When you walk in Tulum, you become accustomed to meeting bones.
There are full fledged skeletons sitting on park benches, skulls with sunglasses and jaunty caps on shop shelves, brightly colored ceramic skulls with smiling teeth and bulging eyes. It is February and Halloween has long since been packed away in warehouses.
In Mexico and other warm climates, death is never packed away. It is on display and in your face as you sip coffee, have a pina colada on the beach, drive in a taxi to a tantalizing tourist adventure.
I sit next to this fellow and have a conversation about the best beer in town.
He tells me he misses drinking,going fishing, his wife and kids.
He tells me he doesn’t have much advice, but his all time best advice is that ” people hang themselves in their own nooses.”
I ask him, gently, what noose caught him?
He turns and smiles at me with good teeth, and says, ” You got an hour? ”
Tides are capricious.
Some places on this beach you find no nasty presents from high tide. There is white sand, pools of trapped sea water, an occasional shell. Other places you find a narrow strip of seaweed, like Christmas tinsel on a living room floor. In the worst places you find piles of seaweed drying in the sun, an obstacle to beachcombers and an offense to noses.
Early morning, hotels hire men with shovels and rakes to move the unwanted seaweed and beach debris. Sometimes they cart it away in wheelbarrows, dig holes and bury it, cover it up with sand, or,best yet, haul it off in a wagon pulled by a tractor.
Each morning there is a new batch to be disposed of.
Even in paradise there are menial chores that wash up on our beaches. For every happy tourist, in a beach chair, there are two or three locals working behind the scene to make the place postcard perfect.
It doesn’t take more than a whiff to know that shoveling seaweed is a job waiting for Mike Rowe to put on his television show..
This is a job that makes me appreciate roofing, concrete work, painting, digging swimming pools, having to assign student grades and facing an overflowing class of maniac eighth graders.
Today, I’ve met a job worse than most of those I have had to do.
Cats are everywhere in Tulum, Mexico.
These gatos sleep during the day and hunt at night. Even when asleep they can wake instantly, move into a predatory stance, run up a tree trunk to safety amid sea grape leaves. They are used to people, allow themselves to be stroked, take food offerings when they can get them. They have no collars, no tags.
Cats have perfected the art of being asleep and awake at the same time, the art of living in the moment that humans at Yoga Shala work to achieve on their mats, doing deep breathing exercises, twisting their limbs into pretzels, listening to the voice of a guru who is where they want to be.
Studying cats is my plan of the day.
The ability to take cat naps is worth all the study I can give it.
The sea changes like a model’s face.
One moment it is smooth as glass all the way to the horizon, the meeting of water and sky straight as a pencil line drawn by laying a ruler down. The horizon is so straight that you believe the world is flat like old explorers believed and imagine their fear as superstitious sailors neared the edge of their world, as they knew it.
On good days, the water is turquoise, clear, and you can see white sand twenty feet underneath blue waves.
Palm trees move in the wind like a sea of jungle ants scavenging on the jungle floor. Leaves in the canopy move all directions and it is difficult to see what direction the wind comes until you look at the slant of the tree trunks.
It is no lucky accident Mayan royalty built their retreat here but they had no idea it would become a tourist zone for foreigners looking for paradise outside their own urban concrete and steel jungles.
The Mayan’s couldn’t totally duplicate, in their culture ,the richness of what they saw around them, but they could and did pay homage to the God’s that led them here.
There is water wherever you look, but it tastes salty and won’t take away your thirst.
Water falls from the sky, but, on land flatter than a tabletop, it doesn’t run into rivers and down into the sea. Water seeps into the ground and collects in cenotes, underground caverns with stalactites and stalagmites, blue blue water, fish and turtles. There are rumors that ancient Mayans dropped their sacrifices into these cenotes weighted with heavy stones.
This history doesn’t deter us tourists from donning brightly colored snorkels and masks, showering, slipping into the cool waters, following rope lines into underground caverns lit from underneath with lights, over thirty feet deep.
This particular Gran Cenote is written up in guide books as having colorful fish, but, for the record – the fish are small, not in a multitude, and not at all colorful.
On this morning tour buses out front of the attraction are already unloaded, overweight men and women parading in swimming attire to the pools, Mayan descendants renting them towels and equipment.
There are a few scuba divers who can swim far underwater in the caverns, holding underwater lights, that swim farther than we can and see what the rest of us can only imagine.,
When they surface, they look exhilerated,
Places where the insides of the Earth open up have always attracted the curious.
I don’t see dead bodies but my shivers remind me there is much more we don’t see, than what we do.
Recent Comments