Our apartment was… an apartment, and our neighborhood was kind of industrial and unattractive. We were blessed with a fonda a few blocks away that made the best tortas we’ve ever had, but that represented the neighborhood’s highlight. Honestly, we never even thought to take pictures.

We arrived a month prior, so that Dorothy had time to complete Ruby’s wedding dress and finish the alterations to Layla’s suit. The best Airbnb we found in San Diego was a 14′ Airstream parked in someone’s driveway for $2,000 for the month. Thus, Rosarito.

How much is Rosarito not a destination? When we walked through customs, the Mexican agent, looking down at our passports, asked how long we were staying. “Un mes.” And where are you staying? “Rosarito.” He looked up, startled, and said, “Rosarito?” Apparently no one has ever voluntarily chosen to go to Rosarito for that long.

It’s just south of Tijuana, but the trip to San Diego was rough. Uber to the border. A bus that goes about 100 yards in 30 minutes, but drops you off right at the US Customs entrance, avoiding the 3-4 hour pedestrian queue. The San Diego trolley, which picks up right at the border and deposits in town. Uber to Ruby’s apartment. Total elapsed time: about three hours.

That was more time and effort than we expected, but we also thought we’d be going back and forth just a few times. As it turns out, we underestimated by a wide margin. In fact, we wound up making the full round trip six times, and sleeping just eight nights in our 30 day Airbnb.

What did we wind up doing in Estados Unidos that kept us out of Mexico for all but eight nights? The Medical-Industrial complex attached itself to me and wouldn’t let go. Truthfully, sometimes it’s hard to tell shark from remora.

Soylent Green Is People!

The actual story about my condition isn’t very interesting. Old person has organ fail, harvesting ensues. Whatever. But before the speculation starts (“I didn’t even know he had a heart”), the organ in question was my gall bladder. A glorified appendix. Although I did learn, while I was in the hospital, that no one seems to have a gall bladder. I would say 80% of the folks in my ward, both patients and visitors, were walking about gall bladder-less. Who knew that every day we walk through a world of ghost gall bladders?

What is arguably of interest, though, is how the Medical-Industrial complex dealt with me, with a little cross-cultural observation thrown in, since this escapade started in Mexico. Let’s dig in, shall we?

We were visiting Dorothy’s parents in Temecula, and as I went to sleep one night, I rolled over and got a sudden sharp pain in my chest. It felt like a muscle pull, so I figured I could ride it out. By the time I figured out it wasn’t a muscle pull I was in so much pain I wasn’t rational, or I’d have awakened Dorothy and had her take me to the ER. Instead, the episode lasted about 35 minutes, and I went to sleep when it passed.

When we woke up in the morning I told Dorothy what had happened (“This is why women live longer than men”), and we set out for urgent care. My blood pressure was fine, blood labs were fine, EKG was fine, but they noticed some inflammation in my lungs. I got a diagnosis of bronchitis, a fistful of meds, and a pat on the back.

I’m pretty sure the bronchitis diagnosis was correct. I’d had a lingering cold in Guanajuato that lasted so long we were taking side bets on when the secondary infection would show up, so bronchitis tracked. But I’ve had bronchitis before, and the chest pain I’d had the night before was nothing like bronchitis. I’ve never had a heart attack, but I imagine one would feel much like what I’d enjoyed the previous evening. However, no lingering effects. No numbness or tingling. No more aphasia than previously. When the pain passed, it was over.

If you’re keeping score, this first episode was September 12th, and the urgent care visit was on the 13th. We’d only planned on visiting in Temecula for a few days, so we headed back to Rosarito after we picked up my new meds. That night I had another episode, again in bed, and thought to check my blood pressure (we’re old, so a blood pressure cuff is part of our travel self-sufficiency kit). I didn’t get it right at the onset, but it was 225/83 about ten minutes in. Pretty alarming. So, off to the ER in Rosarito.

I basically went straight from triage into the ER, where a doctor saw me right away. My blood pressure was still super high, so they gave me a medication, a prescription for high blood pressure medication to fill in the morning, and had me there for observation until my blood pressure dropped and I was stable. I think I was in and out of there in under an hour, and the entire suite of services was under $50. This was retail pricing; we’re not traveling with US-style international medical coverage (I explain how we’re managing health care while we travel here).

So back to our Airbnb, with a quick shoutout to our host. Not only did she tell us which hospital to go to, she called a cab, went with us to the hospital, and waited until we were done, just to make sure her translation services weren’t required. We haven’t had any bad hosts in the last year, and we’ve had some very good ones. But that, that was above and beyond. I’m sorry the rating system tops out at five stars.

Sitting in the apartment, waiting to calm down enough to sleep, and another episode comes on. This time I threw on the blood pressure cuff right away: 265/100-something. When I search to find out how bad that is, Google asks me how I can still type, since most of my organs are about to fail.

Back to the ER, less than an hour after I left. They take me right back in, check my blood pressure, and give me one of the meds I was supposed to start the next morning (different than what they gave me on the first visit). I hang out about 45 minutes until my blood pressure is reliably stable and they send me home again. Without, I feel compelled to note, charging me for the second visit.

The next day I had another minor episode, despite being on the blood pressure meds. It lasted under five minutes, and blood pressure was 156/83. Still bad, but better. I guess. Although it felt like if I was being properly treated I wouldn’t be having any episodes. We thought it best to be on the US side of the medical system, so we returned to Temecula. I swear, I think this is where it went off the rails. I’ll never know for sure, but I honestly believe I’d have been better off under the Mexican health care system.

This takes us to the 15th, with no more episodes and blood pressure mostly in the 110s to 130s, with a few peaks at 147 and 151. On the 16th, although still no episodes of chest pain, my blood pressure was stubbornly high, consistently in the 140s and 150s. So, off to try our luck at a US ER.

Not as smooth an experience as the Rosarito ER, but a similar outcome: a diagnosis of high blood pressure and a different medication. Thank you very kindly, you’re free to go now.

The next day, the 17th, I had two minor episodes, both of which had blood pressure readings in the 160s. Another minor episode on the 18th sent me back to the ER. They ran the same set of blood tests and EKGs they’d run before, and discovered that my liver enzymes had spiked dramatically since my visit two days earlier. And thus we had our culprit: the unassuming gall bladder.

Turns out I, and all of the medical professionals, had assumed that the high blood pressure was causing the chest pain. Rather, gallstones blocking my bile duct were causing the chest pain, and the pain was shooting my blood pressure up. Easy, by-the-books solution: they’d clear out the gallstones and remove the gall bladder to keep them from recurring. It seems that once your gall bladder starts spitting out stones it just can’t stop.

So far, so good. The reason I’m drowning y’all in so much detail, though, is because it’s the foundation on which the next part rests. Because this is where it goes south.

After explaining all this, I’m told they’ll be admitting me to the hospital for the procedures. Which seems sensible only because I don’t know how long this is going to take. I spend my first 24 hours on a gurney in a hallway, because they don’t have room for me anywhere else. Even better, food and water are withheld for that entire 24 hours, because no one can definitively answer the question as to whether it’s OK for me to eat or not. Not even fluids are provided. I can just desiccate in the hallway, if you please.

Extra fun in that first 24 hours: I had blood taken eight times. Despite the fact that I had an IV port hanging off one arm. I finally get an explanation from a nurse: some of the blood needs to be drawn directly (whatever, sure), but mostly it’s because they’re sending phlebotomists to draw blood, who aren’t licensed to access the IV port. Has to be an RN. Every time someone approached me with a needle, I demanded a nurse, so they could use the port. And I still got spiked eight times in that first 24 hours. I had the bruises for weeks.

On Day Two, they finally move me to a group ward. Kind of like a cross between sleepover camp and prison. People just keep showing up or disappearing randomly. But an actual doctor does finally pay a visit. So I ask why, if both upcoming procedures are outpatient (removing the gallstones is endoscopy and removing the gall bladder is laparoscopy), I’m in the hospital at all. I’ve been asymptomatic since checking in, so why don’t I just check out and come back for the outpatient procedures?

Up until this point, the barbarity of the care I’d been provided had seemed site specific. Sure, many hospitals are under the same staffing and space constraints, but my treatment had been specific to those circumstances. If I’d happened to have gone to a hospital without those constraints, in an imaginary world where such a place existed (like Mexico), I wouldn’t have been warehoused in a hallway without food and water.

But the doctor’s response to my seemingly reasonable question cast the whole system in a more sinister light, where my treatment represented something endemic rather than situational. His answer was, sure, I could check out. But it would be Against Medical Advice, meaning that my insurance wouldn’t cover my hospital stay (it turns out that’s not true, but it’s not clear whether that was an intentional falsehood or just the thoughtless repetition of a discredited urban myth). And good luck getting on the schedule for outpatient services. That would be weeks, at best (and don’t forget, I have a wedding to attend on October 6th). So if I actually wanted this thing done and paid for, I should sit tight in the hospital until it happened.

Which I did, because, really, what was my choice? Even so, “until it happened” took five days. I was in the hospital for five days to get two outpatient procedures. And if that wasn’t enough, my gift with purchase was a case of Covid (our first, after all this time), which I gave to both Dorothy and her elderly parents before knowing I had it. We cleared protocol with only a couple of days to spare before Ruby’s wedding.

About That Wedding…

There hasn’t been a lot of pleasure in this story so far (unless you count schadenfreude), so I’m going to take a detour before returning to my previously scheduled screed. We were in San Diego in the first place for my daughter Ruby’s wedding to her partner, Layla. It was very hard to keep our eyes on that ball during all the Sturm und Drang, but that was the actual point of our presence.

And, with apologies to my son and everyone else whose weddings I’ve attended, it was the best wedding I’ve ever attended. Bar none. Ruby and Layla are such a delightful couple, they take so much pleasure in one another’s company, it is impossible to be around them without getting a contact high. Everything about the wedding, which Ruby planned out meticulously over the previous two years (wonder where she gets that from), was perfect.

I’m only slightly ashamed to admit that I teared up during the reading of the vows. They were beautiful, heartfelt, genuine, and full of their true playful, loving spirits. We feel… I was going to say “lucky,” or “grateful.” But I think I’ll stick with “we feel.” I’m never unsurprised when it happens.

Here’s a sizzle reel of the wedding, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Don’t Worry, Be Angry…

OK. We were on fire about the medical industry. Let’s not forget why we’re here.

What stood out to me about all this was the difference between the treatment I received in Mexico vs. the US. It’s not a direct comparison, as I only got as far as the high blood pressure diagnosis in Mexico, although I’m certain if I’d stayed in that system they’d have found the gallstones. After all, my first trip to a US ER also ended with a high blood pressure diagnosis.

The Mexican system seems to be driven to maximize efficiency. My first experience with the Mexican healthcare system was for kidney stones in Oaxaca, but there was a part of that story I didn’t share at the time. The doctor had prescribed me 15 pills of one of the medications, but when I got to the pharmacy they were only available in pre-packs of ten each. So they gave me two packs, a total of 20 pills. Five more than I’d been prescribed.

The horror! No one in the healthcare system in the US would tolerate such sloppiness. To say nothing of our broader social expectations that no one should get one more thing than they’re entitled to. We spend more on the mechanisms to make sure that no one who hasn’t earned it gets safety net coverage than we would if we just approved everyone who applied. We’re just dicks.

The US system, unlike Mexico’s, is absolutely, completely, heroically indifferent to efficiency. Frankly, it seems bipolar. On the one hand, the system’s underlying values seem to be accuracy and certainty, which feels like a response to tort risk. We over prescribe, over order, and over treat, to make sure there’s no potential liability. Unnecessary tests and procedures are a major component of our overall healthcare spending (over $200 billion/year by some accounts).

On the other hand, we also under prescribe, under order, and under treat. How often have you had a health complaint effectively ignored by a provider or, at best, under explored? The answer to that depends quite a bit on who you are. White and male? Probably doesn’t happen much. Not white and male? Share your stories in the Comments.

Maybe it’s the difference between being in the hospital (over treating) and seeing your personal doctor (under treating). Maybe the incentives built into our system are in conflict with one another, and sometimes lurch one way, sometimes another. Maybe the US system is just broken in random ways.

So what happens when you value efficiency over certainty? You get pre-packs of meds and over-delivery. There’s no one in a Mexican pharmacy counting pills, filling bottles, checking insurance, printing invoices… They’re just grabbing boxes off the shelves and ringing them up. Could be turkey franks. Getting a prescription filled is near instantaneous, and involves fewer steps and highly paid professionals, so costs stay low. What’s the price of all this efficiency? Occasionally someone gets a few more pills than they’re entitled to. It’s a pretty good trade. One we’d never make in the US.

So why, with that excellent experience under my belt, did we decide to return to the US for medical care? FUD, I suppose. Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Fear of the unknown: walk-in care was inexpensive in Mexico, but how much would hardcore surgical services cost out of pocket? I knew hospitalization was a $90 copay in the US and outpatient services were $320, so our financial risk was capped. Maybe a surgery that would be $20,000 retail in the US would only be $3,000 in Mexico, but that’s still way more than our plan’s copays.

Uncertainty about communication: One of the ER nurses in Rosarito was blessed with excellent English, and translated between the doctor and I. It made the visit manageable. But would that level of translation services be available at every step of the process? Even my visit with the urologist in Oaxaca was largely mediated by Google Translate. That’s a tough way to have to make important decisions.

And finally, doubt about the quality of care. This one stings, because it’s just prejudice. Tijuana is a well-known destination for US medical tourism, specifically because the quality of care and cost advantages are so compelling. Ultimately, this is the concern that brought us back to the US (the fear and uncertainty were manageable). It just feels weak. And having enjoyed five days of the best the US system has to offer, it also feels stupid.

Don’t get me wrong. The quality of the execution of the services provided to me in the US was stellar. My gall bladder is completely gone (I’m told), removed as delicately as current technology permits. But the entire infrastructure surrounding the provision of those services seems intentionally designed to inflict maximum pain and suffering. I know it wasn’t intentional in the sense that every provider I interacted with would have been delighted to have worked within a kinder context. But intentional in the sense that every decision made about the US healthcare system (funding, staffing, payments, business structures, incentives) drives inevitably to the brutality of the system we have. It’s not necessary. It’s the result of choices. We could make different choices and have a different system.

Or we could continue to insist that ours is the best of all possible healthcare systems (despite being first in cost and 75th in outcomes worldwide – looking up the ladder at you, Turkmenistan) and never explore alternative models. Some of which are as close as our southern border.

The tour takes you 60 meters down into the mine, which is why Dorothy let me go alone. There is no way she could have made it back up. I could, however, have used her much better Spanish, as the guide, an ex-miner, spoke zero English. Still, I managed to understand enough, and even asked a few questions. And got answers I understood. Or at least I think I did.

There is literally no way to grasp the mine’s scale. It’s been worked for 100s of years, and goes down a full mile. Having descended, and then come back up, just 60 meters, I cannot possibly wrap my head around its scale.

Visually, the mine doesn’t offer much up. What’s most notable is the various tiny crawl spaces that the miners were expected to work inside. I’m sure there’s no such thing as Fun Mining, but still.

But the true star of Valenciana is outside the mine: the San Cayetano church. This is such a great story. The church was completed in 1788, and was funded by the owner of the Valenciana mine, Antonio de Ordóñez y Alcocer. The mine was actually abandoned in 1559, just a year after opening, as the owners at the time believed it had been played out.

Ordóñez reopened the mine in 1760 and promptly, 80 meters down, hit the largest silver vein in all of Mexico. You’ll be surprised to learn that this made him fabulously wealthy, and prompted King Carlos III to honor him as nobility. Because what’s more noble than being rich? Henceforth, Ordóñez was known as the Count of La Valenciana and Viscount of the Mine. Sadly, Duke of Slavery was already taken.

Yep, while some of the miners were paid, many were enslaved indigenous and African peoples. Remember I said this was a great story? Well, the payoff is that Ordóñez built the church, he said, for the miners. So the enslaved miners could pray (whatever did they need to pray for?) to the Christian god to whom they had been forcibly converted. Noblesse fucking oblige.

But I can’t discuss San Cayetano without first issuing an apology to Oaxaca’s Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzmán. I was foolish enough to refer to the Guzmán as “the Liberace of churches.” San Cayetano has exposed the stupidity of that designation, and I sincerely apologize to both churches for my youthful misapprehension. San Cayetano, you are the true champion.

San Cayetano may be the finest example of the Spanish Churrigueresque style of architecture, sometimes known as Ultra Baroque. Because, Baroque… sometimes it just doesn’t say what you want it to say, you know? It’s probably the gaudiest example, as its three massive altarpieces are completely covered in gold leaf. No, completely covered.

Here’s a walkthrough…

And here’s some eye searing detail. First up, the interior view. I love how it centers the primary altar under a beautiful dome (which is one component of the excellent use of light), while completely hiding the two side altars, whose placement represents the cross. The reveal of the side altars once you’re up on the main altar is perfection.

Next up, the Big Kahuna, the main altar:

And the two side altars:

And let’s not ignore the exterior, which, despite the notable absence of gold leaf, is plenty Ultra Baroque, thank you very much.

It is, sadly, the typical story with Colonial works. We’ve been marinating in the Spanish conquest of Mexico, but we’re not going to find anything different in Africa or India, or wherever. The beauty often comes with an ugly backstory.

On my first visit to India I was in Kolkata for work, but I’d arranged a weekend there for sightseeing. I had a driver, because that is 100% the safest way to traverse India. It’s the only place I’ve ever been where the traffic actually frightened me.

I had a list of places I wanted to visit on Saturday, but my driver took me to his hot spots on Sunday. One of them was a beautiful Raj-era English church. Which baffled me. Did he take me because he thought I’d be comforted by some classic Western architecture? *wrong* Did he genuinely find it beautiful and worth sharing? And if so, how was it possible for him to enjoy it as an artifact bereft of its context?

Because I couldn’t. I was profoundly uncomfortable, on top of just not being very interested in classic English church design. I didn’t quiz my driver on his motives (because I’m not actually a dick), but I stayed for the minimum amount of time necessary to show respect and then moved on.

I feel like our travels are destined to constantly bump into the ravages of Colonialism. But what’s the alternative? If we only traveled to parts of the world that didn’t rub our noses in Colonialism, we’d be back in the US already. Not that there’s any residue of Colonialism to worry about there. As our ill-fated attempt to visit all the Missions in California proved.

I mean, Europe? They’ve just been colonizing and recolonizing one another in a great circle jerk of fuck-you for millennia. You can still see Roman baths in England, although it’s kind of tough to feel any sympathy for the British. Over anything.

So we’re just going to have to rub some dirt in it and walk it off. As much revulsion as the remains of Colonialism genuinely inspire, that truth is as much a part of the history of the places we’ve visited, and will visit, as anything else. It needs to be understood and confronted, not ignored because it’s unpleasant.

I was expecting to learn things on this adventure. I didn’t expect to be as angry as I often seem to be. Although I suppose that’s the natural consequence of looking at anything closely. I guess I was expecting this to be all sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows, and didn’t account for how much seamy underbelly we’d be forced to embrace.

And I’ll leave you with that heartwarming visual as a parting gift.

San Miguel de Allende is about an hour outside of Guanajuato. It’s a picturesque mountain town that’s home to the peak capitalism version of Gringotenengo, with one of the largest expat communities in Mexico, representing a full 10% of the total population. Guess what else San Miguel is known for? Mexico’s most severe income inequality. But I’m sure there’s no connection.

San Miguel also offers the strongest contrast we’ve yet encountered between surface and subtext. Its surface is, objectively, beautiful. Like Guanajuato and Oaxaca, San Miguel is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and is well deserving of the designation. The mountain setting is gorgeous, the streets are wide and clean, and the buildings are all in beautifully restored condition. It is the tidiest city we’ve visited in Mexico. In theory, there’s nothing not to like. Except that the whole effect has more than a whiff of EPCOT to it. It’s been cleaned and curated for the benefit of everyone except the native residents.

Then there’s the subtext, which is that expats, at scale, are a destructive force. Like locusts. A few are fine, but once they’ve settled on your town, you’re fucked. Unsurprisingly, a huge part of the income inequality is driven by housing costs. New construction is almost exclusively luxury housing, with prices starting at about $500k USD and going up, way up, from there. That’s obviously unattainable for locals, whose average income is about $270 USD/month.

Of course, it’s not just expats skewing housing construction. It’s also tourists screwing the rental market. Like many popular tourist locations, San Miguel’s long-term rentals have been turned into short-term Airbnbs, taking them off the rental market and further driving up prices for the remaining stock.

The tourism pattern is also notable. The 10% of the local population that’s expats is American, Canadian, and European. In other words, overwhelmingly white. The same holds true for the tourists. While there are clearly Mexican tourists, there are a lot of white people in San Miguel, especially compared to the other cities we’ve visited. Oaxaca had its share of gringo tourists, but a fraction of San Miguel’s. And in Chetumal and Guanajuato, we’ve gone weeks without seeing any other gringos.

Which brings up one of the things we specifically didn’t care for about San Miguel, and which, I think, reflects poorly on us. We are, truth be told, gringos. And while we’re not following a tourist cadence, we are to all appearances tourists. Spending time in relatively gringo-light locations means that we don’t see ourselves reflected. But in San Miguel, we were surrounded by our doppelgängers. Everywhere Dorothy looked, there were women of a certain age in straw hats and graying blond hair. Everywhere I looked, there were men of a certain age in shorts and baseball caps. This is why we don’t selfie. We know what we look like in context, and we don’t care to be reminded. In San Miguel, there’s no avoiding the ugly truth. We’re tourists.

The clash between surface and subtext plays itself out most violently in the retail space. It’s not like there are no goods and services that cater to locals, but the imbalance towards high-end retail is pronounced. Throughout the entire Centro, it seems like every other building houses a boutique. Not handicrafts shops, boutiques, beautifully curated and displayed, with goods from all over the world, not just Mexico. We saw some amazing Italian glass, but buying Italian crafts in Mexico in order to mule them back to the US just didn’t make any sense to us.

The entire effect is very Calle Rodeo. Because it’s not just the quality of the goods, it’s the pricing. San Miguel doesn’t just appeal to expats in general. It appeals to incredibly wealthy expats, which is another key factor impacting the local economy.

Just a few blocks from our hostel was an amazing compound called Fábrica La Aurora. It occupies a massive old textile factory, and has been broken up into literally dozens of gallery spaces. Fine arts, housewares, local handicrafts, antiques, imports… The range was astonishing and the quality was breathtaking.

As were the prices. We found a gallery that featured a single artist, Marilo Carral. She makes paintings, jewelry, shrines, and a beautiful fiber-based take on the traditional plastic Acapulco chair.

We loved her work, but knew it was out of our range. To say nothing of the shipping costs. However, there was a small 8″x8″ oil painting that I thought might be attainable, so I asked. $1,200. As for the above, we checked out the prices on her website. Chair: $1,200. Settee: $2,250. Painting: $9,600. Which is one of her cheaper paintings, which top out at $22,000. Also notable: everything priced in USD. They know their customer.

Those prices aren’t unreasonable for real art. Not at all. And everywhere we’ve been has had a few “real” galleries that specialized in fine art, and were, I’m sure, priced similarly. But the sheer concentration, the density of this class of retail in San Miguel was like nothing we’ve seen.

The Elephant In The Room Is A Cathedral

I’ve gone this far without mentioning San Miguel’s most iconic visual element, Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel. It dominates the Centro and can be seen from all over town.

The church itself was built in the 1600s with a traditional Mexican facade. Its current ridiculous pink sandstone Gothic skin was added in 1880. Nearly every news source you can find tells the same story: that the local architect who designed the facade, Zeferino Gutierrez, was inspired by postcards of Antoni Gaudi’s Gothic folly, la Sagrada Família in Barcelona. The only problem with this story is that Gaudi didn’t begin work on the Sagrada until 1883, and worked on it his whole life. Gutierrez may well have been inspired by postcards of Gothic European churches, but Sagrada wasn’t among them.

The interior was similarly Liberace themed. The Spanish certainly knew how to wow the natives.

It’s charms notwithstanding, it was impossible for us to feel anything but ambivalent about San Miguel. The expat assault occurred before the city had any reasonable chance to develop policies to defend itself, and the damage has been largely done. It’s not at all clear whether there’s anything the city can do at this point to roll it back.

Ultimately, I’m glad we went, it for no other reason than the object lesson it provided in what happens when we take our belief systems with us when we move. We are the ultimate invasive species, and, like kudzu, will destroy whatever environment we deposit ourselves in.

It’s funny, because one of the reasons we undertook this adventure was that we were sick to death of the predations of third wave capitalism, and wanted to experience how the rest of the world managed itself. The sad answer is, just fine, until we show up in numbers. It’s helped make us super aware of treading lightly and minimizing our impact, and that’s a good thing.

There are multiple ways to get up to the park that houses the statue, but only one of them is frightening. Most people, I think, take a car or taxi, but you can also walk. You’d have to be both much younger and much more masochistic than we are to try walking up the switchback steps from the base to the summit.

But there’s a funicular… that’s the adventurer’s option. It’s the old-fashioned counterweight style. There is one up car and one down car, and they always balance one another out.

This is the view looking up. Vertiginous, no? And I have something of a history with vertigo. So Dorothy looks at that, looks at me, and asks, “Do you think you can?” And I’m a fucking idiot, so I say, “Of course! Are you OK with it?” “Yeah, I guess so.” So, merry idiots, we march forward to our assured doom.

But it was nothing. In fact, it was fun. But what’s funny is we agonized over whether this was a good idea, and it was fine, but then waltzed into the mummies exhibit like it was a picnic, and that shit was deeply disturbing. That’s where playing all four quarters of the mental game might have paid off.

Once up top, there are two things going on: communing with El Pípila his own self, and the view. He looks big from the bottom, but he’s… really big up close. I’m not sure whether that 20 meter measurement includes the base or not, but either way, that’s a lot of statue.

But the view… This is unquestionably the best view of the city.

So, What’s This Guy’s Story?

El Pípila’s story is pretty good. So, Spain, war of independence, yada yada yada. This may be reductive, but I think the Mexican Spanish wanted the right to abuse the indigenous population without having to get permission from the mothership. You know, independence.

So, just outside Guanajuato, one Father Miguel Hidalgo raised an army to take it to the Spanish, and marched into the city unchecked. The Spanish forces, along with the citizens who owned enough wealth and property to side with the royalists, retreated to the town’s granary, the Alhóndiga de Granaditas. Thus began the Siege of the Alhondiga.

To be fair, this is a very imposing building, with thick walls and the high ground. But this move still seems pretty idiotic. The Spanish forces permitted themselves to be surrounded, holed up in a fortress with no ability to resupply. Rooftop soldiers were able to keep the rebel forces from approaching the entrance, but the stalemate was only going to last as long as their food.

Enter El Pípila, a miner whose actual name was Juan José de los Reyes Martínez. An impatient fellow, he was unwilling to wait for the Spanish to starve, so he grabbed a torch and some pitch, strapped a large stone to his back to protect himself from them muskets, and crawled to the front door. A strategic application of pitch and torch burnt the entrance wide open, whereupon the superior rebel forces (20,000 rebels to 300 royalists) entered and slaughtered every one of the inhabitants, soldier and civilian alike. And then, because they had some free time, they pillaged the city.

This was the first victory for the rebels in the war for independence from Spain, but it was hardly the end of things. In fact, in some ways, it set the rebel cause back. It seems there were plenty of folk who craved an omelet but were squikked by the breaking of eggs. It’s not like the tactics employed were tuned to capture hearts and minds. In fact, Hidalgo had planned to march on Mexico City, but wasn’t sure he could control the forces he’d mustered.

Plus, the Spanish didn’t turn tail and flee at the first sign of discontent. The siege occurred in September 1810. The Mexican declaration of independence was executed in September 1821, eleven bloody years later.

But that’s not the end of the story for our heroes. Miguel Hidalgo and his three chief co-conspirators were captured by the Spanish and executed, their decapitated heads displayed at the four corners of Alhóndiga de Granaditas. The heads were left up for the entire period of the revolution. (“I shall see your brutality, sir, and raise you butchery”). Miguel’s would have looked down over the plot of land that now houses the Mercado Hidalgo. Named after him. So… happy ending!

Alhóndiga de Granaditas

Today, the Alhóndiga is a museum, compressing history from pre-Colonial to post-Colonial into a nice, tight package. It’s made from the green and pink striated sandstone native to the area, which is no less beautiful for being ubiquitous.

I’ll admit I’m not a big fan of celebrating the Colonial era in post-Colonial sites. There’s only so many portraits of Colonial nobles and so many artifacts from the Hall of Overdesigned Furniture I can process before it all curdles. The “servile veneration of European stupidity,” indeed.

The pre-Colombian exhibits, though, were well worth the trouble. The first hall was full of sellos, or seals. These were used to transfer patterns to textiles, paper, and ceramics, but they’re also wonderful artifacts in their own right.

The remainder of the pre-Colombian exhibits were primarily ceramics. Because the wooden stuff didn’t make it. It is, of course, impossible to know how these pieces were viewed at the time, but from our vantage point the design and execution read as playful. Even the sellos above have a notably jaunty profile. The premier collection of pre-Colombian art has to be Diego Rivera’s Museo Anahuacalli, but for a small collection, the Alhóndiga is lovely.

And then there are… these.

“Do you like this? You want some of this, don’t you?”

I had confessed to my sister and niece recently that my long-thwarted, lifelong ambition was to write fiction, but that I was crippled by a lack of imagination. They assured me that I was more than capable (so if I ever do try my hand at fiction, you know who to blame), but I swear there’s a novel in this portrait.

What is it about this? Is it the defiant poses of three girls in front? The crossed knife and fork on the Napoleonic chapeaux? The slightly abashed expressions on our boys? All of it? I want to know WTF is going on, but I also don’t want to know, so I can tell my own story. Perhaps I will.

What distinguishes the Guanajuato mummies from your standard issue Egyptian mummies is that they weren’t intentionally mummified. Also, that they’re just out there hanging around, not wrapped up and hidden in sarcophagi. Like the good mummies.

There are two origin stories about the mummies, and they may both be correct. They share in common that the cemetary (panteón) started charging families annual fees, and when families couldn’t pay, or there was no family, the bodies were disinterred. To everyone’s surprise, what they found wasn’t a pile of bones, but fully mummified corpses.

In one version, the bodies were buried in above ground crypts. When they were disinterred, the dry, warm mountain air turned out to have created the perfect conditions for natural mummification. In the other version they were buried in the ground, as god intended, and the dry soil led to their mummification. A variant on this version is that many of the corpses were buried as a result of a cholera epidemic, and were buried in such haste that no one bothered with the salts that are usually used to speed decomposition and absorption.

Whatever the specifics, the result was over 100 mummies, and it’s axiomatic that any number of mummies over, say, none, is a tourist attraction. The Guanajuato mummies have been on display since 1894.

And How Does That Make You Feel?

What’s disturbing about the mummies isn’t that they’re corpses. It’s that they’re displayed as objects, not people. Of course, when they were first disinterred the panteón knew who they were. Each deadbeat had a name. Over the years, with the lax handling and the absence of give-a-fuck, their names have been lost. They’re just archetypes now: El Ahogado (The Drowned Man), La China (The Chinese Lady), La Bruja (The Witch).

Thankfully, not everyone is OK with the current state of affairs. Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History has undertaken an effort to identify the remains and, when it’s possible to locate living descendants, return them to their families. Just the effort is already more dignity than they’ve been afforded since death.

It also warrants pointing out that El Museo is hardly alone in this sort of reassessment. Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum, which features medical curiosities, is undertaking a critical reassessment of how it displays and contextualizes exhibits featuring human remains. Cue howls about the Woke Police.

In the meantime, the display at El Museo De Las Momias has more in common with pornography than anthropology. It’s a form of objectification that makes the viewer complicit in the act.

Trigger Warning

There’s a reason I used a photo of a mural outside the Museo for the featured image on this post, rather than an objectively more arresting photo of one of the actual mummies. Because, people, these are corpses. With hair and teeth and clothes. And eyes. *shudder* And truly horrifying expressions. They are disturbing. There is no shame in bailing. No one will know. So do not scroll any further if this is a thing you don’t want to see.

For the rest of you, fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.

Nothing

To

See

Here

I’d

Scroll

Back

Up

If

I

Were

You…

Still Here? Good.

The few, the brave, the foolish. Welcome, my band of brothers. To something you can never unsee. This is on you.

And… Nothing more needs to be said.

That’s never really true, is it.

I had originally written clever captions for each of the photos. There was some pretty good stuff there. Knee slappers, if you will. But I’ve deleted them. They made me feel… dirty. And not in the good way.

It felt like I was just heaping one more indignity on folks who didn’t deserve it. It felt like… a feeling. And you all know how ambivalent I am about having feelings. So if funny captions make feelings, no funny captions. Sorry. You’ll have to write your own.

We had a different response this time, when we left Chicago after Dorothy’s right hip replacement. It was more like, “Aaah, we’re back where we belong.” Managing the routine of not having a routine.

I think we were both surprised at how much it felt like we were coming home, even though we’ve never been here. The closest comparison I can make is that if felt like getting remarried after we’d gotten divorced.

Relationship math says that you’re on solid ground if the positives outweigh the negatives. But the negatives are still there, still a source of friction. The thing about getting remarried was that it involved a very conscious calculus, not so much a willingness to accept the negatives as a part of the deal, and more the acknowledgement that continuing to give the negatives weight was just stupid. They exist, but they’ve been intentionally chosen, with full knowledge of the alternatives, and not grudgingly accepted.

Living this lifestyle is much the same. We’re gaining things of real value, but we’ve both had to give up things that matter to us: a settled home, a weekly boardgame night, a fully stocked sewing room, time spent apart, the ability to speak to other people in our native tongue, a fully stocked liquor cabinet, time spent apart…

After seven weeks in the US, our primary response to Guanajuato was relief. It was the understanding that the things we’ve given up weren’t just costs we were willing to absorb, but that they didn’t even matter. They’ve been chosen, rather than accepted. We’re now relaxed into this adventure in the same way we relaxed into our second marriage. Although it’s unlikely to last as long.

The Apartment

We have another bedsit, like in Chetumal, but without even the room divider we had there. It’s more like a hotel room with a kitchenette than an apartment. We’re only here five weeks, so it’s fine, but I think it would be a little claustrophobic if we were here three months.

I’ve mentioned before that part of our settling in process involves picking up whatever housewares we need to cover what’s missing in a new apartment. We just leave those behind when we exit, and consider it the cost of being comfortable while we’re there. You can see in the budget I’ve posted what some of those costs look like for representative months, but I thought I’d provide a little more detail this time.

For this apartment we picked up: a pitcher for tea, a compost pail (most everywhere we go the trash cans don’t seal well, so if we don’t keep organic waste covered we get flies, but we don’t actually compost), two bath towels, a large skillet (we’ve left behind a large skillet in almost every apartment – we’re going to see if we can shed enough weight to make room for it when we leave), a small rolling cart (you can see it under the sink in the photos above – very poor storage in this apartment), a serving tray (to use as a lap desk on the sofa), hangers (another thing we always have to buy and leave behind), two tumblers, and four melmac bowls. Total cost: $63.52 for a five week stay. Obviously, the longer we stay someplace (we’re five weeks here, but three months is our target) the less money we churn doing this.

Also, through no fault of our hosts, we scored our first scorpion on this trip. One step closer to completing our International Travel Bingo card.

So close!

The Elephant In the Bathroom

Or, Is Geography Destiny?

Guanajuato is not the only city in the world carved into a mountainside. There’s La Paz, Quito, Setenil de las Bodegas, Sana’a… But it may be the most colorful, and it’s the only one we’ve visited, so it’s obviously special.

Guanajuato has been occupied for thousands of years, but the city proper dates from the 1500s, and has the Colonial architecture to prove it. The area was rich with silver and gold deposits, which were utilized by the Aztecs and their forebears prior to the Spanish. Leave it to the Spanish to industrialize the process, exploiting both the resources and the population.

At its peak, a single Guanajuato silver mine, La Valenciana, churned out 2/3 of worldwide production. This was no Silver Rush. Over a 250 year period, La Valenciana alone produced 30% of the world’s silver. Unsurprisingly, Guanajuato was Mexico’s richest city at the peak of silver production in the 1800s.

The steep mountainsides forced the residential equivalent of terrace farming, with successive layers of housing climbing up the mountain. That’s where the mountain in our bathroom comes from – our building is literally clinging to the rocks.

What’s not clear is why that pattern required that the housing be connected by narrow alleys instead of actual streets. Density is surely one reason. Narrowing the pathways permitted more housing to be built, and I’m sure the labor demands of mining at scale required lots of housing. While the climate is mountain temperate, Guanajuato is pretty high up, and the narrow alleys also tend to reduce the impact of the sun and promote cooling. Maybe it was for defensive purposes. Maybe nobody was paying attention, and it just happened.

Whatever the origin story, the narrow alleys have all kinds of practical impacts. First, there’s no way to navigate a car, or any kind of vehicle, or even a cart, up into the web of alleys. If you want something in your home, you carry it up. Although I did see a pair of pack mules, which makes perfect sense. But I also saw men carrying loads of concrete blocks up the stairs on their backs.

Services are another challenge. Somehow, they’ve managed to make electric, water, sewer, and internet service available. But there’s no trash pickup. When I asked our host what to do with our trash, we were instructed to take it to a parking lot three blocks away and ask for Cuco.

On the other hand, this is how electric is distributed.

But it’s honestly hard to grasp the landscape from still photos. OK, there are some narrow alleys. So what? This video should provide more of the full experience. As I approach, the opening is so narrow it just looks like the gap between buildings. Then you see stairs, and it just has to be leading to someone’s front door. But, no. It’s actually part of the legitimate navigational terrain.

In acknowledgement of the steep alleys and the high altitude (Did I mention the altitude? We’re at over 6,700 feet, a mile and a quarter up. Mexico City is only about 600 feet higher. We are officially at ass-kicking altitude), the alleys are positively pavéd with benches. They’re a lovely amenity, not a grudging afterthought, and they are 100% lifesavers.

Guanajuato is also a fairly rainy climate. When we moved in, our host cautioned us to keep our windows closed when we weren’t in, to make sure rain didn’t enter. Which made no sense. The alleys are so narrow, rain can fall down, but there’s just no space for the wind to whip it sideways.

Then we had our first rainstorm.

The narrow alleys act as spillways, channeling the rainfall into rapids. We had to close the windows because we were getting whitewater splashing in from the current, not from the sky.

The narrow alleys have also spawned a local Romeo & Juliet legend, centered on El Callejón del Beso, the Alley of the Kiss. This alley is so narrow that the opposite balconies practically touch. In fact, they’re so close it’s possible for two people to kiss across the gap.

The story goes that a wealthy businessman planned to marry his daughter off to another geezer, but she fell in love with a poor miner. Dad confined his daughter to her bedroom to keep him at bay, but the enterprising miner bought the building next door, and they met every night. Dad caught them and killed his daughter. Because kids, am I right?

Nowadays the tourist trap legend says that if you kiss on the third step of the Callejón you’ll get 15 years of great relationship mojo, but a kiss on any other step and you’re fucked. Duh.

The Neighborhood

When we were planning this adventure I read as many travel blogs as I could, to pick up helpful tips and tricks. I’m happy to learn from other people’s mistakes. I don’t insist on only heeding my own.

One of the tips I read, which seemed to make a lot of sense, was to never book your accommodations for the length of your stay in advance. Instead, pick up a week’s Airbnb, then look around once you get there to find the right place for the rest of the stay. The theory being that there’s no way to tell without being there whether a neighborhood is safe, or convenient, or desirable. Hedge your bets.

Aspirationally, that was advice I really wanted to follow. Practically, we haven’t done it yet. Just the thought of getting off an airplane, unpacking into an Airbnb, and then sprinting for the next week to find longer term housing, so we could pack up, move, and resettle yet again… I’m exhausted describing it. We decided we’d rather settle for a less than perfect neighborhood than have to run that particular gauntlet.

But here’s the weird thing: so far, every single apartment we’ve rented has been in the absolutely perfect location. Once we know the city, we always say, “This is the location we’d have picked if we actually knew anything.” I know it’s better to be lucky than good, and we’ve been attributing this outcome to luck. But it’s been so consistent that it’s starting to look like a weird, inexplicable skill instead.

I’ll regret that, because I’ve now guaranteed that our next neighborhood will be a shithole (looking at you, Rosarito Beach). It’s not like I don’t understand how hubris works. A seemingly indifferent universe can rouse itself and notice you, which never ends well. But at least this time, we fell into a pot of jam once again. Our apartment here is ideally situated.

There are small tiendas dotted everywhere, selling everything from housewares to produce. Compared to Oaxaca, there are fewer restaurants but more little shops and street vendors. We also have a Soriana supermercado a few blocks away, and just two blocks further is Mercado Hidalgo, the main traditional mercado. The structure was originally designed as a train station, but by the time construction was complete in 1910 they were like “Fuck the trains. It’s a mercado!” It’s been in continuous service since.

We are also, as fate has decreed, very close to ice cream. In fact, except for up, it doesn’t matter what direction we walk from our apartment, we hit ice cream in a matter of minutes. If we’re not careful we’ll need a bigger apartment than we’re planning for in Chicago when this is all over. Just to have enough room for our hideously ice cream bloated selves.

Once again, we’re also in the rosticeria neighborhood. Multiple choices for flame roasted chicken are but a block away. All of them are delicious.

We’re so close to the shopping because we’re hard by the Centro. The Centro is in the flats, the valley below the mountains. So while the pattern of narrow, twisting alleys remains, walking the Centro is more like taking a stroll than staging an ascent of K2.

The Centro is full of shops, museums, theaters, and parks. The little parks are especially charming. They’re quite common, unlike the minimal green space in Oaxaca, and often feature tree canopies that have been whimsically tonsured to look like floating box hedges. That there is some Texas-sized bonsai.

Plaza De Las Ranas

Guanajuato isn’t just a place name. It’s also a word in the Purépecha language. It means hill of frogs. Apparently, there used to be a lot of frogs here. Kind of like how US subdivisions are always named for the features that were destroyed during their construction. Twin Oaks. Green Valley. Creekside.

So… no more frogs. But they’re still Guanajuato’s spirit animal, and they figure prominently around the city as iconography. No more so than at the Plaza of Frogs. The Plaza features twenty different frog sculptures, plus the enormous mosaic frog that takes up most of the plaza floor. Unfortunately, there’s no way to get a good angle on that from the ground. But we took pictures of all twenty (Gotta catch ’em all!), and share with you these greatest frog hits from Plaza de las Ranas.

It Really Is Uphill Both Ways

Guanajuato is a notably vertical city, with housing climbing up the sides of the mountains. But there’s even more to it than the height. The city also has a subterranean component, with tunnels and roadways existing on multiple levels.

Back in the mining days, the Rio Guanajuato ran through town and regularly flooded the city. Which was apparently OK with everyone until the mines started flooding, and then it was all hands on deck. As it happened, the mining companies knew a thing or two about blowing up mountains, so they blasted a series of tunnels to divert the floodwaters.

In the 1960s a new tunnel was dug out below the initial tunnels. Between that and an upstream dam, the water flow was reduced to the point that the earlier tunnels were clear, and have been used since to manage traffic instead.

In fact, they’re such an integral part of the transit landscape here that buses use them, and there are even bus stops in the tunnels themselves.

Still photos don’t do the tunnels justice, so here’s a quick walk through a short section. At the point where this video ends, it took me almost eight more minutes to walk the straight path ahead to the tunnel’s exit. These tunnels are long.

Charmed, I’m Sure…

I’m going out on a limb and claiming that, all things considered, Guanajuato out-charms Oaxaca. Oaxaca is charming because of what people are doing in it. The calendas and processions, the public performances, the way that the entire city feels like one big town square. If you neutron bombed the people out, the empty city that was left would be interesting, but it wouldn’t be charming.

Not for nothing, Guanajuato is a UNESCO World Heritage Site (as is Oaxaca, to be fair), and is charming in its own right. Even without people, you’d walk the town and be all, “Damn, this is cute.” There’s also more than a faint whiff of Antigua, Guatemala. Like Antigua, Guanajuato is chock-a-block with some serious, high-end Colonial buildings, both residential and public. While the mountainsides may have been housing for the peasants, there was serious money here, and the city shows it.

I keep comparing Oaxaca and Guanajuato, but they’re both spectacular cities, and so different. Oaxaca feels more knowable, for example. It’s laid out on a fairly rational grid, and there are zones and neighborhoods that aren’t that hard to pick up. After a couple of weeks, you can feel like you know both how and where to navigate.

Guanajuato, on the other hand, with its twisted alleys and recursive geometry, feels like it’s hiding a secret around every corner. Where Oaxaca gives itself up, Guanajuato holds itself back. Oaxaca welcomes where Guanajuato dares. OK, fine. Oaxaca is a dog and Guanajuato is a cat. Happy now?

We knew nothing about Guanajuato before this visit, but it was highly recommended by our friend Lyna when she knew we were planning most of our first year in Mexico. Many thanks, as this is fast becoming our favorite place in Mexico.

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.