The Google search was best beginner snorkeling near Yogyakarta, which gave us Pantai (beach) Sadranan. The closest accommodations were at Pantai Krakal, a mere ten minute walk away. We booked for three nights, which would give us two full, uninterrupted days.

The whole area is a long stretch of beaches, each with its own name and, supposedly, identity, but it felt like one Long Beach occasionally interrupted by volcanic rock outcroppings. Sadranan was supposed to have the calmest waters and the best snorkeling in the area, so we figured to spend most of our time there.

Our hotel was the Royal Joglo, which was a notch or two below royal. Charming and fine, but scarcely royal.

Like most beach communities everywhere, the beaches were a hive of small restaurants, or warungs. Weirdly, they were almost all completely closed. I don’t know when season is down there, but we were pretty clearly off-season. We struggled to find lunch and had dinner at the same warung, right next to our hotel, all three nights. We weren’t expecting a beach visit to induce food insecurity.

Mostly we stayed on the beach, but we also walked along the main road one day to get to Pantai Sadranan and enjoyed the lush, tropical flora.

Outside the hotel, however, it was raining with gusty winds. On arrival, we walked the few feet from our hotel to the beach to see what was going on, and it was pretty wild. Surf was definitely up. Not in a run-for-your-life sort of way, but definitely less than inviting.

So… no snorkeling. And while we refused to skip swimming altogether, we did have to experiment to find the calmest of the troubled waters. But those waters, if ill disposed to swimming, were spectacular. We may have missed the snorkeling, but we topped out on the majestic, terrifying power of… OCEAN!

Plus, it was pretty.

Here’s a beautiful overview of Pantai Krakal. It doesn’t really scream “Hey, let’s swim!” On the other hand, this really captures the heartbreaking shade of turquoise as the waves crest.

And here’s a great view of the power of SURF (OCEAN‘s cousin).

Even with rough surf, though, the tidepooling and beachcombing were excellent.

Pools Of Tide & Combs Of Beach

The defining feature of the beach was the sand, which was composed of tiny round beads of coral and shell, like limestone couscous. The beads were large enough that they didn’t compact, like normal beach sand. A step could sink your foot six inches or more. It’s also one of the reasons the water is so clear, as even the pounding surf can’t dissolve the sand into solution. The little beads are too heavy and just sink back down, leaving the water beautifully transparent.

The rain was rarely heavy, so we were able to swim pretty much whenever we wanted. Once you’re wet, you’re wet. But the tidepooling and beachcombing were best done in the sunshine, and there was enough so that we got to do both every day we were there. The swimming was best at high tide and the tidepooling and beachcombing were best at low tide. The days were just packed.

The Beach

The volcanic rock outcroppings divide the beaches, either into discrete stretches or small coves. Other rocks just sit on the beach like sentinels.

Of course, the entire point of combing the beach is to collect loot. And there was Loot Galore (my favorite Bond girl), a dragon’s hoard of shell and coral treasures, rescued moments before, one imagines, being ground into beach sand. Quite the haul. All the cowries are meant for a necklace-to-be.

The Pools

The beaches had, for the most part, long sloping approaches with the coral sand topping rock flats. At high tide the water was deep enough to swim with sand underfoot, and at low tide the rocks were exposed for tidepooling.

When we first stopped at the pools they looked empty, which seemed odd. But slowing down and staring revealed wonders, not the least of these being what Google identified as fireworms. I was all about skipping about the tidepools willy-nilly until we saw these fellows. And that was before Google flagged them as venomous. So. Feet were carefully placed.

They live tail end in holes and snake their heads out to venomously forage. Like even creepier eels.

Those might have been the most terrifying thing we saw, but hardly the only wonders. There was this mysterious hole. I kept waiting for something to pop out, but it never happened.

And this adorable little fellow, who was about the size of a currant.

Our Cove

We found the ideal beach just a short walk from our hotel. Still part of Pantai Krakal, we found a little crescent cove, perfectly shaped to funnel the violent surf to a soft landing.

There’s a sharp drop-off just behind the shallow rock shelf. At low tide, that drop-off swallows the breakers, robbing them of energy as they roll to the beach. At high tide, the waves break over that transition, so they have more power when they reach shore. Here it is at low tide, the waves gently rolling in.

Here’s a better view of the strength of the waves. I know there’s a lot of video of surf here, but I just find it mesmerizing. I could stare at waves for hours. Without drugs. But you don’t have to. Just don’t click the Start button.

Swimming there at high tide, I stood in chest high water facing the beach, waiting for a wave large enough to crash into my back and send me hurtling shoreward. Like bodysurfing, with a top note of Keystone Kops. And the closest thing to a roller coaster I’ll ever enjoy.

4×4 Jeep Tour

This shouldn’t have been much fun. It was just a couple of hours of driving around to different beaches crammed into a 4×4 all-terrain jeep. Look-around, no swimming, back in the jeep, on to the next beach. But we wanted to do something other than splash in the surf, which sounds stupid when I say it out loud, and we figured it would be fun enough.

We were mistaken. It was riotously fun, from the kidney-jarring 4×4 to the occasional rain shower. It was entertaining start to finish, with each of the beaches having a distinct character. It could have been an all day tour with time for swimming, but now I’m just being a little bitch. It was great.

It must have been a slow day, with stormy weather and the off-season colliding, as our driver interpreted our two-hour itinerary generously. We took three hours and unscheduled stops.

Each beach had its own distinct flavor, either through their natural differences or the evolving light based on time of day and the fast-changing weather conditions.

Pantai Watulawang

Our first stop was a wild stretch of beach with some powerful surf.

Pantai Sundak

A beautiful beach with amazing light, but whatever. The highlight was the stalls selling seafood gorengen, fried bits of aquatic deliciousness.

Pantai Sepanjang

When will it stop? Another beautiful beach.

Some powerful surf at Sepanjang.

Pantai Baron’s Lighthouse

Pantai Baron is unique in this stretch of beaches in that it also has a freshwater spring that has made its own lake. We didn’t go down to the beach, but there’s a lighthouse on the cliff overlooking Baron, providing a spectacular view.

Pantai Mesra

The light at this beach was beautiful.

Pantai Krakal Vista Point

Just above Our Cove was a vista point that permitted a 360° view. It had an enormous yellow fish sculpture at the top, because why wouldn’t it?

We got to see Our Cove from above, which was a treat, as were the panoramic views of the beaches and rocky coastline from that height.

The other side of the vista point from Our Cove featured a truly wild, completely dangerous assemblage of water and rocks, with a very drownable profile.

Home Again

We’d worked through groceries before leaving on our adventure, so we went out to dinner when we got back, even though a home-cooked meal would have been welcome. Rather than the same old noodles or rice, we found a restaurant that specialized in gudeg, a jackfruit curry with chicken, or ayam in Indonesian, and dried cow skin.

Prompting my very first Indonesian dad joke: Who’s a gudeg? Ayam.

It’s true, by the way. Ayam a very gudeg.

The festival features arts, crafts, traditional and modern performances, plenty of food, a night market, and a midway. It is ridiculously well attended, and has the vibe of a county fair. But it’s Bali, so everything about it is beautiful. We went our first night, and it was so much fun we spent the next two evenings there, as well.

Grounds

To call the grounds rich is to diminish them, but there are only so many superlatives to throw around. Close your eyes and spin, and when you open them you’ll be staring something marvelous in the face. It’s dense.

This is just the entrance gate.

It’s not at all clear how much of the decorative infrastructure is reused vs. what’s created fresh each year. Some of the more elaborate constructions seem to be made of ephemeral materials, but even if some pieces are reused, they’re all beautifully maintained, and certainly look brand new.

This is just one of the stages.

But wait. There’s more.

As promised, there’s even a midway, as part of the stalls that make up the market area.

And plenty of food stalls. We were there three nights and ate dinner in the stalls every evening. The cuisine has a distinct top note of ouch. I believe they use the chilis in surgery instead of anesthesia, to distract from the pain. When we are given the option of pedas (spicy) or not, we choose not.

Performance

We saw dance and music performances every night, and got a crash course in Balinese gamelan music, which is both offered on its own and accompanies the dance. I kind of wasn’t expecting to like gamelan, as it doesn’t use a Western tonal scale, and operates, in my mind, in the same taxonomic space as Chinese opera. Which sounds to me like cats desperate to convince you of something very, very important.

I may have to revisit that bias now, as I truly loved the gamelan music. It has the manic, coked up energy of a Raymond Scott Looney Tunes score.

Gamelan is not, as I had ignorantly thought, an instrument, but a style of music. While there’s the odd flute or string, the vast majority of the instruments are percussive: drums, xylophones, gongs, and metallophones (tuned percussion). That’s a gangsa metallophone on the right.

While this isn’t the craziest music we heard, it’s the craziest we recorded.

But that wasn’t our first exposure to gamelan music, which came on our first night, in an outdoor arena that seats 6,000, but had plenty more standing.

What we didn’t know we had walked into was some sort of weird all-female gamelan orchestra battle of the bands, featuring dozens of women in identical outfits, like a Bizarro Tommy Dorsey orchestra.

They must have been local celebrities, because each band had a cheering section with fans waving flags the same color as their outfits. The whole thing had the energy of an Iggy Pop performance, the ambiance of a World Cup match, and the choreography of a Busby Berkeley jam. It was enchanting.

Then there was this, and whatever was making those weird harmonics. I thought it was singing, but Dorothy thought it was flute and strings. We both thought it was wild.

Topeng Dances

Topeng is a masked dance that is found throughout Indonesia, not just in Bali, with roots that stretch back to 850 AD or earlier. While they originally focused on nature and ancestors, the introduction of Hinduism to Indonesia added the Ramayana and Mahabharata as source texts for new dances. Still, many dances represent archetypal characters more than structured narratives.

Here’s the blustery guy arguing with another character. This went on for so long, without dance or music, that we had to leave. I’m sure it was funny if you spoke Indonesian, but that left us out.

We think this character is Patih Keras, a high-ranking court official. But that doesn’t get us anywhere near understanding the narrative of this dance. This clip is long, as I wanted to capture an entire performance, so feel free to bail. I certainly wanted to, or have magically sprouted a tripod. On the other hand, it does an excellent job of capturing the sonic range of a gamelan orchestra, which can go from eerie to frenetic, delicate to thunderous, and every stop in-between.

In this particular case, the music is sinister and the dance is a little creepy, making a compelling combination. The dancer’s fine body control is something to behold.

Ramayana Dance

While the Topeng trended more folk dance, there was another troupe that focussed on Ramayana dances. Knowing that didn’t make them any easier to understand, but there was at least some familiarity. The Ramayana has been a consistent through line during our time in Southeast Asia.

We think these dances had something to do with trickery, abduction, and, shall we say delicately, seduction. But only because that seems to be what the entire Ramayana is about. This may have been about a lovely picnic.

Again, the body control is very hard to wrap your head around.

This dance, though, was the bomb. We were totally not expecting saucy drag. Shockingly, Googling “ramayana saucy drag” brings back nothing, when it should most assuredly be bringing back this.

More Ramayana…

This performance was less dance, more play, and was played very broadly. So broadly that I tagged it as commedia dell’arte when I filed the photos. It’s still from the Ramayana, and appears to involve giants, or giant hermits, kidnapping fairies, or little girls, or princesses. And impertinent men hitting on saucy wenches. Or something. There was much declaiming.

The Crafts Mall

And this is where our dreams came true, and the reason we didn’t bother trying to fabric shop on Jalan Sulawesi. This was a selection of artisans so perfectly curated that we didn’t have to go anywhere else to find the very best artifacts. They had conveniently all been brought into one place, seemingly just for us.

The indoor mall had a large open courtyard, with a side gallery featuring a series of four rooms with textiles and jewelry.

Crafts

The courtyard had all sorts of things, from housewares to sculptures in a variety of media. For whatever reason, what leapt out was one woman who hand painted baskets, purses, fans, and wall hangings, using canvas and reed. Dorothy picked up a swell fan.

Jewelry

There’s a famous silver village, Celuk, just half an hour from Denpasar, that had been on our list. But since it seemed like every major Celuk jeweler had a booth in the craft mall, no need. I bought a ring and we both bought earrings.

The four large side galleries were all set up identically: three walls of textile makers, the fourth wall and the center island for jewelers.

And… Ikat!

We’d done a good job picking up display quality textiles on our day trips to Tenganan and Sidemen, but we needed things that could be cut up and made into garments. We only have so much wall space, but I wear shirts every day.

As with the jewelry, it seemed like every artisanal ikat maker was represented at the craft mall, so it was an incredible one-stop shop. We bought fabric each of the three nights we attended the fair. They started to recognize us.

The range and selection was astonishing, and rewarded three nights of viewing. Every time we went back we saw amazing things that we’d somehow overlooked on previous visits. I’m glad we took the time to go slow and dive deep. Our wardrobes will thank us.

One of the most amazing things we saw was ikat with figurative, brocade-like designs. I understand how that’s theoretically possible, but it still doesn’t seem practically achievable. The technical complexity is just through the roof.

Here’s another thing that should be impossible. That hand-woven stripe on the right isn’t pieced in. It’s woven on the same loom as the ikat. Then just to show off, it shifts back to ikat. Insane.

But this is going to end up exactly where you thought it would: with loot. We bought us some fabric.

I have to blame Dorothy for the fact that I’m a fabric slut. I can’t imagine that I’d have wound up in that place without her influence and guidance. My world is profoundly enriched by that, as it is by her in so many, many ways.

Then we started looking at flights. They all stopped in HCMC for heinous 6+ hour layovers before continuing on to Bali. We decided it would be easier, and more fun, to burn a few days of our Airbnb, fly to HCMC for those days, and take a nice, direct flight to Bali. Three days in HCMC would be a rushed, tourist cadence, but we figured we’d have more fun than if we’d skipped it entirely.

So… maybe?

The thing is, we’re not at all used to the tourist cadence. Our slow travel lifestyle has us staying in a location for from 1-3 months, so we’re used to taking our time to learn a place. We don’t have any muscle memory associated with the guerrilla rhythm of hitting a place hard and fast to squeeze the juice out in a few days and move on.

It’s not like we haven’t had successful short jaunts. We spent three days in Lan Ha Bay, for example, but we had boat trips scheduled for two of those days, and toured a couple of local caves on the third day. We had an itinerary, so it worked.

We hit HCMC with nothing more than a vague idea. It’s one of those places with so much going on, it’s not immediately obvious what you’d triage down to for a three day visit. Chinatown seemed like it would be fun, and there were a couple of good looking museums. Other than that, our “plan” was to walk the city and see what it had to offer.

Which, as a practical matter, meant that we just kind of wandered aimlessly for three days. We did go to Chinatown, and we did go to the History Museum, but HCMC is a big capital-style city (I know Hà Nội is the actual capital, but HCMC has a more capital city vibe – like NYC vs. DC), and it wanted a plan that we hadn’t prepared. Still, more fun that a six hour layover at the HCMC airport.

Chinatown

HCMC’s Chinatown, Chợ Lớn, was not at all what we were expecting. Because, you know, ignorant. I was expecting it to look like a US Chinatown, which is stupid, since I’m well aware that the entire Chinatown esthetic had been dreamed up as a marketing ploy by a pair of white US architects who had never been to China. So HCMC’s Chinatown looked just like the rest of HCMC.

The other confounding factor is that Vietnam, due to history and proximity, is closer to China culturally than any other country. So when we went to Chợ Lớn’s main market, Bình Tây, we couldn’t tell the difference between the Chinese products and what was on offer at Bến Thành, HCMC’s main market. Again, ignorance, but Vietnam already has a lot of Chinese products, so the untrained eye really couldn’t tell the difference. Bình Tây and Bến Thành looked pretty much the same to us.

This was Bình Tây, the Chợ Lớn market:

And this was Bến Thành, HCMC’s regular market:

Obviously a little different in layout and overall design, but not much to pick between them as one being quintessentially Vietnamese and the other being hardcore Chinese. If you swapped the photos, no one would know.

After Bình Tây we walked around randomly hoping to see some of Chợ Lớn’s history, as it dates back to the 17th century, but no luck. Maybe if we’d done more research and planned everything out we’d have known where to go look, but as it was, Chợ Lớn was kind of a bust for us.

Ho Chi Minh City Museum of History

We also got to the history museum. Which I only have a few pictures from, because, honestly, museum fatigue. In our ten weeks in Vietnam it felt like we’d visited scores of museums, and at some point they just become a blur. Especially, because the Vietnamese forms share a number of design elements with the Angkor-era carving we saw in Cambodia. That’s a lot of time looking at art with a common underlying framework. I’m looking forward to Indonesia, where Bali and Java have distinct artistic traditions.

These Cham sculptures are from the 12th-13th centuries. The first two were building supports for a tower that collapsed before it was completed. They’re in such fine condition because they were buried in the resulting rubble, which protected them from erosion.

Unsurprisingly, Dorothy found beautiful garments.

Aimless Wandering

As promised, the rest of our stay in HCMC was completely random. We had post cards to send, so we went to the main Post Office, which was in District 1, where we were staying.

We had one dinner at a one star Michelin restaurant, Mặn Mòi, which also boasted high-style architecture.

Another dinner was at the Bến Nghé Street Food restaurant, a food court style arrangement with over 50 stalls. We could even have had tacos. Which we didn’t.

Randomly walking the streets we saw…

Random topiary.

Random electrical lighting objects.

A random Indian temple.

We even went to a typical pagoda, the Ngọc Hoàng, not far from our hotel. And tried really hard to care. But temple fatigue is real, like museum fatigue. Despite being stuck there in a torrential downpour, we just couldn’t get into it. Time to leave Vietnam.

But it did have a few treats. You still have to keep your eyes open, no matter what, or you’ll miss some tucked away morsel of wow. Not OK.

For some reason, we thought this table of offering votives was really beautiful.

I’ll leave you with the most HCMC thing about HCMC: Traffic.

That, by the way, was a street we never crossed. Normally we’d draft behind an auntie, but not even the locals were crossing that street.

Should we have skipped HCMC and just flown directly to Bali from Đà Nẵng? I still think we were better off this way, but note-to-self for the future, we should only do short visits if we’ve done our homework and have a clue how we’re going to spend the time.

So it is with Hạ Long Bay. “Oh, that place. I didn’t know its name.” Well, you do now. Isn’t this educational.

That scraped photo tells the full story of Hạ Long Bay. It’s an iconic UNESCO World Heritage site, known for its unique limestone karst outcroppings, and it is positively acrawl with tourists. In fact, it’s pretty clear that if you were on one of those boats, your primary view would be of other boats.

The problem with iconic, bucket list locales is that they tend to be overrun. That’s why visiting El Jem, the Roman colosseum in Tunisia, obviated the need to ever visit the Colosseum in Rome. We’ve aged out of the mosh pit.

Hạ Long Bay is in the Gulf of Tonkin, helping fill in our American Colonialist World Tour bingo card (box #1 was snorkeling in the Bay of Pigs). As it happens, the Gulf of Tonkin is also home to two other bays, one of which, Lan Ha Bay, abuts Hạ Long Bay and shares its geomorphology. All the half a billion year old limestone karsts, pretty much none of the tourists. It enjoys less tourist infrastructure than Hạ Long Bay, but that’s fine. That’s why there are fewer tourists. It’s not like we’re five-star travelers.

This is the other reason you might recognize Hạ Long Bay. It was used as a location for Kong: Skull Island.

Adding to our Star Wars and Tomb Raider check-ins. Aren’t we the accidental nerds?

Day One

Home base for most Lan Ha Bay tours is Cát Bà Island, and we arranged a four day/three night visit. Actually getting to Cát Bà is a multi-step process. The bus from Hà Nội gets you close, but then you have to catch a ferry to the island and pick up another bus to the hotel. We worked with a local Cát Bà agency that made the arrangements, so we were guided through all of our transfers and changes. Sweet.

Cát Bà Town, the largest city on the island, is in the middle of a pretty furious makeover. The entire waterfront is a construction zone, getting a Green Tourism facelift that won’t be completed until sometime in 2026. Promised amenities include a desalinization plant, rainwater and wastewater processing, green spaces, a new beach, electric cable cars and trams, ecotourism resorts, and a golf course. Because nothing screams sustainability like a golf course.

We arrived to our hotel at about noon and had some time to kick around Cát Bà Town before our evening tour, so we strolled the modest sights.

But the main event for Day One was a twilight tour of the bay, dinner aboard, and then a kayak trip after dark to view the bioluminescent plankton. Yes, please.

As it turns out, I knew a little something about both glowy sea bits and kayaks. When I was 13 and traveling the Americas with my parents, one of our stops was in Guadalajara, which boasts shoreline bioluminescent plankton and a long, shallow shelf at the beach. As I recollect you could walk out almost a quarter mile and never get above your knees, while trailing blue-green fairy lights behind you with each step. There aren’t that many places on the planet that feature bioluminescence, so this tour was an. easy decision. It would be a first for Dorothy.

Getting there by kayak, though, not so much. I had been in a kayak, once before in my life, and it ended badly. Any experience that ends in a rescue, I think, counts as ending badly. So I hadn’t been in a kayak in over fifty years, and Dorothy had never been in a kayak. What better way to manage our collective fears than in the dark?

Before that, though, we had a lovely late afternoon cruise to see the Bay’s highlights.

That cued up the whole point of the cruise: them glowy plankton. Of which I have next to no documentation. Here’s the thing about kayaking at night in the middle of an unlit bay: it’s dark. Too-dark-for-pictures dark. Here’s pretty much the only proof I have that this wasn’t a fever dream.

What you can’t see in that photo is that we’re actually tied to the guide’s kayak in front of us. No way to drift away, which, once Dorothy was able to successfully get into the kayak, allayed most of the remaining fears. Let the plankton hunting begin.

But these were not the plankton of my Guadalajaran youth. Those critters had a blue-green color and a slow decay. Once agitated, they’d glow for a few moments before fading out, which is what led to the fairy trails in the water. The Lan Ha plankton glowed white, with a sharp decay, so they were like little lights that came on and blinked right out. You’d agitate them with an oar and they’d flick on for a moment. Which made taking a picture, given the absence of ambient light, impossible.

Thankfully, I was lucky enough to capture them in the boat’s wake on the way back to dock, which turned out to be their most spectacular expression. Way better than the minimal violence that an oar can inflict.

Day Two

Day Two was a full-day, eight hour cruise that left the dock at 8:00 AM. We’d be doing a much more thorough tour of the Bay than our evening cruise, including a kayaking run through caves, monkey hunting, a visit to a fishing research station, a stop for swimming, and lunch.

The Hạ Long/Lan Ha/Cát Bà area was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994. Since then, the government has taken actions to preserve that status, as UNESCO has benchmarks you have to hit in order to keep your listing. In the case of Lan Ha Bay, that meant cleaning up the floating village. Suddenly, good hygiene was in and throwing your trash overboard and shitting in the Bay were out.

The floating villages have been consolidated into one area not far from the dock. It’s pretty much one of the first things you see on the tour. People still live on the water and make their living there, just with more constraints from the government than they had pre-UNESCO. Our guide grew up in the floating village, and his father still lives there.

I have a ginchy new glass lens for my iPhone camera that takes anamorphic photos in something closer to a cinematic aspect ratio. But to truly get a feel for the scope of the Bay, I think this might be better.

The landscape reminded me, in an odd way, of the Lake District in England, which I visited once when working at DC Comics. Steve Parkhouse, who was illustrating The Hiding Place for my Piranha Press imprint, lived in the Lake District and drove me about for a tour. At one point we stopped on the crest of a hill and got out. The vista below was iconic to a fault.

Rolling green hills, ancient stone fences crisscrossing the fields, sheep dotted about in a particularly fetching pattern, and a little stream bubbling out of the ground near us and tumbling down to the valley below. If you close your eyes and think of England, which is how I get through the scary parts, that view will be what you see.

Beatrix Potter and J.R.R. Tolkien had both been Lake District residents, and it all made sense. They suddenly seemed less like fantasists and more like creative documentarians. I’d have been utterly unsurprised to see a hobbit come out from behind a rock or Peter Cottontail bounding across a field. Of course they wrote those stories. What else could they do?

Lan Ha Bay, in a less refined way, elicited a similar response. Neither a swarm of pterodactyls nor a giant ape would have been a surprise in that landscape, which looked decidedly like The Land That Time Forgot. I’d bet money that it wasn’t a case of the filmmakers scouting locations and finding Lan Ha/Hạ Long as it was one of them going there and coming up with the idea for Kong: Skull Island on the spot.

There isn’t a lot of culturally significant commentary to offer about this next slideshow. It’s just nature, at its awesome, atavistic best. Enjoy.

Here’s a little of what the islands feel like up close.

We had been surprised that the clientele for both of our boat tours trended so young. We’d thought of the kind of off-the-beaten-track adventure we were on as more suited economically to the retirement cohort, but we’d overlooked how cheap this kind of travel is, and how very, very active it turned out to be. There was a reason we were the oldest people on the tours: we simply hadn’t done the math.

It all started to make sense when we set off on the putative highlight of the day: the afternoon kayak trip around the Bay and through the caves. We’d managed our first kayak adventure in the dark, so we figured a daylight run would be a piece of cake. But you know that thing where your trainer is all, “Dude, don’t do two arm days in a row.” We did two arm days in a row.

Our nighttime trek had been an hour of paddling, but we didn’t know what exactly we’d agreed to for the following day. It seems we’d signed up for two hours, over three kilometers, and several days of recovery. I believe I documented Dorothy’s quote verbatim: “I never want to work that hard to have fun again.” I second that emotion.

But it was fun. Painful, but fun. It was a beautiful day, the views from the kayak were great, we went through caves, on foot and asea, and we even saw four Cát Bà langur monkeys, which are critically endangered. That’s a considerable fraction of the fewer than 70 specimens still alive. There’s no guarantee they’ll show, so that was a treat.

But how did they get so endangered? If I told you dicks were involved, would you be surprised? Yep, like rhinoceros horn, the Cát Bà langurs have been hunted near to complete extinction because they were the key ingredient in a traditional monkey balm guaranteed to help men supercharge their junk.

Jesus. All this travel has made me hate America (more), hate the French (more), and now, I even hate men and their junk. I am a self-hating junk owner. Is there anything sadder? Sure, I guess. Being the kind of mook who’d rub ground up monkey on their junk in a desperate attempt to feel something, anything. That’s rock fucking bottom.

Halfway through the tour we had to be lashed to our guide’s kayak again, like the previous night. We were falling behind. I don’t think he was literally dragging us, but it was easier to keep pace attached. We dragged ourselves back to the boat for a very welcome, very sedentary, very necessary lunch break.

Next up, motoring to a spot for swimming. We were both excited for this, because we thought we’d be getting dropped off at a beach. Instead, we pulled up adjacent to a beach. Specifically, the beach on Screaming Island, so called by the locals for its obviously screaming face.

Our guide, Ryan, had been poking me since the previous day’s tour, when he tried to get me to jump into the water from the second floor of the boat. I declined, while noting for his benefit that I was immune to peer pressure. Ever since my second rescue from the top of a pyramid, I’d committed to heeding my inside voice whenever it said, “I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t.” More people should try that. You just know, you meet some people and think, “Oh, that person has never once in their lives said ‘Maybe I shouldn’t.'”

So Ryan backflipped into the water from the second floor as if, somehow, that would convince me. It did, in a way.

It convinced me to walk down to the first floor and enter the water from the ladder. For good measure, I donned a life jacket. Sure, we were near a beach, but in water way too deep to stand in.

Which turned out to be a great decision, as that water was way colder than I expected. I jumped in all at once and my heart did that thing it does after an especially thick line of blow. You know. Threatening to burst. I’d had some thought, on entering the water, of swimming to Screaming Island’s beach. Which somehow looked much closer from the boat than it did from the water. I immediately pivoted to my newly hatched Plan B: survive.

To be fair, I was adjusting to the water temperature. Alternatively, I was dying and could no longer feel anything. Not caring to settle that definitively, I paddled the couple of feet back to the ladder and hauled myself to safety. Dorothy was relieved to know that she could skip the swimming experience without regrets. I’m always happy to take one for the team. Especially when I survive.

That left one more stop on our way back to the dock: the fishing research station. This was basically a small floating village that had been converted to research and development. They raised fish there for two purposes. To use them to produce fish eggs, and to try different methods to keep the fish healthy for as long as possible. Their charges were all long-term residents.

The fish eggs were used to make wee fry, which were then distributed to the fishers in the floating villages, who raised them until they were large enough to be salable. The Bay had been overfished, and this was the government’s attempt to reset the balance. I’m sure no one was truly satisfied, as the fishers had been forced to migrate from hunters to ranchers, but there’s not a lot of recourse built into the system.

What it led to, though, was very large fish. Like, really large fish.

Somehow, as an Official Guide, Ryan had permission to feed them.

These guys had a net on the top, as well, as they’d been known to get excited and leap to freedom.

And that was it. Eight hours on the Bay, and sore was the worst thing that happened. We’re winners!

Day Three: A Leg Day!

We wanted this day to be pretty chill, given how intensely physical we’d found the kayaking. Cát Bà had a couple of modest-sized but notable caves not far from Cát Bà Town, so we hired us a driver for a few hours and took off. First stop: Hospital Cave.

The first notable thing about Hospital Cave is that it is at the top of a hill. We think of caves as having a strong down component, so we were surprised to find that up was required. No, it didn’t use our arms, but I think we’d envisioned something more stately and relaxed than what we encountered. Effort would be required. Shit.

It was well worth that effort, as Hospital Cave turned out to be as much human artifact as natural. The Cave part was obviously naturally occurring, but the Hospital part had been built inside it from 1963-1965 as an impregnable retreat for both wounded soldiers and Viet Cong brass. It was in constant use until the end of the war in 1975.

The stairway is new, of course. As designed, access was via a wooden stairway that could be pulled up in case of attack. Which never happened. The facility was so well hidden the Americans never figured out it existed. Stupid Americans.

The complex is an impressive feat of engineering, comprising over 20,000 square feet across three floors, with 17 rooms and a capacity of 100 patients. The facility boasted fresh water, ventilation, and a secondary escape route, in the event of a breach.

The first floor was storerooms, offices, wards, and operatories, all built of concrete. The second floor was a gathering area in a large natural cavern, used for exercise and movies. It even had a small swimming pool. The third floor, which isn’t open to the public, was a bolthole in the event that senior officials needed to go to ground, although I don’t know that it was ever used for that purpose. That floor included its own separate escape route.

Our final stop of the day, and of the visit, was Trung Trang Cave. Unlike Hospital Cave, whose interests were primarily historical, Trung Trang offered the more traditional cave virtues of cool limestone formations. However, like Hospital Cave, it required an ascent to reach. What’s up with all the caves at the top of mountains? Who does that?

This greets you on entry. I think everywhere should have a Code Of Conduct For Civilized Tourism. The US could use one. I especially love the bottom left, which reminds you to Respect Vietnamese culture and custom, and features a mother shielding her daughter from a couple embracing. No one should have to see that.

I’ll confess that I’m kind of a cave slut. You don’t even have to be the most beautiful, most spectacular example of cavedom. I will still spelunk you. Assuming there’s a paved pathway. Jesus, what do you take me for?

I think it all goes back to family car trips in the Southwest. Carlsbad Caverns was always my favorite stop, and I think reading Journey To The Centre Of The Earth at a tender, impressionable age sealed the deal. “How old were you when you first had these feelings?” Indeed.

All of which is to say that Trung Trang is not the prettiest cave at the dance, but I shall happily twirl her about the floor with reckless abandon and extol her manifest virtues to all who will listen. She is a cave, and that is enough.

She was also a lovely, low-key way to wind up the trip. Except for all the ascending.

To a great extent, I built what passes for my career on this ability, along with writing. Those were the two things I did well enough to warrant a paycheck. I’ve been planning and organizing for so long it seems like part of my nature. And there’s a small part of our lives, managing the logistics of our travel, that still calls for that skill. Planes, trains, automobiles, and Airbnb.

But except for those occasional travel-related bursts, our days serve as an active rebuke to the entire notion of planning ahead. We pretty much wake up and decide what to do each day. We cannot recommend it highly enough.

For the past eight months, as we’ve been Stateside, I have been thrown headfirst back into the world of multivariate critical path management. Which has been almost exactly as much fun as that description makes it sound. It turns out that when I’m not engaged in planning and management as the daily wallpaper of my job and life, I find it kind of unpleasant. Being good at it doesn’t really reduce the sting.

The first six of our Stateside months were spent preparing our new apartment in Chicago. If we’re going to use that as a safe harbor and break from travel, it’s important that it be done when we next come back. It won’t be much of a rest if we return to more move-in projects.

Plumbing, electric, tile work, demolition, repair… Figuring out when tradesmen could execute their piece, how we needed to order their work, planning when we could slide in the pieces we were tackling ourselves, coordinating with the building. I was basically the general contractor on a small construction project.

We had about a month at the end of the process where we could just chill, which was nice. We got to enjoy Chicago a little bit, and we feel really good about the choice. There’s more than enough going on to keep us entertained during our annual summer US sabbatical, and when we’re all done traveling it’s a city well set up for oldsters.

For the last five weeks we’ve been in Temecula with Dorothy’s parents. They’re 92 and 88, and have finally admitted that their massive house is more than they can manage. They’re moving to Tucson to be near Dorothy’s sister, and their house needed to be cleaned and staged for sale. They’re flipping their expensive California property for a smaller, cheaper Tucson property and banking the difference, which they need. They haven’t done a great job managing their finances.

They’ve been in their current home for 24 years, and they’ve accumulated as much stuff as you’d expect, or more, all of which seems to hold some sentimental value for them. Prying them off of every tool, every stick of furniture, every Christmas decoration they’ve ever owned has been a grueling, unrewarding series of arguments. 20 boxes of holiday ornaments, most of which haven’t been put up in years. It was demoralizing.

But all of this was going on while we’re trying to strip the place down so it didn’t look like a Grandmacore stage set and cleaning it so it didn’t look like no one had ever cleaned it. And managing the various vendors and tradesmen who were doing the heavy lifting that we couldn’t. Figuring out what order to execute, when it’s safe to put new curtains up, making sure the outside windows and screens don’t get washed until the landscaping is done…

It’s a lot, made worse by the effort required to help people who don’t want to be helped, and who fought us every step of the way. I think the worst of it is that Dorothy and I pride ourselves on not wasting experience. When bad things happen, we’re dead set on figuring out what possibly useful thing we can extract from the episode. Even the arguably worst thing that has happened to us, the collapse of our successful business when we were in our 20s, served up useful perspectives on, if nothing else, how to avoid getting fucked like that in the future. There’s almost always some positive you can take away from even the worst situation.

But very rarely, every so often, you walk outside your front door and a meteor hits you. It came from nowhere, you didn’t do anything to cause it, and there’s nothing meaningful to take away from the experience. It was just a bad thing, and all you can do is rub some dirt in it and walk it off.

I could relate all of the arguments and stupidity and self-sabotage, but it wouldn’t mean anything. There’s nothing to be learned from it. Except, at best, the limits of filial piety. So we’re rubbing some dirt in it and walking it off, leaving a clean house and taking away a few bruises as souvenirs.

Our job was to prep it for sale and then skedaddle, and we’ve done both. There’s still the nightmare of actually moving that Dorothy’s sister is going to have to manage, but we got the elders as far as we could. Our hands may be tied, but they’re clean.

Which, thankfully, brings us to the first stop of our third year of travel: Cambodia. We arrive slightly beaten up, ready to relax and explore, and delighted that no more complex logistical challenges await us. Now we can just live day to day, as we’ve intended all along.

Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.

Since out first stop is Cambodia, it made more sense to leave from LAX than go back east to leave from Chicago. So pretty much the moment the photographer left we headed to LA. Our dear friend Bob Rossoff lives in LA, and he graciously drove down to Temecula to rescue us.

Photography was on a Monday and our flight was Wednesday evening, so we arranged two nights in the lovely Royal Pagoda Motel in Chinatown.

Which, whatever its kitsch exterior suggests, was actually fine.

Bob docented us through our brief LA stay. We took a walk in Griffith Park, we went to Sherman Oaks, where I grew up, for pastrami and chopped liver sandwiches, and Bob showed us an art installation he’d done beside the LA River. We also walked around Chinatown, which was weirdly silent. Bob explained that many of the businesses had failed to make it past lockdown, but the whole effect was of a Chinese Potemkin Village. Somehow it was charming, in a way I’m sure native Chinese abhor, ridiculous, as the entire Chinatown esthetic was created by two white architects who had never been to China, and disturbing, as the desolation made it feel like a post-apocalyptic hellscape where only the architecture had survived.

Choo Choo! Next Stop Singapore…

But not before fucking up the LAX airport experience. Remember how I started with how great I am at planning and organizing? Apparently that skill needs to be used more often if I expect to still apply it at a high level.

I’ve fucked up calendar timing for a flight before by being sloppy about time zone shifts, so I’m now super careful to doublecheck that time zones are correct for both arrival and departure locations. Not so careful, apparently, about checking the actual times. My calendar entry said that our flight left LAX at 5:00 PM, whereas the actual time was 10:05. Not entirely sure how that cog slipped, but I’ll add Check Your Fucking Tickets to my Paranoid Departure List. Which also now includes Make Sure Your Airline Hasn’t Gone Bankrupt.

But, of course, we didn’t arrive at the airport at 5:00. Bob dropped us off at 2:00, leaving us eight hours to kill at LAX. Which is a lovely airport, but it lacks about seven of the eight hours of entertainment we needed to fill. Especially since, given the lateness of the departure, Singapore Air’s ticket counters didn’t even open until 4:00. So the first two hours were spent in the modestly appointed public area of the airport.

We walked a lot. All the way to Singapore, it seemed.

Which was our transfer point to Cambodia. After about 18 hours in the air we were looking forward to a six hour layover at Singapore. Genuinely looking forward to it, as Changi Airport in Singapore is world renowned as the Disneyland of airports. Maybe looking forward to it a little less, after having to cool our heels at LAX for eight hours, but still. A treat.

And it only modesty disappointed. It turns out that some of the most amazing features are outside the security perimeter in the public parts of the airport. And while we technically had time to leave and reenter, it would also mean clearing immigration for Singapore, which we hadn’t planned for. No clue what the paperwork and bureaucracy requirements were. Better, even with six hours between flights, to not tempt fate.

Which still left plenty to do.

The first thing you notice about Changi is its sheer scale. It’s the third busiest airport in the world by passenger volume, handling almost 70 million passengers a year. Plus us.

The next thing you notice is how very, very green it is. There is an absurd amount of plantings. And water. And art. There’s pretty much an absurd amount of everything.

There’s also a large, impressive two story butterfly garden. Because of course there is.

I know nothing at all about butterflies, other than that they’re pretty, so there’s nothing clever or insightful about this. It’s just pretty pictures of pretty things. Shallow.

However, I did just finish the ninth book in the Veronica Speedwell series by Deanna Raybourn, about a Victorian lepidopterist who solves crimes with her swashbuckling beau. Which books are an order of magnitude better than that description makes them sound. Highly recommended high quality, lo-cal reading.

There’s a fair amount of video-based art, most of which was impressive in both conception and execution. Here’s a multistory installation that I think is part of one of the duty-free stores, even though we watched it for awhile and didn’t catch any branding.

Here’s Dreamscape, an installation that pulls it all together: plantings, water you can walk on, koi, and a digital sky.

And finally, our white whale: The Wonderfall. A four story digital waterfall that was outside the secured area. We never even saw it from a train. We are suffused with regret.

But all things must pass, even Changi airport, so we finally board our flight to Siem Reap. Where for one last time we get to truly enjoy the hostess uniforms for Singapore Air.

This is not a great photo, but as I was positioning myself for another attempt, Dorothy helpfully pointed out that taking multiple pictures of Singapore’s airport security infrastructure wasn’t my best idea.

Khmer, You

For accuracy’s sake, I should point out that that’s a visual pun. They pronounce it k-my. For decency’s sake I should delete it. Obviously. I’ll get right on that.

While we’re correcting pronunciation, we say kam-bo’-dee-ya, but they say kam-bo-djee’-ya. Pretty close to Kampuchea, as they were affectionately known during the Pol Pot years.

This leg is all Southeast Asia: Cambodia, Vietnam, and Indonesia. With the exception of Hanoi, we’re staying away from capital cities on this tour. So no Phnom Penh, or Ho Chi Minh City, or Jakarta. The big capital cities rarely seem to represent the best a country has to offer.

For Cambodia, we’re four weeks in Krong Siem Reap, home to Angkor Wat and all the rest of Angkor, which was the seat of the Khmer kingdom from the 9th to the 15th centuries. Angkor Wat is just the largest and best known temple in the area. But Krong Siem Reap itself has plenty going on, as it’s become one of Cambodia’s primary cultural centers. Plenty for us to explore in our four weeks.

We got into our Airbnb at about 7 in the evening. Dorothy passed out instantly, and my dinner was the rest of a bag of airport trail mix. Before I fell asleep standing up, I asked where the closest ATM was, which was about a half hour walk each way. I’d downloaded the local Uber equivalent, Grab, so I could very easily have called a tuktuk, but I was still pretty muzzy and I’d forgotten that was an option. I was going to walk, but our lovely hostess took me there and back on her scooter. That’s service.

With a fresh One Million riel in hand I went home to pass out, too. Knowing that I’d have to wake up to nasty exchange rate math. Up until this point we’d been mostly lucky on exchange rates. 10:1, 100:1, 20:1… those are all pretty easy to do in your head. But the riel was 4,000:1. One million riel was only $250. You can figure it out, but it takes some effort.

It turns out that almost everything here is denominated in USD. I have no idea why. It’s kind of weird. Anyplace that takes credit cards not only prices in USD but charges in USD. Cash transactions can be priced in riel or dollars, but they’ll take both. I still have to do math, since all of the bills in my pocket are riels, but it’s mighty convenient to have things priced in USD. You do the math once at the end, and not every time you’re trying to figure out what something costs. It is a little disorienting, though, to pay for something in riels and get change mixed between riels and USD, depending on what they have in available cash.

After we’d been here for a few days our hostess offered me one of their scooters, which seemed like an obviously bad idea. The traffic here, a mosh pit of cars, trucks, scooters, bikes, and tuktuks, reminds me of nothing so much as Mumbai, in the sense that it seems to be governed by the laws of physics rather than the rules of the road. Is there space for your vehicle? It’s clearly meant just for you.

The confounding thing is that while it looks random it clearly isn’t, or there would be pileups everywhere. Which means that there are implicit rules governing traffic that everyone has agreed to follow, but for the life of me I can’t decode them. I’ve watched every merge in every tuktuk we’ve been in, searching for the cues used to let you know it’s safe to insinuate yourself into traffic, and nothing. They are communicating, somehow, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out how.

No scooter for me. I would be a danger to myself and others.

Here’s an unexpected local oddity, what we refer to as the Fuck It Outlet. “Sure, fuck it, plug in whatever you like. I have the slots.”

We’ve never been anywhere where there wasn’t a standard that all devices adhered to, but everything that plugs in here has a different plug. If you can figure out the proper orientation.

Truthfully, I didn’t even know a universal outlet existed. Travel is broadening!

Our apartment is charming. We’ve had apartments in Morocco that were more ridiculously over the top, but this one has a generous layout, gracious amounts of storage, and lovely furnishings. We need a few things for the kitchen, but nothing serious. The host is responsive and the onsite staff is superb (the day after getting my scooter ride to the bank I walked literally a quarter block to the corner minimart to get water and ice, and when I turned to come back she was right behind me. She’d followed me to carry my bags back. I suspect she thinks I’m not safe alone). We’ve had a lot of accommodations that were just fine, but this one is actively good.

We’re a little outside the city center this time, so we’re not smack in the hurly-burly. We stayed three months in the Medina in Marrakech, and one takeaway is that we don’t need to be at ground zero for Action. The Medina was a little jangly.

We’re about a 45 minute walk to the heart of Siem Reap, but only about ten minutes by tuktuk, at less than $2. Grab is fast and convenient, and transportation is ubiquitous, so we’re fine with someplace a little quieter.

The weather has been surprising. Yes, it’s in the 90s every day, but there always seems to be a breeze that takes it down a notch, and the evenings have been lovely. It’s a little like the climate in Chetumal, only less clammy. We’ve been warned about the weather here, and it may well get bad, but we’ve been pleasantly surprised so far.

Rub Some Dirt In It And Get Carted Off

We wake up to our first full day ready to conquer Cambodia. We’re flush with cash, the morning is leavened with a cool breeze, and we’re a 25 minute walk to the grocery store. What’s not to love?

We stopped for breakfast on the way, our first local meal. The setting was delightful and the food was delicious. We felt relaxed for the first time in months, and talked about how ready we were to slide back into what has become our preferred rhythm for daily living. I definitely feel most at home now when we’re not at home.

Down the back stairs we go, ready to grab the day by the throat, but the day had other plans for us. About 3-4 steps from the bottom, Dorothy’s foot slid off the side of her sandal, twisting her ankle and tumbling her down the stone stairs to land face first in the dirt. This was like her stumble coming off the train in Tunisia, but obviously, at first glance, much, much worse. I was behind her on the steps and watched the whole thing, helpless to do anything.

We drew a crowd, including our waitress, who said she was calling her boss. Someone else said they were calling for help. We lost about ten minutes until I figured out no one had called for transportation to the hospital yet, so I dialed up Grab to get a car to the nearest hospital.

Meanwhile, we’d managed to get Dorothy turned face up. She was obviously in a lot of pain (I recognize the sound, sadly), but I also knew how terrified she was about her replaced knee. That’s what had caused the stress in Tunisia, worrying that she had damaged the artificial joint and convinced the next step would be medevac back to the US. There’s not a lot of soothing you can do to alleviate a fear like that. We’d just have to get her to the hospital where they could check her knee and address the gash on her shin.

The tally: busted lip, bruised jaw, bruised and swollen knee, badly sprained ankle, a ragged gash that would definitely leave a gaudy, Frankenstein scar, and road rash on hands, arms, face, and legs. So, date night.

The Grab car showed up in a few minutes, and with the help of the crowd we got her laid down across the back seat with only the expected amount of screaming. Our waitress had climbed into the car to help at Dorothy’s head while we were managing her feet, and then closed the door on herself and accompanied us to the hospital. Unexpected.

Once there, Dorothy was taken care of quickly. Someone dressed the gash pretty much right away. It took a little longer to get an x-ray and a doctor to review it, but all told I think we were there for no more than an hour. We’d have left skid marks in a US ER.

The x-rays were negative. Dorothy was cleared to lose the fear so she could focus on the pain. Don’t knock it. One less thing to worry about, especially the worst thing, is a win.

No stitches for the gash, which kind of surprised me, but I think it might have been too ragged to stitch. They cleaned it and dressed it, and everything else was a rounding error.

My only complaint about the hospital was the weak sauce of acetaminophen and ibuprofen they prescribed. This called for opiates, dammit. Fortunately, we don’t leave home without.

The other thing that happened while all this was going on was that the restaurant’s owner showed up, a lovely woman who took charge, communicating with staff and translating for us.

When we were all done she drove us to a pharmacy to get a cane and then took us back to our Airbnb, where our kind scooter hostess helped manhandle Dorothy up the stairs.

I’d like to report that, like our other hospital experiences on our travels (Mexico and Tunisia), Cambodia’s system was clean, efficient, and cheap. I can vouch for clean and efficient, but I have no idea what it cost, as the restaurant’s owner paid for everything and refused to let me reimburse her. While we were driving around to find a cane she shared her life story, which included the information that her husband was a very successful manager at Dow, and that she only ran her restaurants and hotels to provide jobs and education for her employees. I think she was trying to let us know that paying for our ER visit wasn’t a financial burden.

I’m sure that at least some part of her response was fear-based. An American Karen had fallen and hurt herself at her restaurant, which must be terrifying. We didn’t present in any way as troublesome, reassuring her that the blame was on Dorothy’s sandal and not her stairs. And she seemed genuinely kind and concerned. But there had to be at least a soupçon of let’s-just-keep-this-from-getting-out-of-hand.

It’s hard to overstate the level of kindness and care we received from strangers, from our waitress to her boss to the bystanders. Not exactly how I wanted our first day back in the saddle to go, but affirming nonetheless.

I’d reached out to our host while at the hospital asking if we could be moved closer to the ground floor so Dorothy didn’t have to manage getting up to the fourth. Our scooter hostess had prepared an apartment on the second floor, and when we got back helped move our things down. Thankfully, we hadn’t been there long enough to move in, so we just threw everything that had been strewn about back into suitcases, and she carried most of them down for us. Young and strong.

The new apartment is a tad smaller, but that’s fine. The other one seemed kind of pointlessly large. But we are missing the washing machine that our first apartment sported. There’s a laundry service a scarce half block away that returned beautifully folded laundry same day for $1/kilo. A week’s worth of laundry was $3. Why would we do our own laundry?

The barber is also just around the corner.

As exhausted as I was at this point, we still hadn’t made it to the grocery store we’d set out for in the morning. Despite the fatigue, I decided to take the 25 minute walk. I’d tuktuk back when I was laden.

On the way I ran across a kiddie car rental lot, which we’ve seen variations of in many countries. It never fails to charm.

We didn’t know how Supermarket the place we’d been told to go would be, so Dorothy sent me with a pretty deracinated list, assuming there would be few options. So “rice,” “coffee,” and “cooking oil,” as opposed to “jasmine rice,” “French roast coffee,” and “olive oil.”

The grocery store was a shiny new two story marvel, the equal of any Carrefour in North Africa.

So many choices, and no one to help, as Dorothy was fast asleep at home. I was overwhelmed, like Borat with cheese. I soldiered on manfully and was even able to buy fruit for breakfast, but I totally failed at veggies. Other than onions all the vegetables looked alike to me. But not in a racist way.

The Local Mercado

Everywhere has something like the Mexican mercado, sometimes open air, sometimes covered. The place where the locals buy fruits, vegetables, meats, spices, housewares, and lunch. It took us a minute to locate the Old Market, around the corner from the night markets downtown, but it didn’t disappoint. It’s an entire square block, with everything you could want. I think shopping for fresh groceries in the mercados may be our favorite activity when we travel.

I went a couple times on my own before Dorothy was stable enough to manage the narrow aisles and tight quarters. I spent a lot of time texting her photos of produce so I could bring her what she wanted.

Streetscape

There’s always interesting things to see just walking and driving around wherever we happen to be.

The Royal Independence Gardens are known for the colony of bats that live in its trees, specifically Flying Foxes, so named for their red fur. Bats being nocturnal and all, we expected to see them sleeping during the day, but they were super active. And screechy.

The Royal Independence Gardens are basically the front yard of the Royal Residence. Which is every bit as ornate as you’d expect.

One more thing. The cats here are mutants. They have this weird thing going on with their tails. There’s the odd freak with a normal tail, but 99% of the cats here have either ridiculous, stubby tails or, more likely, a bizarre kink. I know, Jerry, you have a bizarre kink, too, but no one wants to hear about it.

Follow Up Care

The ER we went to for Dorothy’s extravaganza had been strong on right now but weak on later, so we thought a follow up visit to check the wound would be prudent. Her ankle and knee were both healing nicely, and she was even starting to get some side-to-side action on the knee. But that wound was troublesome, and we needed to know if it was healing OK, and how long we should keep it bandaged and moist before letting it have air exposure.

Our host provided the name of the nearest local doctor/hospital: The Golden Queen. That sounds about right. They specialized in women’s issues, but they also handled the normal range of injuries and such. We were in and out in half an hour, which included the cleaning and dressing of the wound, a detailed and thorough consultation about caring for it while it healed, and a bonus Tetanus shot for good measure.

Oh, and a bill for $22.

But we live in the greatest country in the world. And don’t you ever forget it.

We now have a path forward on all of Dorothy’s various recoveries. It’s probably going to be at least another week before she’s ready for any serious sightseeing, but we’re arranging some car sightseeing for a few days from now.

And we’re here for four weeks. While that’s a short visit for us, we have plenty of time to see what needs to be seen, and no reason to begrudge the healing time. We have ordered our lives to have nothing but time, so when something like this happens we’re not derailed.

Just slowed down.

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.

So… sure.

How hard can it be to write about food? Eat, take pretty pictures, write a few words about how delicious it is, lather, rinse, repeat.

It turns out, at least for me, that it’s hard to talk about food divorced from the cultural context in which that food is produced and consumed. It may be easier to ignore this in other places, but Oaxaca forces you to acknowledge context.

The state of Oaxaca has an incredible diversity in climate and biome, driving a wider range of crops than would be expected based on size alone. That pairs with an incredible cultural diversity. It’s estimated than more than 50% of all of Mexico’s population that speaks indigenous languages is in Oaxaca state, representing 16 officially recognized indigenous peoples. Unsurprisingly, that agricultural and cultural diversity makes for some truly outstanding, and very specific, cuisine. Oaxacan food is positively marinated in terroir.

Oaxaca’s mercados, especially Central de Abasto, offer a dizzying range of locally grown produce and ingredients specific to the region, from moles to chiles, spices, and vegetables. That makes for great homecooked meals. At the other end of the spectrum, Oaxaca boasts world class restaurants with chefs devoted to honoring tradition while pushing the boundaries, such as Criollo and Origen. In between is a thick stew of street food and more modest sit down and takeout restaurants. As eating towns go, Manhattan has more diversity, but Oaxaca is every bit as dense. And that’s saying something.

So there’s the context in which Oaxacan food is produced. The context in which it’s consumed, though, has much to do with the consumer. Like us, for example. Our relationship to la cocina tipica Oaxaqueña is by definition different than a local’s.

Curiously, the context that’s been most thoroughly deconstructed for us in Oaxaca is that of the United States. Sometimes you have to step outside your environment to see it clearly. We expected this adventure to teach us about the places we haven’t been, not the place we came from. Go figure.

Diversity and Monocultures

We all talk about the value of diversity, but I don’t know how much we think about how that diversity manifests itself in our day to day lives. OK, I haven’t. I’m sure you’re all much better people than I am.

Honestly, I’d never even thought to define the value of diversity in concrete terms until we came to Oaxaca. It was an almost entirely abstract value. Diversity good. Monoculture bad. What’s true for your yard is true for your community.

But Oaxaca is not a diverse environment, at least not in the sense that we tend to use the term. Yes, it has its 16 discrete indigenous populations, and each of those peoples has contributed something specific to the Oaxacan culture at large. Given enough time and knowledge, you could decode the contributions to cuisine and art back to the peoples who contributed those ingredients. This part is Zapotec, this part Mixtec, this part Mazateco…

But as an outsider, Oaxaca reads like a monoculture. Different flavors, in both food and art, may bubble up and provide a distinctive top note traceable to a specific group, but the cultural stew itself has become its own specific mélange.

Part of this has to do with the unique physical structure of the state of Oaxaca. Much of it is rugged terrain (only 9% of the land is arable), leading to isolated communities. That isolation made it harder for the Spanish to consolidate top down control, letting the indigenous peoples of Oaxaca maintain much more of their cultural identity than other parts of Mexico were able to under Spanish rule. Over time, these separate strands have been woven together into a tapestry that is distinctly Oaxacan.

I know there’s a ton of nuance here that I’m not just glossing over, but am actually incapable of seeing. But my point here isn’t actually about Oaxaca. OK, maybe it’s a little about Oaxaca. While we can celebrate the diversity that the region’s indigenous peoples have brought to the local culture, there isn’t a lot of diversity here across racial and geographic dimensions.

Case in point, a local chain called Tlayudas el Negro. Their logo is so appalling, even I won’t share it. Google it if you must, but that’s on you. I wondered how they could possibly get away with something so blatantly racist, and then realized that in the three months we’ve been here I’ve seen precisely two Black people. And they were both clearly tourists.

Which takes us back to the US, and to the dimensions of diversity that we’ve taken for granted, because they’re such an ingrained part of the environment. Even in a podunk little town like St. Louis (which we love, while recognizing that it lacks the richness of a New York or Chicago), you can walk down a street and see a Jamaican restaurant next to a Brazilian restaurant, next to an Ethiopian restaurant, next to a Greek restaurant, next to a Thai restaurant, next to a Bosnian restaurant, next to… the rest of the UN.

If it sounds like what we miss is international dining, that’s not wrong, and it’s what led to this topic. But it’s more than just the food. Because that Thai restaurant is run by Thai people who live in the community. As are the Greek, Jamaican, Brazilian, Bosnian, and Ethiopian restaurants, and all the others. Every American city is flavored and enriched by the transplants who’ve moved there.

And we didn’t just benefit from those expats when we went out to dinner. When we had a shop on Cherokee Street in St. Louis, members of those communities walked through our doors and were customers, bringing us their own particular perspective on what dressing well meant. We could hold very still and filter feed, and the whole world came to us.

That’s so much the norm, in every city we’ve lived in, that it seems unremarkable. But it’s not. It may seem like wallpaper, but having that wallpaper stripped away has made us super conscious of its absence, and the ridiculous value of its presence.

It’s hard to pick a favorite Zora Neale Hurston quote, but one that’s stuck with me over the years is, “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” We’re all defined, in many ways, by contrasts. For all that much of this adventure is about fleeing the US and some of its less pleasant aspects, being in Oaxaca has made me feel more American than I thought possible.

But you came here for food pictures.

Fine Dining

Casa Oaxaca

To cap off our day at Hierve el Agua, we decided to treat ourselves to a fine dining experience. Casa Oaxaca had come highly recommended, but we had no idea what was in store for us. This was not merely the best meal we’ve had in Oaxaca, we all agreed that it was one of the best meals we’ve had in our lives. For real.

We were so full after two appetizers each that we couldn’t do dessert. But after what they did with the food, we have to go back and see how they create magic with sugar.

Tierra del Sol

Our anniversary dinner on December 17th was derailed by poor planning, so we made up for it, in style, on the 19th at Tierra del Sol. The rooftop terrace was beautiful, and the food was amazing. It didn’t hurt that the bill, including two delicious cocktails and tip, came to $58.

Terraza Istmo

The rooftop restaurant/bar is a feature of Oaxacan dining, and Terraza Istmo’s is lovely. Nothing better on a warm evening than dinner and drinks al fresco. Terrazzo Istmo did not disappoint.

Boulenc

Boulenc is both a bakery and a cafe. There are a ton of bakeries in Oaxaca, but the local style of bread is really… white. It may look like a crunchy baguette, but it’s just a different shape of white bread. Boulenc makes a beautiful multigrain loaf, traditional sourdough baguettes, and really excellent pastries. Their sister shop next door, Suculenta, also specializes in non-local foods. They offer Greek yogurt, crunchy peanut butter (with nothing but peanuts), mango jams, bresaola, and all manner of delicacies. It’s an islet of other in a sea of tipico.

Boulenc’s cafe also specializes in non-Oaxacan cuisine. I’ve never really grasped the concept of comfort food before, but I ordered a ribeye cheeseburger and Dorothy had lasagne. It was yet another lovely rooftop setting, and food that genuinely comforted.

Zandunga

I just love saying Zandunga. It sounds like one of those mystical board games that captures unsuspecting children in kid movies. Truthfully, we ate there because of the name. For the same reason we make a cocktail called the Chupacabra.

As it happens, it’s a lovely courtyard restaurant serving up delicious takes on classic cocina tipica. That’s shrimp ceviche on the left, and a mixed platter that we shared on the right. Tamales, empanadas, garnachas, molotes… Every one a treat.

Oaxaca Te Amo

We’d sought out most of the restaurants above based on articles and reviews, but we just wandered into Oaxaca Te Amo because we were hungry and it looked quiet. The food here was beautifully plated and subtle, and very much a delicious surprise.

Street Food

If we didn’t have to occasionally sit down to eat someplace other than a curb or planter, I might only eat street food here. It’s axiomatic that in most places the street food is great (not looking at you, Sabrett), and we’re just at the beginning of the journey… But Jesus the street food in Oaxaca is amazing. I’m sure I’ll eat these words, happily, but it’s going to be hard to top.

Hamburguesas

The street cart hamburguesas are so amazing, and so particular, they require their own section. I’ll just come out and say it: best hamburgers I’ve ever had. They have to be. They have everything. We ordered them con todo, but without the hot dog. Curiously, the todo includes a hot dog. Truthfully, better without. Otherwise, perfection. Come see one built, a layer at a time on the grill.

Elotes & Esquites

Elotes and esquites also warrant their own place of honor in the street food pantheon. Elotes are ears of corn grilled and slathered in Cotija cheese or queso fresco, mayonesa, chile, and lime. Esquites are pretty much the same, except the corn has been removed from the cob and it’s all mixed together and served in a cup. Which is why it’s also known as elote en vaso. Or, as they were referred to more simply on Cherokee Street, our St. Louis Mexican neighborhood, vaso elote. Extra toppings can include various salsas and spices, as well as all the chapulines you can eat. Which in our case is none. My favorite sentence in Spanish? “Sin chapulines, por favor.”

Like hamburguesas and tlayuda, elotes y esquites are quintessential Oaxacan street food. And orders of magnitude better than a simple recitation of their ingredients makes them sound.

Tlayudas

Rounding out the street food trifecta is the humble Tlayuda. Reduced to its component parts, a tlayuda is just a Oaxacan tostada. It’s an exceptionally large tortilla, crisped on a traditional comal, a large flat griddle. Toppings vary, but the common denominators are asiento (settled pork fat), refried beans, quesillo (Oaxacan string cheese), and lettuce. You can add your meat of choice, which for us is usually tasajo (flank or skirt steak that’s pounded super thin and then cured in salt before grilling) or the local chorizo, which is spectacular. Sometimes served flat, sometimes folded, it is so much more than a mere tostada.

Foreign Food

A few years back we spent the holiday season in Cajun country. We went to this back country bayou roadhouse for New Years, having been tipped by a local that the music would be hopping. We went expecting a killer Cajun band, and found a Top 40 cover band instead. They do the zydeco every day. On a special occasion, they want something different.

The same holds true in Oaxaca. When they’re not in the mood for the usual, they love their pizza, fried chicken, and Chinese food.

Pizza

When we lived on the Upper East Side in New York there was a Mexican restaurant on the corner. We used to joke that the kitchen was full of Chinese cooks and photographs of Mexican food, because the food came out plated to perfection and tasting nothing at all like Mexican food. If you could get over your mouth expecting it to taste like it looked, it was fine. It just wasn’t Mexican food in any sense but visually.

And so it is with Oaxacan pizza (or, for that matter, St. Louis pizza). Pizza seems to be Oaxaca’s most popular food that isn’t traditional cocina, and it certainly looks the part. But it isn’t pizza.

There’s nothing wrong with it. I’m a thin crust guy, and this is a little Chicago-ier than I like it, but that’s just a personal preference. And the ingredients can be interesting, although I’d never have picked hot dog as a pizza topping. But the biggest gap is that there’s no tomato sauce. It’s basically an open-faced toasted flatbread sandwich. There’s an array of salsas available to squirt on top, which definitely makes for a better open-faced toasted flatbread sandwich. Just so long as you don’t expect it to taste like pizza just because it looks like pizza.

Pollo Kentucky

The Central de Abasto mercado near us has several vendors that make the most amazing roasted chicken. We had a craving the other day but didn’t feel like braving the Abasto, so we tried the Pollos Broaster a few blocks away, promising Pollo Kentucky. Roasted, broasted… How different could they be?

So. The pizza, kind of meh. We had takeout Chinese on Christmas Day (Tradition!) that was perfectly plausible. But the Pollos Kentucky? We’ve finally had our first (and likely only) actually bad meal here. Gray is not a food color and grease is not a flavor. Only look at the last picture in this slideshow if you have a strong stomach. Or have made a New Year’s resolution to never eat fried chicken again.

Last weekend, in another neighborhood, was the Fiesta de la Virgen de Guadalupe. Anywhere else in Mexico, that would be the big deal. But Soledad is the patron saint of Oaxaca state, and the festivities represent Oaxaca at it’s best: colorful, idiosyncratic, and deeply, deeply committed.

The Basílica itself is a great Baroque beast, completed in 1690 and in continuous use since. It features a restored, fully functioning pipe organ from 1686, a statue of Mary made with 2 kg of gold and a crown with 600 diamonds, and multiple public plazas. One of them is dedicated to ice cream vendors, and the other two are used for weddings, performances, and events.

Day One: Friday

The Fiesta preparations started Thursday afternoon and continued, as far as we could tell, all night without a break. The street in front of our building was closed off and turned into a three block long pedestrian mall with food, clothing, and souvenir vendors, along with games of “skill.” The park directly in front of us was turned into a pop-up carnival. The Ferris Wheel was actually in the street, so close you could diagnose riders as they circled past.

But the fair was a sideshow. At 7:00 PM, the Mass at the Basílica ended and the party began. A Carnival-like riot of costumed dancers, constructions, and massive puppets, it takes place on an open plaza with revelers snaking through the performers. There are no adequate words to describe it, so I’ll let the pictures do the talking.

When they finished up in the plaza, the entire party decamped to the street behind the Basílica. It looked exactly like it was going to become a parade, based if nothing else on all the floats on the back of trucks. Three of those floats featured different human versions of Soledad. Or maybe they weren’t all supposed to be different versions of Soledad, but there were no signs for foreigners, and they sure all looked like her.

We waited a while to see if it would actually move, but gave up in favor of dinner at one of the booths in the fair. Of course, it did turn into a parade, just after we left. We missed it, but Espacio Cultural Oaxaca posted an excellent video.

Dinner at the fair was amazing. More than just stalls, entire restaurants had popped up in the street, complete with awnings, tables & chairs, and table service. We ordered huaraches, masa dough fried and covered in refried beans and, in our case, al pastor. They’re called huaraches because of their shape, much like the sole of a sandal.

And that was pretty much Day One complete. But while we may have been done with the day, the day wasn’t done with us. The fair ran until midnight, and featured an amplified barker repeatedly inducing passersby to try their luck throwing a ring over rubber ducks floating in a tank. We tried to dull the sound by liberally applying mezcal, but were only partially successful.

Day Two: Saturday

The fair continued to run on Day Two, but the big event was the fireworks at the Basílica in the evening. The other big event was our 45th anniversary. The plan was to catch the fireworks and then go out to a nice restaurant for dinner. We’ve been eating pretty well, mixing it up between cooking at home from ingredients available at the mercado, eating street food, which is spectacular here, and the occasional sit down restaurant. But we hadn’t gone anyplace really nice yet, so the anniversary seemed like the right opportunity.

We didn’t know exactly when the fireworks would start, but Day One’s party started when Mass ended at 7:00. So we left at 6:30 to stake out prime spots on the plaza overlooking where the fireworks would go off. The temperature was in the low 60s and we weren’t dressed too warmly, but we thought we’d be out for about an hour before we made it to dinner, so we weren’t concerned.

So…

It turns out that the poster with the schedule for the Basílica did have times. Which I hadn’t noticed, and didn’t discover until afterwards. That time: 10:00. Actual start time was 10:15, so pretty tight to schedule, but almost four hours after we got there. That’s a very long time to stand, especially for those of us with replacement knees. But Dorothy was a trooper, and we were lavishly rewarded for our peevish patience.

As it happened, at 8:00 there was a procession, which we thought, in our youthful optimism, was a harbinger of fireworks. Not so, but still beautiful, with the Hermandad de Estandartes parading through with a statue of Soledad.

Eventually the fireworks proper began. It started with, as one might expect, men dancing with Papier-mâché bulls on their heads. Said bulls were wired for maximum carnage, and little to no effort was made to keep the crowd at a safe distance. No one was injured, or at least not badly enough to require treatment. Which made absolutely no sense.

I’d love to share the specific cultural context and meaning of this particular ritual, but I couldn’t find anything illuminating. I suspect that, like many traditions, it began with someone shouting, “Hold my beer.”

That was just the exceptionally weird appetizer, though. The main course was El Castillo: The Castle. A handcrafted, multistory Tower of Doom, constructed of bamboo and prayers.

I’m sure there are settings for my phone that would have kept the fireworks from oversaturating the video, but I don’t know them yet. So rather than share a video of the entire 10 minutes of exploding Castillo, I’ve edited some greatest hits, where the image isn’t so blown out you can’t tell what’s happening. Oh, and no video at all of the more traditional fireworks show that followed the Castillo. All in all, quite a night of explosives.

By the time this was over, we were cold, sore, and dazzled. What a perfect way to end our anniversary celebration. We had managed to sneak out before the show started to pick up hand food at the fair, so at least we weren’t also hungry at the end. We got a pair of esquites, which we knew as vaso elotes. It’s a cup with boiled corn, smothered in queso fresco, mayo, lime juice, and chili powder. It has absolutely no reason to be as delicious as it is, and it served double duty by warming us from the inside.

We wanted dessert, but we wanted to be sitting even more, so we made it the block home through the fair and collapsed with our best bottle of mezcal. It was after 11:00 when we got back, so we figured we were at least close to the amplified huckster shutting down. Sadly, he ran even later than the previous evening. By the time we passed out at about 12:30, he was still going strong.

Day Three: Sunday

The fair is still running, for what we assume pray will be its final day. The crowds were so intense this evening that we battled just to leave the area and take our evening walk.

Today’s Basílica festivities are modest. A fair amount of Eucharist, and then the return of the Brotherhood of the Banners in the evening. Last night was their entrada, and tonight will be their despedida (farewell). Not to be jaded, but we’ll play the video backwards if we need to see them depart the Basílica.

Sadly, the other Basílica activity today was the Procesión de aurora, with the ubiquitous Brotherhood of the Banners and a live band. As you might have guessed, aurora means dawn, and this Procesión was scheduled for 4:00 AM. Promises made, promises kept.

The band played a mournful air, followed by chanting, followed by a loud explosion. Because, of course it was. And the sequence started all over again.

Which sounds like complaining. Can’t imagine why. But we truthfully have nothing to complain about. We’re staying at Ground Zero for the local culture, and this is what we set out to see. Other people, other places, and other ways of living.

And exploding bulls.

Day Four? No. Just No.

It’s not funny anymore. Make it stop.

Day Five. Seriously.

The fair continues to run outside our building, ending between 12:30 and 1:00 AM. We asked our landlady when it was scheduled to end, and she didn’t know. At this point, we’re afraid it may stay up until Christmas, another four days.

We have dreams of Tía Pato drowning in a lake of fire.

Day Six…

We search for other survivors, but fear we are the only ones left.

Day Seven…

“It’s not the heat that’s driving me mad, Nigel. It’s the incessant jungle drumming.”

Day Eight. Fuck Me, There’s a Day Eight…

We seriously discussed leaving town for a few days. Then, at midnight, it ended, to be replaced by the soothing sounds of metal on metal, as crews worked all through the night to dismantle the rides and remove the stalls. By morning, we’d been rescued.

Plus, and this isn’t nothing, short-term rentals in the local market are almost always cheaper than a long-term Airbnb. Our budget does matter.

So, of course, we didn’t do that for our launch to Oaxaca. We took an Airbnb for over 3 1/2 months. We were apartment hunting online and found an apartment building with absolutely adorable units. I reached out to the owner with our projected travel dates to be told that they’d have a unit available in May. Maybe.

That’s when it dawned on us that we’d be traveling to Oaxaca in the pre-Christmas high season, and if we wanted a place for the duration we’d be in trouble if we didn’t lock it down. Given that we’d visited Oaxaca before, we felt comfortable that we could tell if an apartment was well located or not, so we booked our entire stay in advance.

Man, did we nail it. The apartment is the best Airbnb we’ve had, in any country (especially the US, where the Airbnbs have been pretty abhorrent), and the location literally could not be better.

As confessed, we have completely redecorated the apartment. We’ve bought housewares, moved all the furniture, and moved in. There could be more counter space for food prep, but that’s about the worst thing we can say about it. It has a half-size refrigerator, but that just means we have to shop every couple of days. It’s not like we’re doing anything else, and the local mercados are fun. Plus, our host has been a dream. On day two there was a toilet problem, and a plumber was here in 30 minutes to fix it. I needed a doctor (read the update here), and she had an appointment for me same day.

Let’s Take A Tour

The apartment is basically just two rooms: a living area in the front connected to the rear bedroom by a breezeway.

Location, Location, Location

As lovely as the apartment is, the location is where our situation shines. Half a block in one direction is a Soriana, the local super mercado chain. It’s a full grocery store crossed with a Walmart. You can get tires, refrigerators, freshly baked bread, canned goods, and hot lunch. Half a block in the other direction is a small local mercado, Mercado IV Centenario, with everything from meat and produce to housewares and fresh juice. The block in between has two cremerias for fresh cheese and butter. There’s an ATM two doors down and a laundry around the corner.

We’re also on a main street, and directly across from a little park. The park is a community resource, with events such as a regular Sunday plant market. The main street is part of the local parade route, for everything from street protests to formal parades. All the participants stop in front of the park to perform their routines, which we can enjoy from the comfort of our building’s roof terrace.

There’s a 20 de Noviembre street and a Mercado 20 de Noviembre, so we shouldn’t have been surprised that there was a parade on the 20th of November. That’s Mexico’s Revolution Day celebration, and the parade is a big deal. Every school, at every level, every sports club, the police, the military, the unions… The parade lasted well over an hour, and the only surprise was that there was anyone left to watch. It felt like the entire city marched past our terrace.

That’s just within our little block. If we walk one more block towards the Centro there’s a massive old basilica, which is both an active church and a community center. They host weddings and public events, and their plaza has a permanent array of ice cream shops (neverias). Oaxacan style ice cream is less milky than US style, trending towards granita, with a riotous selection of flavors. Absolutely delicious.

Further towards the Centro, maybe a ten minute walk from our apartment, is the Zocalo, the town square. This area is incredibly active. Honestly, the whole city is active. I thought New York was The City That Never Sleeps, but it has nothing on Oaxaca. How many optometrists need to be open after 9:00 on a weeknight, you might ask? All of them, apparently. Which is a lot. For reasons mysterious, Oaxaca seems to have the densest concentration of optometrists on the planet.

The Zocalo also hosts multiple events over the week. Wednesdays, for example, are a recurring dance party with a live band and what appear to be a host of regulars.

So. Many. Mercados.

While we have a super mercado and a small local mercado hard by our apartment, there are three truly standout mercados within a 10-15 minute walk.

The large one by the zocalo is Mercado Benito Juarez. There’s a smaller one just across the street called Mercado 20 de Noviembre. While there are meat vendors (carnicerias) at every market, 20 de Noviembre is known for its El Pasillo de las Carnes Asadas: The Corridor of Grilled Meat. Unlike the other carnicerias, which only sell raw meats, the vendors at 20 de Noviembre will grill your order while you wait. We’ve enjoyed the chorizo and the tasajo, a seasoned skirt stake specific to Oaxaca.

But the centerpiece, the crown jewel of Oaxaca mercados, is Central de Abasto. It was built in 1974 to ease the strain on Benito Juarez and 20 de Noviembre, but it quickly outgrew both its formal plan and its original boundaries. Home to nearly 20,000 vendors and spread across half a square mile, Central de Abasto can be overwhelming. There’s no map, no zones, you just have to make your way and remember, “Right, that’s where the great roasted chicken is, that’s where the cheap, high quality mezcal can be found…”

Central de Abasto has become our go to mercado. Because of, not despite, the chaos, it’s our favorite mercado in Oaxaca, and only a short walk from our perfectly situated apartment.