’ve only tried the Machacado. Because we only brought so many clothes with us, and it would be convenient if they still fit. It’s impossible to know exactly what’s in one, as the process is mysterious. A guy in front of the cart takes your order and shouts it to the guys in the back of the cart. A few minutes later they hand the result to the first guy, who hands it to us. It’s a mystery.
But we’ve looked, and they appear to be made of: fresh fruit (I chose mango, because, mango), vanilla ice cream, and sweetened condensed milk. There’s a large ice spear, which also appears to be made of sweetened condensed milk, so it doesn’t dilute as it melts. It’s then garnished with cookies (your choice) and marshmallows, because it clearly wasn’t sweet enough. It feels like a dumbbell in your hand.
I lamented that it didn’t come with a spoon, until I realized that one of the marshmallows was impaled on the end of a plastic spoon. They think of everything.
The Marquesita is also a local creation. They make thin waffles (not crepes, just very thin waffles), roll them into a cone, fill them with Edam cheese, and then slather them with everything from chocolate sauce to caramel to Nutella, for a sweet/savory combo I haven’t yet wrapped my head, or mouth, around. We tend to hit the Malecón in the evenings, so we go for dessert. These seem substantial enough to count as food.
Finally, the stalls offer Chamoyadas, a distinctly Mexican treat, if not indigenous to Chetumal. It’s fairly simple, especially compared to the Machacado and the Marquesita. It’s basically juiced mangoes and Chamoy sauce, garnished with chunks of fresh mango. The complexity comes from the sauce. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s made of dried apricots, chile de arbol, Tajin, and hibiscus flowers. It packs a lot of sweet, spicy, salty, and sour into a tiny package. Mango and Chamoy is a not uncommon flavor mix in Mexican ice cream. Perhaps it started with the Chamoyada.
On the weekends, a vibrant night market gets added to the mix. Unlike Oaxaca, Chetumal isn’t really a crafts center. There are stalls with carved wooden trinkets and such, but most of the vendors are selling manufactured goods.
But the night market did finally give up its secret: Chetumal’s primary craft is… baking.
Every popup market we’ve been to in Mexico has sweets. Dulces, pan, postres… But they’ve all been selling goods from other makers (the dulcerias weren’t selling homemade candy), never their own handiwork. Chetumal felt more like a bake sale than a night market. These were vendors very clearly baking at home and bringing their wares to market. Best local crafts ever.
Museo de la Cultura Maya
Chetumal isn’t dripping with culture, but there’s a very nice Mayan museum in the Centro right by the nearest mercado. One of the highlights is a series of scale models of some of the more impressive Mayan structures.
The tallest structure is the iconic Temple V from Tikal. 
This is from Yaxchilán, and I just love how very Midcentury Modern it looks. 
This is a life size reproduction of a Chac Mool, a recurring Mesoamerican sculpture motif that no one can explain. This one is from Chichén Itzá, so we’ve seen the original.
The model of this particular pyramid, El Castillo de Chichén Itzá, or the Temple of Kukulcán, is more than a little triggering. We’re going to take the Wayback Machine to 1985 and the very first international trip Dorothy and I took (with the exception of a few day trips to Tijuana and Ensenada).
We were dewy-eyed, still in our 20s, and headed to Guatemala, but our route was through Cancun. We bought a package trip that included airfare and hotel, and blew off the hotel, which was still cheaper than just purchasing airfare. We didn’t have plans or an itinerary, just a belief that once we were there we’d figure out a cheap way to get to Guatemala.
We wound up driving to Mérida to get a flight to Guatemala, but not really on purpose. We just headed in that direction to swim in a cenote and visit Chichén Itzá, a major Mayan metropolis, and when we got to Mérida we decided to ditch the rental car and grab a flight to Guatemala.
One of my endearing quirks is that I’m afraid of heights. Not can’t-fly-in-airplanes afraid (one of my other endearing quirks is an enormous capacity for suspending disbelief), but definitely nauseous-at-the-rim-of-the-Grand-Canyon afraid. As I’m sure you can tell just from the photo of the model, El Castillo is tall. Very tall. It is deeply imbued with height, the specific thing I fear.
So, when we visited Chichén Itzá I, of course, climbed to the top.
In my defense, which is slim, I blame children and grannies. Multiples of each were galloping up the steps all carefree and loose limbed, so how treacherous could it be? Plus, I had visited San Juan Teotihuacán when I toured Mexico with my family at 13, and I specifically remember climbing the pyramid of the Sun (or Moon, I honestly don’t recall which). Since I wasn’t, in 1985, still at the top of said pyramid, I had obviously gotten back down, so really, what could possibly go wrong?
On the way up, nothing. Smooth like butter. Head down, feet moving, don’t look down, and the next thing you know I’m standing on the very narrow top platform with the children and grannies, enjoying all of the extravagant height the pyramid offers. This is not good. I need to be back on solid ground. I need to go back down the steps I’d just effortlessly clambered up.
Purloined stock photo…
Which is when I realize that I can’t see said steps. They’re so steeply raked that you have to have your toes on the precipice to see them. Which requires walking all the way to the edge of something that looks like a cliff. Which, it turns out, I cannot do. Just approaching the edge induces a stomach-churning vertigo. Even though children and grannies are bounding down the steps like passive-aggressive mountain goats, I am certain that if I try I’ll get dizzy and plummet to my death.
Another purloined stock photo…
So I back all the way to the outer wall of the room at the top of the pyramid and lean against it for support and stability. Which doesn’t help, because even though I am objectively leaning backwards, I feel like I’m leaning forward. I start fantasizing about them dropping food and water to me via helicopter, as I cannot imagine how I’ll ever get back down.
All of this top-of-the-pyramid drama has taken less than a minute, and Dorothy is right behind me. Somehow, what with my sweating, panting, and pallor, she manages to figure out that I’m both stupid and fucked. Also, that if I’m going to get rescued, she’s going to have to call in the cavalry herself. She’s not much happier than I am to be on top of a pyramid, but she tells me to stay put (no problem!) and she heads down the pyramid to get help.
She doesn’t have any trouble finding the park rangers, but her real problem is that she doesn’t have enough Spanish to communicate any of the key concepts: pyramid, height, rescue, acrophobia… She searches through her limited Spanish vocabulary and comes up with “Mi esposo tiene corazon de mujer.” My husband has the heart of a woman. The rangers know exactly what she means, and when she tells me this part later, I know that I have never loved her more.
I’m hyperventilating at the top of the pyramid when Dorothy appears, head first, seeming to float above the rim, accompanied by an absolute mountain of a ranger. Turns out there’s a protocol for this, and he explains, in more than passable English, how we’re going to get down. First, he blindfolds me. Vertigo is a visual phenomenon, so, problem solved. Then he has me sit down and inch forward on the platform. He sits down right behind me and wraps his legs around my waist, anchoring me. Then he grabs one of my wrists in one of his paws, and it’s very clear that if I slip, he can just hold my entire weight in his hand.
We inch forward together to the edge of the platform and, on our butts, entwined, scooch our way down the pyramid one step at a time. When we’re about half a dozen steps from the bottom, the ranger tells me it’s safe to remove the blindfold. When I do, the crowd that’s gathered to witness my rescue bursts into applause. Which doesn’t, somehow, feel affirming.
What I love about this story is that the punch line keeps moving. My husband has the heart of a woman looks like the punch line, but then it’s not. Mark gets humiliated for being a mook seems like the punch line, but that’s not it, either.
When we finally return to the States, I call my mother to tell her my tale of woe. When it’s over, she says, “Schmuck. You don’t remember how you got down off the pyramid at Teotihuacán?” And before she finishes the sentence, I do. Blindfolded, on my butt, with a Ranger wrapped around my waist. My 13 year-old self had suppressed the memory, without which my 28 year-old self was doomed to repeat history.
And that’s the punch line.
For bird audio identification too now , Cornell U’s Merlin app … https://www.apple.com/us/search/merlin?src=globalnav
We’d totally forgotten that Dorothy has the Merlin app. Which correctly identified those birds as great-tailed grackles. Thank you!
i have enjoyed every post but this is my current favorite. Keep up the adventuring!
Aw, thanks. I’m so happy to provide entertainment.
On the other hand, your favorite post so far is the one where I’m most thoroughly humiliated. So there’s that.
Oh my gosh! I love you two more and more with every post! Loving living vicariously through your travels and this post made made me laugh to the point of tears!
To be fair, we are very, very lovable. No one blames you for your feelings.
My feelings, on the other hand, are complicated. It’s bittersweet that the post where I share one of the most humiliating episodes of my life is the one everyone seems to love best. I suppose the most positive spin is that I’m probably not done being humiliated, so y’all have something to look forward to.