A Bad Idea

I know that beach-lovers want to live as close to the water as possible, but building below the high tide line is a Really Bad Idea. Some examples:

This staircase may not look too bad in this view,

but sand is unstable and has a tendency to wash out with the ebbing tide, leaving the entire structure above the soil and resulting in staircases like this one.

Sometimes, entire walls fail.

Streets intended to go all the way to the water don't always do too well, either.

With the possible exception of Neolithic stilt villages, building right on the water has not been one of humanity's brighter ideas.

More complicated history

The plans for yesterday included a meander through the park where I saw my first (and thus far only) scarlet tanager last year, but the park was closed for refurbishments and guarded by a quite handsome vulture sunning itself on one of the park walls.

Not one to let a good day go to waste (since I had taken the bus into the city and my return ticket was good until evening), after a fabulous late breakfast at a tiny café in the Catherwood House (itself worthy of a post sometime), I let my feet lead me back to the Plaza Grande in the center of Merida, and eventually into the Palacio de Gobierno and its famous murals.

The spouse and I had spent time last year with these paintings depicting the area's long human history, but since mi memoria es malo, I opted for a little educational reinforcement (seldom a bad idea). Like anyplace inhabited by humans for multiple thousands of years, the Yucatan Peninsula has seen its share of tragedy. The Maya, whose ruined buildings are found every few miles across the peninsula, warred with their neighbors and each other until being conquered by the Spanish in the 1500s. The Spaniards, who seem to have behaved badly all over the world, fought numerous wars with the indigenous peoples over a few hundred years. In post-independence 1847, the basically-enslaved, mostly Maya workers on the wealthy sisal plantations of the Yucatan began the Caste War, a guerrilla insurgency that lasted until 1901 and resulted in something like 300,000 deaths. Following the early 20th-century Mexican War, progressive governors began changes--but more wars and, sometimes, executions and assassinations put an end to those reforms.

Still, some people did (some) good things.

• Gonzalo Guerrero married a Maya princess and became the "father of los mestizos."
• Father Diego de Landa, bishop of Yucatan until his death in 1579, destroyed Mayan codices (and to be fair to him, may actually have thought that he was trying to eliminate human sacrifice)--but then wrote the book that contains much of what we know about Maya culture and religion.
• Vicente Maria Velazquez, a Fransciscan priest, agitated for Mayan rights in the early 19th century (unlike some of his predecessors, seeing no conflict between his religion and the physical well-being of his parishioners). Unfortunately, the Palacio has no ladders from which one might get a better photo of this large painting that reaches almost to the (very high) ceiling.

• 

• Salvador Alvarado, revolutionary and governor of the Yucatan from 1915-18. In 1916, he sponsored the first Feminist Congress in Mexico, while passing laws on workers rights, public education, and divorce. He is sometimes called "the one true liberator of the Mayan slaves." 

Not a bad way to spend part of an afternoon.

El Corchito Reserva Ecologica

A confession: thus far, I have been disappointed in the Mexican idea of an ecological reserve, spoiled as I am by Ohio's Metroparks that go on for hundreds of acres. The few reserves I have seen here have been small and consist of paths winding past a few labeled trees--a good place to start in urban or urbanizing areas, but not my idea of any sort of intact ecosystem. Still, anything that encourages the preservation of vegetation and wildlife in an area where many people are still poor is a good idea, and allowing local people to profit from preservation is an even better idea.

El Corchito, a reserve just outside Progreso, was founded by a group of local fishermen getting old enough to look for an easier way of earning a living. While I am not sure what kind of profit they are making, they have created a delightful place to spend a few hours.

Visitors to the reserve pull into a small parking lot off the coast highway. The visitors' center hosts picnic tables, a café, decent restrooms, a small gift shop, and a viewing tower (currently closed for repairs) above the lagoon. For 35 pesos (less than two dollars), visitors enjoy a short boat ride across the lagoon into the heart of a mangrove forest.

Mangroves, for anyone unfamiliar with them, are small trees adapted to waterlogged soils and salty water that would kill less stubborn plants. One of their adaptations is an aerial root system that allows the intake of oxygen directly from the air; 

another is the ability to secrete salt. Interesting as they are in their own right, mangroves protect coasts from storm surges and create habitat for a variety of other life forms, many commercially and environmentally important species spawning among those tangled roots. Mangrove forests (just called "swamps" when I was a girl) are now theoretically protected in most places, although many are lost to development each year.

Most people, of course, are not going to hand over their hard-earned pesos just to go look at scrubby little trees and smell the swamp. The proprietors of El Corchito have created paths and bridges leading through the mangroves to three cenotes, the limestone pools that define the geology of the Yucatan peninsula. These three range in depth from three to about nine feet and are popular places to swim, cool off,

or hunt, if one is a baby caiman interested in a generous supply of small fish.

Reptiles are not the only wildlife present in the park. This young brown pelican was hanging out near the hammock vendor, no doubt hoping for a handout.

And while there are arguments to be made against feeding wildlife, the workers at El Corchito have encouraged gaggles of raccoons and coatimundis, to the delight of visitors of all ages. Snack time is quite the show.

One could supplement one's income in worse ways than by tossing kibble at coatimundis.

Sand and sea(weed)

Beaches erode. While most of us probably like the thought of long, peaceful stretches of white sand, the reality of the oceanfront is that it is continually washing away, hammered twice-daily by high tides that bring sand and debris to the shore and then vacuumed by receding tides that often draw the sand back out to sea. The unstable nature of sand and the recurrence of tides and periodic storms are among the reasons why traditional beachfront building involved small structures on stilts, rather than today's rather more elaborate buildings.

Chicxulub Puerto, on the Gulf of Mexico in the western Yucatan, does not yet have the high-rises now blighting most of Florida, but it does have a beach erosion problem, aggravated by the fact that some homes have been built WAY too close to the water, with seawalls and steps where dunes should have been. The seawall of the house we are renting is less than two feet from the high tide line--entirely too close.

Attempts to protect the beaches are being made. The mangroves on the lagoon side of this spit of land are being restored, filtering the water and holding soil. Some homeowners are planting native vegetation to restore or hold the dunes,

and homemade breakwaters of sandbags and tubes are common.

Unfortunately, some of the sandbags used to hold the beach are made up of plastic fibers, eventually shredded by wave action. These fibers wash out to sea and can be ingested by marine creatures, whose digestive systems did not evolve to handle plastic.

Another sand-holding device is washing up on its own--seaweed, and lots of it. While US beachgoers often complain about seaweed and tourism-minded municipalities remove it, clumps of seaweed can act as sand-catchers to help build the dunes that keep beaches from washing completely away. I have read of places that actually rake the seaweed back to the dune line to facilitate the process, although I have yet to see that done here.

What I have seen are seabirds taking advantage of seaweed as a food source. Evidently, large clumps of the stuff are home to all manner of small life forms, which in turn feed other slightly larger life forms like these least sandpipers.

Would you really want to deprive these little guys of their seafood buffet just to have uninterrupted sand?

Wanderings

The only scheduled event on Thursday was an evening wine tasting, and while my first thought had been to find my way to Merida early, that did not happen. Instead, I enjoyed an early morning walk on the beach, showered, and decided on the adventure of using only public transport and my feet to explore (despite the kind offer of the property caretaker to have his son drop me at the bus station in Progreso if I wanted to wait an hour or so before leaving).

First lesson of the day: ankle-length palazzo pants are not good when walking on sand roads in sandspur country, at least not if one has a tendency to meander toward the margins to see which pollinators are attracted to which wildwood weeds. Said trousers pick up lots of burs, which then blow against unsuspecting legs. But at least waiting for the bus gives a little time for removing burs from fabric.

Second lesson of the day: the buses that run the length of the coastal road are actually a series of buses. The bus caught at the end of our street ends its run in downtown Chicxulub Puerto, at which point one catches the bus to Progreso. If I were heading to the western towns, I would pick up a different bus there. This fact is inconvenient, but I cannot begrudge the drivers or these little companies the 42-cent fare.

But after only a slight delay, I was on my way to Merida. With a few hours to fill before meeting up with my wine-tasting companions and having forgotten to eat lunch, a light repast was the first order of business. Getting off the AutoProgreso near Parque Santa Lucia, I opted for La Chaya Maya, known for its Yucatecan cuisine and the place that last year introduced me to a local drink known as Chaya con limon. Chaya is a plant sometimes called "Mayan spinach, " and the drink involves blending it into lightly-sweetened, lime-infused water. That green color is all natural.

And while I could probably have been satisfied with the complimentary botanas (fresh chips, salsa, and two kinds of beans) that came with my beverage, I ordered the vegetarian salbutes, lovely puffy tortillas topped with a variety of things.

La Chaya is housed in a fun space. My table was in a high-ceilinged room with murals,

but the building also has the interior courtyard typical of colonial buildings in this part of the world.

The afternoon was gorgeous, so I opted to sit and read in the park for a while. Besides the ubiquitous European rock doves (AKA city pigeons), a few Mexican white-winged doves joined the crowd hoping for handouts.

With nothing to feed the birds and no desire to purchase anything from any of the park vendors (hammocks, blouses, embroidered purses, and hats were popular that day), I opted to burn off some calories by walking. Merida is a great city for pedestrian exploration, and I ducked into the Teatro Juan Peon, a Beaux Arts building dating from the early 20th century. This week the theater's gallery is featuring a display by contemporary artist Sandra Nikolai, mixing vibrant, joyous paintings of ordinary people with reminders of the poverty of many rural residents and senior citizens, like this portrait of an old woman begging, entitled "Por Una Vida Digna."

The juxtaposition of Ms. Nikolai's paintings with the enormous, elegant, built-from-scratch colonial home where the evening's wine-tasting fundraiser was held is likely to stay with me for a while.

(Some of) the truths of travel

While not everyone believes it, I am basically an introvert, having no difficulty entertaining myself or spending significant chunks of time alone, and in need of daily quiet to recharge the batteries ( no doubt a major reason why I never had any desire to rear children). But I am discovering that travel, particularly solo travel, activates a different skill set.

First, as addicted as I am to natural scenes (and I am loving the nearly-uninterrupted view of the Gulf of Mexico from the covered patio where this is being written), I notice people, particularly women alone. Striking up conversations is easy, and everyone has a story. (Of course, in Merida's centro, handsome young men tend to wander up wanting to practice their English, and then attempt to steer one toward the only authentic shop in the area, which always happens to belong to a friend, but that is a whole 'nother experience.)

People reach out. Random strangers share important information, like the best restaurants for fish, the best bus, or the cleanest public restrooms. A compliment to a chef who spoke no English brought the revelation of his secret ingredient for the best marinara sauce I had ever eaten. Chatting up another solo female elder on the beach yesterday resulted in an invitation to stop by the house she and some friends bought a decade ago when they realized that they would not be able to afford Vermont winters on their pensions.

Friendships tend to happen quickly; you find yourself sharing personal details with people you just met. A chance encounter at a lecture on architecture last January led to three sixtysomething women taking an impromptu bus trip to a city several hours away, where we wandered 18th-century streets, toured a museum on pirate history, and made a spectacle of ourselves flagging down a taxi and then running madly along the malecon to find exactly the right spot for sunset-watching. Tonight the three of us will meet up with my birding buddy from last year for a wine-tasting event sponsored by the Merida English Library; tomorrow we are meeting the owner of last year's guesthouse for lunch at a favorite French café. Because I am staying at the beach and they are in different Merida neighborhoods, we are doing overnights in each other's rental homes. When is the last time most of us had people we (if we are completely honest) barely know spend the night?

What seems to be true: even in this ugly time, most people can still be trusted.

Settling In, 2018

My second winter in Mexico is shaping up to be quite different from the first. While last year I spent the first month in a lovely guesthouse in a 19th-century neighborhood of Merida, this year some friends and I rented a beach house. Unfortunately, the friends were unable to travel at this time because of medical problems, so for now I am inhabiting a gorgeous three-bedroom, five-bathroom house on the Gulf of Mexico by myself, with property caretakers whose English is even more limited than my Spanish.

It's tough.

 The street address of the house is Calle ("street," for those with no Spanish) 15, but the entry is actually off of Calle 17, pictured below.

Yes, this is a part of the world where sand streets still exist. I had not walked on one since a long-ago Florida girlhood, but today I followed Calle 17 to Chicxulub Puerto's downtown. This village is welcoming to tourists, as evidenced by the many elegant houses found along the waterfront, but it is still a small town of a few thousand inhabitants. Visiting the central market after a morning spent on an editing project, I discovered that the loncherias were all in the process of closing at 1:00 PM. 

Undaunted, I took the recommendation of a couple of elderly gringas and visited a nearby fish restaurant, where the house special of rice and shrimp with fried plantains was both delicious and filling (if not particularly healthy). 

But the mystery of Calle 15 had not yet been solved, so I followed a side street past Calle 17, finally realizing that this is the mysterious missing street.

 Tire tracks in wet sand confirmed it,

but  Calle 15 has one little quirk.

At high tide, it's under water.

El Norte

The Gulf Coast of the Yucatan is experiencing a periodic winter phenomenon known as "El Norte," cold winds and water that swoop down from Texas. My first reaction to hearing of this was some variation of "yeah, right," but now that I am spending a night alone in a house with waves crashing on its seawall, a few feet from where I am writing, I begin to understand why some local people dread the Norte.

Chicxulub is in the tropics, but the temperature has dropped into the low sixties, the winds right now howling so that I have actually closed the doors and windows rather than go in search of a sweater. (On the advice of the property manager, I brought one. Ohio Valley friends, try not to laugh.) No moon is visible because of the cloud cover, but the white crests of the waves are nearly luminescent as they throw themselves against the shore and the breakwater. The Gulf tonight is not the gentle body of water I remember from Florida.

We are not having a hurricane, and none are on the way, but winter is here.

On the road again

I have made it through the journey stage that still evokes the most concern for me: airport security. Why this nervousness should be, I have no real idea, but so it goes. One blessing of white hair and a history of uncomplicated travel is that security personnel seem to view me as unthreatening, so I am generally waved through with minimal screening--except for the memorable trip when I was the person randomly selected for intensive screening--on both entering and leaving the country.

As is typical of life, the best-laid plans "gang aft agley." The travel companions with whom this year's winter retreat was planned have experienced last-minute medical challenges, so I am on the road alone, at least for a while. Yesterday, during a final load of laundry to prepare for the house-sitter, the washing machine decided to begin screaming during the drain cycle, requiring a load of mostly sheets and towels to be wrung out by hand; they took a long time in the dryer. Then Mittsy's annual checkup revealed two very bad teeth (suspected, given her recent breath), so the poor feline had to be left at the vet for blood work, followed by general anesthesia and oral surgery this morning. This complication required the acquisition of soft food and arranging pickup for what is likely to be a very groggy cat.

But the overall plan proceeds. The house-sitter knows a few things about motors and will take a look at the washer (and has a Plan B for laundry in any case). Cat food has been provided, and Mittsy has a ride home. The travel companions have been in contact with their medical providers, and we are hoping that all will be well in the near future. The spouse, returning to Toledo for musical activity, accompanied me to an airport hotel, where the desk clerk was a drummer, the room was warm, and excellent Chinese takeout was available. The caretaker of our rental house will be meeting me at the airport and swinging by a grocery store before taking me to our temporary home. Most delightfully, two adventurous women encountered during last year's wanderings are in Merida and will be meeting me in Chicxulub tomorrow for an exploration of that area, followed by a geriatric slumber party.

If the winter storm just manages not to hit Atlanta until this afternoon, I should see the Gulf of Mexico by 5:00 PM.