Wrapping Up a Year on the Mayan Riviera

As you will recall gentle reader, in November of 2020 we momentously and fabulously celebrated the nuptials of my son and his now lovely wife in the Charlottesville Virginia area. As recorded a few blogs ago, we left JFK and flew to Mexico. We chose what tourism marketers have dubbed the Mayan Rivera because frankly, Mexico was one of the few countries open to perpetual wanderers and also had low Covid cases. A few months on Mexico's Caribbean beaches played no part in our decision. We ended up this apartment in Punta Sam, on the outskirts of Cancún wishing my favorite daughter Caroline a happy 29th birthday. As you will see, we finished up 2021 with Caroline's 30th birthday bash in Playa del Carmen.

Somehow, another year just kinda slipped away.

In November 2020, due to Covid, we had Playa del Carmen almost to ourselves.

A year later at the same spot, Playacar beach looked like this. This shot was just the build up to ~500,000 tourists from everywhere coming and going from the Cancún airport every week! I don't have a shot of it, but Playacar beach was pure chaos once the Christmas season started. Ug, which meant time to move on.

Moved about every month or so, just to see what was up

and take a look at things from a different 'hood.

Carretera Federal (#307) basically divides Playa between the towns and gowns er, I mean tourists and everybody else. We moved across the highway to the Ejido neighborhood, mainly to see how the other half lives the other 85% lives and the safety of riding bicycles. Playa has more bicycle lanes than I have seen anywhere else in Mexico, but they mostly run along 10th avenue, parallel to the beach. Not as touristy as the ghastly 5th Avenue but you have to be hyper-aware and constantly check your surroundings at at least 270 degrees. Otherwise one might encounter, but not limited to: pieces of steel re-bar sticking out of walls, aggressive taxis, honkin' tractor trailers and police/army/federales trucks, sewers where someone has stolen the metal lid and left a ten foot drop, barking dogs that could plausibly relieve you of your calf muscle, scooters loaded down with an entire family going the wrong way, drivers in parked cars opening their doors in your path...

Although Ejido had all these things in much lesser amounts, riding around when everyone in the neighborhood was at work was quiet, pleasurable and relaxing, interspersed with moments of sheer terror.

Even stayed at the location where the Squid Game was filmed.

Caught the ferry out to Cozumel for a week.

A problem with Cozumel, if you are not snorkeling out on the reef or on a tour, is that the good beaches are a longish cab ride from/back to town. This particular beach had peacocks that aggressively demanded our chips and guac.

Other than the beach, Playa offered many "open" cenotes, both crowded and solitary.

 

As well as numerous unheralded Mayan Ruins that are overshadowed by ones like Chichen Itza.

Our 180 day Mexican Visa expired in May 2021, so we went to Columbia for 3 months to renew it. Cartagena was the first stop.

 Medellín

Salento

We flew from Bogotá back to Cancún with a new 180 day visa.

Had many visitors over the year. Lilly's mom, brother and niece enjoyed the Cancún resort experience at

the J W Marriott Cancún.

A quick word about the history of Cancún and the Zona Hotelera where this hotel and 100 others are located. After the Spanish Conquest much of the indigenous Mayan population had died off or left as a result of disease, warfare, piracy and famines, leaving only small settlements on Cozumel and Isla de Mujeres. In 1970 Isla Cancún had only THREE residents, who were caretakers of a coconut plantation. Some 117 other people lived in the nearby fishing village of Puerto Juarez. They say that in 1974 Carlos Slim, the richest man in Mexico and at one point the richest man in the world, build the first hotel. As Cancún became saturated, the developers moved on to Playa del Carmen, Tulum and by 2022 almost every place in between.

Very few people are from what is now called the Mayan Riviera. There are tourists from everywhere, me and Lilly, investors and employees from all over Mexico and increasingly, digital nomads from everywhere as well. Just humans doing what humans do.

Dana, our Kalani friend and Hawaiian Homie also came with her family and shared "the resort experience" with us at the same J W Marriott Cancún.

Logan, also a Hawaiian Homie, visited twice during the year.

The first time he brought his amiga and we went to

Tulum, which unfortunately is an example of what can go wrong with runaway and unregulated tourism; but that will have to be a story for another day.

I think Gerard came to Kalani ~2005 and at one time was the GM...ah the stories he could (and does!) tell. He is also a perpetual wanderer that includes a long stint living in Barcelona. He visited us in Mexico City and Oaxaca City a few years ago. These Mojitos in Playa mark his second visit and we are planning a third, maybe Peru.

Jamie and Bijen, whom gentle reader, you will remember being our hosts first in Kathmandu and later in the remote village of Okhaldhunga, Nepal. In 2019 they were starting a farm to provide school lunches to the Okhaldhunga village kids. Covid and Dharya, above, altered that project just a tad. But they did manage to make it to Playa. Sorry Bijen, we don't have any photos of you so I assume you were in the kitchen making that delicious Dal Baht.

Dharya gets a de facto New Age-ish baptism in a cenote. With my youngest child Caroline about to turn 30, I was reminded that it might have been 29 years since I had been that close to a baby.

Thanksgiving 2020. Israel was our neighbor at another one of our stops outside of the Playa tourist bubble, that is to say, in a real neighborhood. Israel works in the tourist trade in town and hence was coming home in the wee hours when I was cooking the Thanksgiving turkey in the same wee hours of the morning. We initially had a little misunderstanding outside. The gist of it was that I thought he was stealing my bicycle and he thought I was stealing his bicycle. A couple of shots of mezcal cleared everything up and he remained our friend for the duration of our stay.

Met Beth, another Kalani friend and her friend Steve at El Fogon our favorite taqueria in Playa. I'll bet 1000 people eat at El Fogon daily and they have three locations. Sort of a Mexican diner with serious tacos, professional service and excellent prices; we ate there at least once a week.

Then there was our next to last guest, yet another Kalani friend, Joanna. She left Kalani in 2014 and amongst other adventures, she went on to chef it up at the Ivy Inn in Charlottesville and the Shore Lodge outside of Boise Idaho. I missed her both times at both places. Through social media, we found out that she was flying into Cancún the day we were calling it a year in Quintana Roo and flying out to Quito, Ecuador. We all made a big effort to have lunch and catch up, so much so that I forgot to take a picture.

Seems like up to this point, most of our visitors were alumni of that jungle spot in Hawaii: Kalani. A special genetic predilection for inveterate and intrepid wandering?

Our final visitors for 2021: my children and most of their significant others, flew in from Idaho, Colorado and Virginia to celebrate Caroline's 30th birthday.

We rented Casa Loma, a beach house that would have made Pablo Escobar proud.

From left, her brother Giles, her brother Hunter and his wife Danielle join Lilly and I not only to celebrate her 30th but welcome her ride or die guy Jake, front center, to the family.

 We had the official birthday dinner at Alux Restaurant A cool restaurant in a dry cenote/cave. 

An Alux is an invisible Mayan mythological spirit that brings years of marital bliss to people on their birthday.                    

Happy Birthday Care Bear.

An ajouti was acting kind of weird around the pool one morning. They usually try to avoid human contact.

Plenty of space and time to hang out together....it had been a long time. Then poof! They were gone.

We later did a little Día de los Muertos at a local graveyard until it was time to move on.

We moved to the Sisal neighborhood in Valladolid, which is in central Yucatán. The gardens at our place had so many fruit trees, plants and flowers that we recognized that we thought we were back in Hawaii. Must be the latitude.

Christmas Eve 2021 in Valladolid

Lilly tried on a new Mayan dress.

Valladolid didn't have the urgency of the Mayan Riviera.

The Ex-Convento de San Bernardino de la Siena was started in 1522. An imposing hydraulic water wheel was added over the largest cenote on the property in 1613. It was secularized in 1755 and fell into ruins during a particularly bloody phase of the Caste War for Independence from Spain. I think it was restored in the 1970's. Really, a monument to the evangelization and conversion enslavement and murder of the Mayan people by the Catholic Church that is celebrated nightly with a light show, that they now call video-mapping.

*Tedious Historical Disclaimer* The Mayans of yesteryear enjoy a reputation as a peaceful people, differing say from their war mongering neighbors the Aztecs, that they serenely sat around eating maize and avocados, building temples, carving calendars and dressing up like birds. I am currently reading Los Mayas: Pasado y Presente by Miriam Rios Menses, a sort of textbook on Mayan Culture. She relates the discoveries of evidence of continual and total warfare between the various city-states, all types of human sacrifice in those cenotes, slavery, psychedelic drugs ingested by enema...the usual human goings on of the time. Evidently, resources became scarce in the 9th century and things really got bloody. Ah just humans doing human things.

The Spanish just took it to the next level and made it an art form. The indigenous folks never had a chance.

What is the right adjective: astonishing, astounding, shocking, breathtaking, for what Spain pulled off in the Conquest of the New World? While researching a citadel, church or convent in the countless plazas that we pass through in Mexico, Guatemala, Columbia, Ecuador, I inevitably find the same story for each one. 

First came the Conquistadors that would militarily kick the asses of the local populations, then the diseases would follow, killing most survivors. Secondly, along came the Franciscan Monks, or some other Catholic Church Monk variation, whose primary task was to forcibly catechize the remaining population as a means of control. Thirdly, the introduction of the dreaded Auto de Fe, which allowed the Spanish to burn the local's "things of the devil" like books and records, forbid the local language, destroy their temples etc. Once they had accomplished all that and more in the name of the one true God, they were free to steal every last thing the locals had as well as torture them in the most imaginative of ways, murder and enslave them for the next couple hundred years.

And we have barely scratched the surface of South America.

The ancient upraised reef of Yucatan is riddled with underground fresh water rivers. Over the eons these rivers carve the soluble limestone into a vast system of caves and caverns, garnished with stalactites and stalagmites. When the roof of one of these caves collapses, exposing the sky above and the fresh water, below, you have an open cenote. Over the eons, changes in the water currents, more wall and rooftop rubble collapse and wind blown debris continue to fill up the cenote until it goes dry. This was the entrance to the dry cenote Xkopeck, now a bee keeping park. Different bees and different flowers produce a tasty honey available at the local markets.

We generally used the same taxista to haul us from place to place, When asked what was his favorite cenote along the famed La Ruta de los Cenotes of central Yucatán, he chose Sac-Aua. Our guide there talked about the Mayan medicinal plants and trees along the way.

There were quite a few examples along the 1K walk to the cenote.

He asked if we wanted to see a chamber where they used to have ceremonial events. It was a little more spelunking than I normally would have agreed to if I had known the claustrophobic nature of the trek, but by that time it was too late. When we got to the chamber, there were ancient animal bones and shards of pottery scattered about. Must have been pretty cool for a Mayan teenager to have made the hike with only a torch as a spectator to a spectacle that now only the walls remember.

Cenote Sac-Aua is a partially closed cenote. Would have been in darkness for centuries but now the roof has begun to collapse. The fallen rubble from the roof has created an island in the middle of the pool, which one can kayak around. Steps were a little rickety though.

Steep and rickety.

Dzitup and X'kekén are two side by side cenotes. The tour buses stop here on their way to Chichen Izta so it is very touristy. Some boy followed us on the very marked path to the cenote and wanted a tip; we laughed him off. Some photographers were very aggressive with a parrot they put on Lilly's head and then took unasked for shots also didn't get a peso.

I guess because of its younger age, the roof has only collapsed a tiny bit, maybe two yards. The result is eerie spotlight into the pool that attracts bats and swallows. We were there early before the crowds, so it was quite the natural phenomenon.

If you, sweet reader, look to my left in the above photo, you will see a very annoying Eastern European Instagram couple. At first she tried to slip between me and the guardrail with nary an excuse me. I pretended to not notice her and held my position which allowed me to wheeze potential Covid all over her. She then said in heavily Slavic accented English "could you move just a littttttle bit?, with an insincere smile and holding her finger and thumb in "just a littttle bit" kind of way. Grumpy Gramps relented and she got her shots for the folks back home in Slovania.

One day we went to Ek`Balam  the less famous and therefore less touristy cousin than that of its neighbor Chichen Itza.

Let's see, what's the best way to get her done?

Lilly was a little baffled by my choice of technique but no one else seemed to mind.

Fuck it. However unorthodox climbing Ek'Balam on all fours may have been, a win is a fuckin' win.

And that folks wraps up a year on the Mayan Riviera 2021. Catch y'all next time in Quito, Ecuador.

Thanks for stopping by