Jessie Goes….

Nothing, and I mean nothing, beats sitting on a rocky cliff overlooking an ocean whose color and clarity is stunning, with a cocktail in hand as its effects slowly trickle through your system!

Its like a rip of a sheet of paper that I have to pick up from here within the hour knowing I will shortly be hanging out in Houston International Airport.

I honestly could sit here all day and write away in my little notebook. Why this is happening now on my last minutes to take advantage is a good question. Maybe Gauguin and Hemmingway experienced this and its why they never left their islandy paradises. The sound of the crashing see-through blue waves does something to me.

Yesterday, after waking up at a leisurely 10am I wandered into the ‘real’ Cancun and away from my little wave crashing oasis, to see a little something more of the way the people who live here actually live. The Isle of Cancun was born as a result of a 1967 feasibility study by the Mexican government and a local bank. When ground was broken in 1970 the island had 3 residents, and Cancun City, where I’m heading today on the local bus, didn’t exist at all. After the government financed the first several hotels, the rest was history, and now Cancun City has 600,000 people whose livings revolve completely and totally on the tourist trade of the Mexican Riviera.

The local bus runs nearly continuously. I jumped on one with my 6.5 pesos and sat down within 3 minutes of getting onto the main (only) road in the tourist zone. I wasn’t exactly sure where to get off in Cancun City, of course, so when we got to somewhere in there I just yelled stop in Spanish, and jumped off.

As is nearly always the case as a single woman, I got my spidey senses out, and looked about suspiciously as I wandered down the street, the only tourist in sight. On first entrance to the city it looked on the dirty, polluted, commercial zone side. Its funny, I often think that as a first sight in many cities. I liken it to being a NYer and staring in wonder when a tourist relates to you ‘how filthy dirty’ the city is. Huh? NYC? What dirt? What bag-ladies? After a while you just edit out those parts and see only the cool stuff beyond. It is part of the urban mystique. Well, its the same thing here, my first 15 minutes of wandering made me wonder if I might as well get back on the next bus I saw before I wandered into an area less trafficked and less safe.

Instead I took a propitious left, to a much more pedestrian street. I have noticed in many a central and south american town that pedestrian street and high speed highway aren’t mutual exclusive. You have sidewalk bars running right up to hordes of honking speeding traffic with people sprinting across 4 or 5 lanes to make it to the other side. I saw some gringo establishments, a hostel here, a hostel there, and that meant maragritas were around. After walking up and down for another 30 or 40 minutes, making sure I kept my internal compass knowing where the main highway outta this burg was, I finally settled on a cute place serving up lunch.

In spanish I did my best with help from pointing, to order just a side or rice and beans, and a margarita. Within minutes my little waitress shows up WITH TWO of these strong enough to kill you drinks.

“No No! I meant just one margarita!” I said in English, all pretext of cultural respectfulness to the wind.

She smiled and pointed to a small line on the top of the menu which said 2X1. So, I order one. I get two. Apparently AT ONCE. One for each hand. Not only were people staring at me because I was this lily white blonde girl alone in Cancun City, but I was so alone that I pretended to order a drink for my invisible partner. Ah well, I wasn’t in any rush!

As the tequila did its magic, my spidey senses dulled just enough for me to start to notice the details through the dirt. First I think there are a lot of americano gringo’s living the highlife here in cancun. 40ish men driving old volkswagon versions you only see outside of the US, with their little tan blonde families, speaking spanish and throwing around that flipflops and panama hat wearing familiarness that reminds me of Jane Goodall in the jungle or Dr. Livingstone in the bush-only he had a pith helmet.

Second I start noticing Latina girls in their full glory, with their hair done up, lipstick applied and stiletto heels clicking down the street, looking like any Manhattanite might, just with a vastly different backdrop. The traffic is still whizzing by, and a young man in a blue junker yells out to her, in that time worn ritual of how to disgust a girl in less than 10 seconds. In any language.

My walk back, down the same streets I had come down on, was much more colorful too… I peeked into the bank with the line out of the door, I took a spin through the grocery store, and I walked down numerous of the side alleys, none of which held the slightest bit of menace any longer, now that the dirt was invisible. People stared at me and I smiled, they smiled.

Last night, I slept with my balcony doors wide open to the ocean, to my maids horrification no doubt – she has twice told me “no safe”… but falling asleep this way is….aaaaahhhhhhhh.

Though I doubt I’ll come back to Cancun specifically, lets face it, I’m not the wet t-shirt type of party girl, I will no doubt come back to coastal Mexico, and I will not wait another 13 years! There is something to this living life in flipflops! Hasta Luego!

Can you imagine traveling to a new place as did the explorers to the New World..? expecting maybe a tribe of natives and stumbling upon a city of 100k people with agriculture, aquaculture and architecture to rival ones own civilization? I mean really… stop and think about how world altering this must have been. How humbling and frightening really. How many more of these foreigners were there after all?

This day and age we feel unbelievably intrepid when we have ventured far enough to encounter “primitive societies”, be they bands of desert nomads keeping alive ancient traditions in the Sahara, jungle tribes without electricity, etc. Shoot, anyone without an Ipod seems double-blink worthy. These cultures are viewed as industrially, technologically, and sometimes even theologically antiquated. As if time and god has forgotten these people, we surmise in our most self-aggrandized views. Or perhaps instead these few have escaped the “evils of modern life” as we put on our well worn hats of patronization. Pat pat pat. cute little culture. No ipods. heh heh. heh. 

But not the same for these guys back during the early age of colonization. Regardless of how our society currently views the cultures that are off the grid, early European explorers to the new world when on their merry way, sailing the seas, hacking through jungle, and yes eyes always keen and hopeful for gold… when lo and behold, they came upon these civilizations where the cities were cities, surrounded by small towns, places of worship, with cultures pervasive over large amounts of land.Cortez and his men for instance, upon discovery of Mexico City, found massive infrastructure, buildings and architecture, canals for transport rivaling Venice, advanced science rivaling Italian and Greek thinkers, accurate calendars and maps, a written language, and a population that rivaled the largest cities on Earth at the time. Holy Crap indeed! It was hard to call these guys cute little cultures, or really think of colonization with the scurvy ridden ranks at hand. Thank god for smallpox though, right?

Standing here at Chichen Itza, a town thriving about 1000 years ago, I can’t help but thinking about those explorers that wiped out the civilizations through disease and slavery, and wiped out much of what they could have added to the world. This is a pretty large complex afterall, the part that we can see that has been reclaimed from the jungle brush. And this wasn’t the half of it, nor nearly the largest city. They were spread all over the yucatan peninsula… and farther… to belize, to honduras, and to Guatemala. Technically, it is believed that the Mayan culture actually started in Guatemala and moved outward. The point is, this was a huge civilization who pretty much up and disappeared in a quick fashion. And no, it wasn’t aliens.

My mind tends to extrapolate these facts forward… will one day some modern culture be visiting the ruins of the Empire State building and Grand Central Station on a tour pod?

Back to the basics here, Chichen Itza is about a 3 hour bus ride from your hotel in Cancun, and well worth it, though it will take the entire day, 7am to 7pm. The Mayans were pyramid builders and though not nearly as big or impressive as anything you’d find in Egypt as far as sheer magnitude, the precision and complexity of the buildings suggest the same exact advanced knowledge of geometry and astronomy. Things are aligned. A large difference in these pyramids is that they weren’t burial zones per se. They were about the afterlife, but they were more about the journey. Underneath each of these structures was a cave that generally had a cenote (waterfilled cave system, eventually emptying into the ocean, sometimes hundreds of miles away. The only place in the world with these cenotes is in this part of Mexico.) The idea of the Mayan afterlife system was that when you died, you went into the cave and floated around in there sucked through the tunnels until you reached the point where the fresh water mixed with the salt water… this was the cross-over point. Interesting right?

Now how these Mayans knew that this entire cave system existed is amazing, afterall, modern day divers with all the modern equipment have labeled the area extremely dangerous for dives as the system is vast, dark, cold, cavernous and easy to get lost in. Many many very experienced divers have died attempting to navigated these systems. Yet these Mayans pretty much had it right on, and were quite obsessed with it. They offered human and object sacrifices reasonably regularly, all of whom were plunged down into one or another of these watery graves. The sacrificees went willingly enough, as in this culture, as well as the Egyptians before them, they felt that their life on Earth was just a speck of a long and definitive afterlife. They weren’t just going into the light. They had some major plans. Those that were given to the gods were only of noble upper class blood, as it was an amazing honor.

Local lore has it that the culture vanished in an abrupt fashion, like poof. Gone. I am skeptical of this, and if I was a betting women, I can definitely imagine that European diseases probably did a good job of clearing the way, similar to its devastating effects in the Caribbean and the eastern coast of the US. Just a guess though. That and some mystical record keeping and you’ve got a pretty good theory to me. Who knows though. Maybe that fourth Indiana Jones movie had it right, and when we aren’t looking those pyramid convert to time space vortex yielding starships. Could be. I guess.

Eh, long time no? It has been, since I’ve been traveling anywhere but between Tampa, NYC, Charleston and my parents houses. But no longer, boy do I have some travel planned!

And speaking of long times…. the sudden once a decade frost bite that has bitten the deep south this January has run me out. I couldn’t take it anymore, and last Wednesday I did some internet desperation searching and came up with a next to nothing trip to Cancun. Mexico. Land of wet t-shirts, margarita’s and college aged stupidity.The last time I was in Cancun it was 1995. Yes, I was 21 year old, as well I should have been. I am definitely aiming for Girls Gone Mild this go around though. (sorry – my alcohol limit has really taken a disastrous turn south since 30)

Cancun is different since my visit last century.First, the ‘other side of the road’ is now one continuous shopping mall. There’s a Chili’s, and Outback Steakhouse, and a Walmart on the way to my hotel. But thats to be sort of expected, us American’s seemingly can’t live without some version of a mall around us. The real change is the beach. Where once lay the prettiest stretch of baby white and powder-fine sand anywhere has been hurricaned away. Some of the hotel fronts sit on craggy bits of limestone rocks. It has its own beauty, don’t get me wrong, and the water color is still out of this world, but it is a far cry in comparison to pre-hurricane Wilma. Some sand has been shipped in, sort of white, sort of fine (reminds me of St. Pete, FL) but it’s a far cry. That said, if you hadn’t been here 2004 or before, you’d still think its an amazing stretch of Ocean. Vegas style.

Oh, and of course, one more thing… I got a 4 star hotel room for less than 100 bucks 36 hours before I got here. And, now that I’m here I see the reason. There is (relatively) nobody here! No heads in the beds! Its shocking. Economic Crisis 1, Cancun, 0, USA 0, World 0. That said, aside from the obnoxiously in love couple I can hear through the connecting doors to my room, having the place to myself isn’t all that bad! I have a perfect balcony overlooking a surprisingly rough turquoise and velvet Carribean Sea. The breeze as I sit here and steal internet is blowing my little sheer curtains into the room like some sort of commercial. Cecilia (Paul Simon) is drifting on the breeze from the pool area, which I left an hour ago after causing myself enough skin damage and margarita damage for one afternoon.

Nap time… and then go out to see the superbowl… hopefully channeling some Party like its 1999 in the Mexican Rivera. Okay Party like I was the age I was when it was 1999.