Isle of (Beautiful and Unbeautiful) Women
Wednesday, October 18th, 2006Boy, is this the life. We´ve been on Isla Mujeres, an island off the coast of Cancún, since yesterday. The first thing we noticed (independently of each other) was that every single person on this island is incredibly incredibly beautiful. For example, we´re sharing a dorm room with 4 women from Switzerland. They live up to the hype.
Perhaps I exagerated the last paragraph a little: we have encountered some unbeatuful people. Perhaps not surprisingly, these encounters make for better stories.
Nuestras aventuras de ayer
Yesterday, we stopped in for lunch at an open air cafe. There was an older American woman finishing up her lunch, quite obviously inebriated. From the way she carried on with the folks who were trying to convince her to pay her bill, it became apparent that she lived on the island. Probably a retiree. She spoke exactly two words of Spanish: the name José and the word nada. She repeated these words ad nauseum in various phrases — ¨No way, José¨ and ¨I told her to no say nada¨ — as if she were speaking Spanish. Then she brought us our food, told us the waiter had left and that she would serve us. She almost dropped our plates in our laps and refused to believe us when we insisted we didn´t want any alcohol. Strangely enough, everyone who worked in the restaurant seemed to get a huge kick out of her, even as she loudly refused to pay her bill.
Nuestras aventuras esta mañana
The other unbeatiful person we have encountered is me, Megan, at about 5 in the morning, being attacked by a bird. I swear, this bird was out to get me. Sarah thinks otherwise. I don´t know how it made it into our room, why it persisted in chirping in my ear, or why the four beautiful Swiss girls were able to sleep through the racket. After I climbed out of bed, tapped Sarah on the shoulder saying, ¨there´s a bird in my bed, can I sleep with you?¨ Sarah convinced me to try finishing the night in the hammocks hung by our hostel. There were birds outside too, but they were not out to get me. Thank God.
After our encounter with the birds, we decided to hoof it to the other side of the island to see the sights. In the tropical heat, three miles feels like 300. We made it, panting, to the Hacienda Mandaca, where a nice woman with a fruit stand sold us cold coconuts and water. The Hacienda was a ruin from the late 19th century, built by the slave-trader Señor Mandaca for his one true love, a local chica. This chica spurned his advances, married a local boy, and ¨as islanders are want to do¨ gave this boy several children (quote from a plaque at the site). There wasn´t much to see, ruin-wise, but the gardens contained a makeshift zoo with monkeys, stags, and possibly a jaguar. They lived in rusted cages, subsisting on carrots and lettuce. The monkeys circled their prison restlessly, like tiny, furry ballerinas. The stag looked like a character from the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe — its horns seemed like they had been attached by magic as a punishment for some 19th century sin. The jaguar, alas, could not be found in its cage. This was unsettling, because directly before viewing the empty jaguar cage, we had observed a frantic bird escape its rotten cell by flying through the bars. We circled the jaguar cage carefully, searching for a jaguar-sized hole, and were thankfully unsuccessful.
-Megan (with help from Sarah)
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