We spent three days at Mahahual, which is about two hours by bus from Chetumal. We specifically chose days when there were no cruise ships in port. On June 29th, for example, four cruise ships docked, with a total capacity of 16,622. Obviously we weren’t there, but it certainly sounds like Hell. Having the place pretty much to ourselves, though, was definitely Heaven.

Our hotel was right on the Malecón, except, unlike La Habana and Chetumal, the Malecón in Mahahual was just the promenade on the beach. No seawall. Our hotel had a beach club (as most of them did, in order to monetize all the cruise ship tourists), but as hotel guests we had full access.

Most of the beaches at Mahahual had netted areas, about 20 yards deep, that defined each hotel’s domain, although you could mostly pass between them. Water depth ranged from just below the knee to just below the neck. So probably chest height on normal people.

There were angled openings in the net, for boats and swimmers to get out of the beach zones, and just beyond that, maybe another 30 yards out, was a floating barricade to keep the sargassum from floating up on the beach and decaying. It’s the line beyond the netting poles you can see in the picture above. It was quite the tourist problem, as the smell is pretty intense. There was one spot on the Malecón where the sargassum had crept past an opening in the barricade, and we declined to eat at the restaurant right in front of it. Before the barrier was put in, the sargassum would clog the beach along its entire length at times, and I’m sure the stench must have been something.

But our beach was clear and beautiful, and we swam multiple times each day, in addition to our snorkel adventures. When we visited Laguna Bacalar, we were stunned that there wasn’t even a hint of cold in the water. You just slipped right in without a moment’s adjustment. Imagine our surprise when we went for our first swim, and the sensation wasn’t so much an absence of cold as the presence of warm. The water was actively warm, like a pleasant bath. I mean, kind of by definition, shouldn’t an ocean be colder than a lake? We attribute it to the meteorological phenomenon known as El Baño.

The Malecón

My absolute favorite part of the Malecón was the galaxy of storefront and beachfront pharmacies serving the cruise ship clientele.

I was very excited at the prospect of picking up some recreational painkillers (for my recreational pain), but Dorothy insisted that they were all fakes. Well, I wouldn’t stand for all these fine beachfront farmacias being tarred with an indiscriminate brush, so I turned to Dr. Google, which led me to a study by the UCLA Health Center. The UCLA team actually went to Mexican pharmacies, bought medications, and took them back to the lab to determine whether they were real or not. Facts would carry the day.

Per the study, the facts were that of the 45 pill samples they tested, almost half were not as advertised. The Adderall contained meth, and the Oxycontin contained either fentanyl or heroin. So I was right! There’s nothing fake about meth, fentanyl, and heroin. Those are absolutely real drugs. And you can just buy them at the local pharmacy. We have much to learn from the Mexicans about supply chain management.

Dorothy was unmoved. I suggested that the right answer was to start with like a quarter pill, until you figured out how strong they are. Her obdurate reply? “This is why women live longer than men.” So stubborn.

Even undrugged, the Malecón had much to offer. Beachfront restaurants with fresh mariscos and ceviche, beachside massages, iguanas… I suppose I didn’t need the drugs after all.

Snorkeling The Reef

The Malecón’s charms notwithstanding, we came to Mahahual to snorkel. There were boats and guides right on the beach at our hotel, and we took 90 minute snorkeling tours each of our two mornings there.

We’d spent a few days on Ambergris Caye in Belize about 35 years ago, at the end of our first trip to Guatemala (the one that started with me getting stuck at the top of a pyramid), and we’d snorkeled the Mesoamerican Reef then. That was spectacular, like swimming in a tropical aquarium, and the parts of the reef we saw in Mahahual didn’t quite measure up.

One explanation for that is that in 35 years the reef system has gone to shit. The more likely explanation, I think, is that in Belize, prime reef was accessible by snorkel, whereas in Mahahual you’d need to dive to get to the good stuff. All of the pictures we saw for the dive trips looked just like Belize, and there were lots of dive shops and dive tours. If we hadn’t cut our visit short to take advantage of an early opening in Chicago for Dorothy’s hip replacement, I think we’d have made it back to Ambergris Caye, which is only a 90 minute ferry ride from Chetumal. But there are great snorkeling reefs around the world, so we’ll have other opportunities.

But that’s to undersell completely how much fun we had snorkeling Mahahual. It may not have been the most spectacular reef snorkeling on the planet, but it was well worth it, and pretty damned fun. Our first day there were three other couples with us, but we had the boat to ourselves on the second day.

We were far enough out for it to be pretty real. Not deep sea diving, by a long shot, but farther than we could swim back, so that gave it a wee frisson.

Before our visit to Mahahual, Amazon.mx delivered a waterproof phone pouch. Not only did it keep the phone dry, you could actually operate the phone through the plastic. Not underwater, of course, but I was able to get video underwater by triggering it above the water and then dropping it below the surface.

The underwater photos were taken by our guide, but I did the videos and some of the above water photos.

The concrete shows up both as a construction material and as the primary source of ornamentation. The other recurring material is decorative ironwork. All of this is topped off with a typically Caribbean color palette, in inviting shades of sherbet and cocktail umbrellas.

Breeze Blocks

Breeze Blocks are pre-poured decorative concrete blocks, and are the primary form of residential ornamentation in Chetumal. They can be standalone designs, or they can be stacked to make repeating motifs, like quarter tile rosettes.

Public Works

In addition to its residential use, poured concrete is also used for the public structures at the Malecón.

Weird Shit We Found On The Street

And sometimes there’s just weird shit out there that just needs to be seen.

This is a street sign in Chetumal. Nothing on the sides of buildings, just the vertically stacked street names, like Deco hotels and theaters, on corner power poles.

I found them super weird looking, but couldn’t put my finger on it. I think it’s that they’re painted by stencil, so they’re monospaced, like Courier. As a result, there’s no vertical kerning between the letters.

Look how much visual space there is between the H and I, and how tight the L and G are, even though they’re the same distance apart.

Sadly, as beautiful as Bacalar is, it qualifies for our Pre-Apocalyptic Tour: places to see while they still exist (e.g. Cuba, Xochimilco, Florida…). [JK about Florida. Not that it won’t disappear soon, but we have no intention of visiting.] Because we can’t have nice things. While Bacalar is off the beaten path (over five hours from Cancun and almost three hours from Tulum), it still gets more tourists than it can sustain. They’ve made rules to protect the fragile ecosystem (no sunscreen, no boating on Wednesdays, etc), but they’re basically unenforceable. People who have known the lagoon for years say that it currently boasts far fewer of the seven colors than it once had.

While we can’t compare it to its more glorious past, its present seems pretty spectacular on its own. We were there for three days, and spent ridiculous amounts of time in the water. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a natural body of water that warm. Getting into the water, I had not even a hint of this-will-be-fine-in-a-minute.

The lagoon and setting are just so beautiful, bobbing in the warm water all day is more than enough “activity.” The water was so shallow at our hotel’s dock, we were able to walk out maybe 50 yards without getting above our necks. The only problem was the walking. The guides we read referred to the bottom of the lagoon as “soft white sand,” but that description, while technically accurate, fails to capture how creepy it felt. It was more like walking in pudding. Water shoes helped, but we picked up pool noodles, just so we could keep our feet out of the muck.

Los Rápidos de Bacalar

On our last day we went to Rápidos, the narrowest part of the lagoon. Laguna Bacalar is fed by an almost 300 mile long underground river that runs parallel to the coast, so there’s actually a current in the lake. In the wide parts you can’t really feel it, but it’s noticeable at the Rápidos. Despite its name, it’s not rapids at all, more like a natural lazy river.

There’s a little beach club there, a balneário, that’s set up a wooden deck running alongside. You can float downstream for about 5-10 minutes and then walk right back and repeat.

You can see in those pictures what looks like stone at the edge and the bottom, but it’s not stone. It’s actually living structures, stromatolites, the oldest life form on Earth. Laguna Bacalar is one of only about a dozen places on the planet where they still exist as anything but a fossil record.

The stromatolites are layers of sediment built up by bacteria that trap minerals and cement them into the rocklike structures. They’re kind of like coral, but it’s bacteria creating the physical structure, not polyps. Back in the day, they were responsible for pumping oxygen into the oceans, changing the Earth’s atmosphere in a way that made it possible for life as we know it to evolve. So, indirectly responsible for the platypus.

If that wasn’t enough Astounding Science, the stromatolite bed in Laguna Bacalar is over 6 miles long, which puts it in the running for the largest organism on Earth.

The stromatolites are, despite their backstory, actually quite fragile. Forgetting that they’re not stone and stepping on one is enough to wreak death and devastation. It’s amazing we’re permitted there at all.

It’s one thing to commune with nature. It’s another thing entirely to engage with geological time and the genesis of life on Earth. While floating down a lazy river with a pool noodle. No, it doesn’t get any better than this.

Xul-Ha

A couple of weeks after the visit described above, we returned to Laguna Bacalar. This time we visited the southern end of the lagoon, at Xul-Ha.

Xul-Ha is definitely sleepier than Bacalar, as well as being quite a bit closer to Chetumal. Bacalar is the touristy end of the spectrum (which still isn’t super touristy), whereas Xul-Ha is just a little village with access to water.

It’s so close to Chetumal, only a 25 minute cab ride from our apartment, you could go in the morning, swim all day, and come back same day. But we appreciate the comforts of showers and clean clothes, so we spent the night.

We stayed in a surprisingly modern hotel just a block from the lagoon.

The lagoon was so quiet compared to Bacalar, which was hardly a hub of activity. No boats, no tourists, just local families using the lagoon like their swimming pool.

We really enjoyed Mahahual and the snorkeling, but just bobbing in the lagoon all morning and again in the afternoon was its own form of joy. We now know to look for lakes, and not just oceans, as we travel.

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.

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 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.