Across the Yucatán with a Ragtag Carny Crew

Late one night in the coastal city of Tulum an American girl named Tilly offered me a sip of her cocktail.

“Guess what’s in it,” she said.

I drank. “Mango? Orange? Rum?”

Tilly crossed her skinny, sunburnt knees. She was slightly cross-eyed and wore heavy glasses. “Right. I bargained with the guy at the liquor store for that bottle of rum. I talked him down. And I mean way down,” she said. “I love to bargain.”

We were in Mexico on the backpacker trail across the Yucatán Peninsula. My quest? A global prowl for places where a writer can afford to live and work. Tilly, on the other hand, was just wandering.

“I’ve been in Mexico three months,” she said. “Didn’t speak a word of Spanish when I got here. Now I’m pretty fluent.”

“How did you wind up in Tulum?”

Back in Oregon when the weather turned bitter, Tilly had fallen off her bike and grazed her skinny knees. Screw this, she thought. She hitchhiked south to L.A. The cheapest flight out of the US was a $99 fare to the city of Oaxaca. After buying the ticket Tilly was left with just $300. After a few days in Mexico she was scammed and lost every cent.

“I was naive,” she said.

Nevertheless, she decided to stay on in Oaxaca. She would make money somehow. She found a small apartment for 2,000 pesos (US$166) a month, no bond. A few days after moving in with a cat, a turtle, and a fish — “I make friends fast,” Tilly explained — a pipe burst in the apartment building. A foot of water flushed through Tilly’s living room. The turtle and fish didn’t have too many problems, but the cat had to scramble for high ground. The landlady arrived and began to scream. She insisted that Tilly owed 300,000 pesos (about US$25,000) to compensate her for the destruction of the apartment.

“But I don’t have three hundred thousand pesos!” said Tilly.

“Go to a bank,” said the landlady, “you’re a rich American.”

“No,” said Tilly, “I’m a poor American.”

“No such thing, pendeja!”

Tilly ran into the street and grabbed the first bilingual person she met — an American exchange student — and dragged him into the apartment to translate the landlady’s screams. The landlady asked to see the student’s passport. He obliged. The landlady put the passport in her pocket, said she was confiscating it, and would call the police if the 300,000 pesos was not presented that day.

“What did I do?” said the student.

The landlady took Tilly’s arm. “You give me the money.”

Tilly shook her head. “No way. Too much.”

“Okay, okay,” said the landlady. “You pay two hundred and fifty thousand pesos.”

“Still fucking unreasonable,” said Tilly. “Why don’t you just call the police?”

“Wait!” said the landlady. “Maybe we say two hundred thousand.”

Anyway, Tilly managed to talk the landlady down to a settlement of three hundred pesos or US$25 dollars.

“I love to bargain,” Tilly explained.

She also got the American’s passport back.

Still, the flooding left Tilly penniless and in debt. She cooked a huge batch of rice bubble cookies in the swampy ruins of her apartment. Meanwhile the turtle flapped around with the fish and the cat slept on top of the half-submerged TV. For days Tilly walked around Oaxaca selling cookies. Locals would pay three pesos per cookie. Gringos had to pay ten or 15 pesos. Sometimes they gave more when they heard Tilly’s story. She quickly raised enough to pay off the landlady.

Tilly moved out of the flooded apartment. She kept selling cookies to raise a stake. She sold one cookie inside a dance club and followed the Mexican buyer and his friends out of Oaxaca to a rave that lasted four days. As the only English speaker, she had to learn Spanish fast. She learned the numbers first so she could bargain and save money. After the rave, Tilly and the Mexicans juggled in the street for cash and food. She made a trip to Mexico City, bought a large quantity of LSD, then resold the tabs on the road to finance a hitchhiking trip to the Yucatán. A few of Tilly’s satisfied customers joined her trip through the hot dusty country. Her crew finally reached a deserted beach on the Caribbean coast. Tilly raced into the water to cool off. Unfortunately she could not swim and was dragged out to sea. One of her LSD customers, a square-jawed German backpacker, swam after her. He held her above water as they were smashed across the rocky coast for half an hour. They emerged bloody and bruised from the surf.

So what next? Back to Oregon? No. Tilly wants to travel to South America. “I want to open a free school for kids,” she said.

Plunder of the Sun

For the last month Clare and I have moved from the tourist resorts of the Caribbean Coast to the Mayan Ruins and cities of the Yucatán. Before Mexico I had worked hard on my fiction during a month of bitter winter in New York and Montreal. I was missing out on the Australian summer and a few days on a hot Mexican beach sounded ideal. The cheapest way to get to the Yucatán Peninsula was to fly to the resort city of Cancún.

After checking into a hostel in Cancún’s centro or downtown, Clare and I went snorkelling off Puerto Morelos, a beach resort of thatched cabanas and cool white sand. We headed to the reef in a skiff manned by two wiry Mexicans. The warm wind ruffled my shirt. The captain dropped anchor and I dived into the water. Floating over the reef I marvelled at large dusty yellow sea leaves with purple veins, fish with scales like snake skin, black stingrays buried in the seabed, and coral formations that looked like the Hanukkah menorah we’d recently seen in the windows on New York’s Upper West Side.

Back at the hostel Clare read up on the history of Cancún’s development. The prime tourist area is a narrow peninsula, a former barrier island now joined to the mainland by causeways. A long strip of resorts faces the Caribbean. According to a 1996 paper by retired exploration geologist Peter V. Wiese at the UNESCO website, Cancún was developed in the early-’70s to be “a Miami with a Mexican flavour”. The city became a planning and environmental disaster. It’s also a disaster for the workers. We read a scathing September 2003 article by Marc Cooper from The Nation. Poverty among the working population of Cancún is entrenched. Despite staggering investment in the city’s tourist industry, very little money has been devoted to building basic infrastructure for the city. As of 2003, “about half the residents are not connected to the sewer system, and local groundwater has turned toxic.” Also shocking is that “a de facto economic and social apartheid keeps the two worlds of Cancún — the served and the server — quite distant except when conducting necessary business.” This means, for example, that local workers are prohibited from swimming at certain beaches. The very concept of a private beach offends me as an Australian. I remembered the anger of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, an unforgiving screed against white tourism to the Caribbean island of Antigua. Read that and try to listen to the Beach Boys’ ‘Kokomo’.

Clare and I decided to get out of Cancún as soon as possible.

Worker housing surrounds the centro. Early one evening Clare and I walked around a market square. It was filled with Mexican children riding go-carts. Wealthier Mexicans are increasingly vacationing in Cancún. A few stalls sold second hand books. Outside the square we encountered a tall electric-white Christmas tree beside a nativity scene. Across the street was a low modernist church, Viva Crosio Rey, with fairy lights and an evening congregation. In a park people were selling jewellery and two teenagers were projecting a documentary on the prophesies of Nostradamus against a white wall.

Our hostel had a rooftop terrace looking over the streets. At sunset I drank a cerveza as my mp3 player shuffled randomly to Miklos Rozsa’s score for the 1962 epic Sodom and Gomorrah. I laughed, but the music was not really apt. Perhaps some horrified American parents see Cancún as a City of the Plain that will corrupt their college-age children, but actually the city is simply the latest in a string of unthreatening, pseudo-exotic playgrounds for Americans to get pissed and get laid. Australians go to Bali for the same reason.

I’ve been fascinated by cultural representations of Mexico for years. In 2003 I’d written and directed a short film called Location Scouting, an unauthorised prequel or fictional response to Fun In Acapulco (1963). Remember that travelogue? Elvis Presley romances Ursula Andress, croons ‘No Room To Rhumba In A Sports Car’, mumbles his lines in front of blue screens, and never leaves the security of Paramount Studios in Hollywood. I shot my little film on a tempestuous deserted beach north of Sydney, sent a brave actor into winter surf wearing a sombrero and swigging from a bottle of table wine in a straw pouring basket. The drunk Mexican drowns. Cut to heartless Hollywood location scout. This will be a perfect setting for the clambake scene, he notes. (It wasn’t a very subtle short film.) Something about that particular Elvis movie must prompt the fictional impulse; last year I came across Javier Marías’s fine novella Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico, another imagined making-of.

Anyway, Cancún has taken over Acapulco’s role as Mexico’s prime beachside tourist destination. One morning the newspapers reported 15 decapitated bodies dumped outside of Acapulco’s Plaza Sendero shopping centre. So it’s not so much fun, these days.

Clare and I moved on down the coast to find a less crowded place to relax. We did not at first succeed.

Playa del Carmen is a smaller-scale Cancún, a long strip of fine white crushed coral. Smaller hotels front the beach. You can rent a deck chair or get a massage while girls emerge from the gentle surf with seawater glistening on their bare nipples. A pedestrian street, Quinta Avenida, runs parallel to the beach and is entirely designed to cater to turistas americanos: McDonalds, Starbucks, a Johnny Rockets with broken table jukeboxes, over-priced restaurants and bars and nightclubs. Shops sell sombreros, Mayan kitsch, Cohiba cigars, bottles of tequila and mezcal, summer dresses, scarves, and bikinis.

Clare and I fled to the nearby island of Cozumel. The ferry was an expensive 140 pesos each way. At the island’s main port we hired a motor scooter. I rode east with Clare hugging my waist. We turned north onto a rough road towards the Mayan ruins of San Gervasio. Clare was giddy with an archaeologist’s excitement. Iguanas scurried over the remains of a city once devoted to the worship of the Mayan fertility goddess Ix Chel.

After exploring the ruins we rode on to the eastern edge of the island, a rocky coastline washed by limpid blue sea. I parked the scooter beside a strip of white sand circling a small rocky cove. I strapped on a pair of goggles to check out the fish. Outside the boundaries of the cove I followed a sandy underwater path and navigated the rock formations. After the swim Clare and I dried out empty-bellied and salty in the late afternoon sun. We got back on the scooter and circumnavigated the whole island until we arrived back at San Miguel, the pretty port town. There’s a Beach Boys song about that place, as well, or at least some fantasy place called San Miguel that “could be in Mexico / where you don’t need no dough.” Not exactly true, but it’s a better song than ‘Kokomo’.

Another day I ignored my daily budget and went scuba diving in a cenote called Chac Mool, 22 kilometres south of Playa del Carmen. Clare, who hasn’t yet done her open water diving certificate, was conned into coming along as a snorkeller. A cenote is an underground cavern filled with water. They go deep. An English backpacker told me he’d dived to the bottom of Cenote Angelita, a 200 feet pit with a hydrogen sulfate layer. At Chac Mool I slid into a wetsuit, strapped on my B.C.D., scuba tank, and regulator, and leapt backwards into the cenote. Our group leader signalled to deflate our B.C.D.s and descend. The fresh water became salty several metres below the surface. Between the two layers the water blurred as if I was swimming through oil. There were very few fish in the cenote. The thrill was to descend to completely underwater passages guided only by the lights of our underwater torches. At one stage my dive group ascended to a cave with about a metre of airspace beneath the roof. The roots of a tree plunged down through the roof to drink the water. We had to be careful not to knock our tanks against the stalactites.

Clare and I moved on to Tulum, south of Playa del Carmen. This was much better. You can stay in a hotel or cabana on the long beach south of the archaeological ruins, but staying in a hostel in the centro is the cheaper option. From there you can jump into a taxi and spend a fixed price of 40 pesos (US$3.30) to get to the nearest beach. Tulum’s coastline is thickly wooded. The quality of the seawater is excellent, too, because the local authorities have tried not to repeat the environmental mistakes of Cancún and Playa del Carmen.

When it rained I sat in La Flor de Michoacan Juice Bar and wrote while taxis slushed past. Later, Clare and I left the main strip of hostels and restaurants and wandered into the workers’ barrio. The residences range from well-maintained houses and apartments to crumbling concrete, wooden, and corrugated tin slum dwellings. Pieces of broken glass and wire were cemented into the tops of some of the mouldy concrete walls. Stormwater drains had overflowed and flooded the roads. Garbage disposal seemed non-existent in this neighbourhood. Near-bursting plastic shopping bags hung on fence posts and lay in rain puddles. Stray dogs rummaged in milkcrates packed with plastic soft drink bottles, discarded gloves, broken coat hangers, and jagged tin cans.

It’s possible to stay in Tulum Centro and live a life of ease for under US$25 a day. After you’ve explored the ruins there’s not much else to do except read or go to the beach. I met a grizzled backpacker from Ottawa who was doing that all winter.

Clare and I looked at a map and plotted our path northwest to the city of Mérida.

A Ragtag Carny Crew

One evening in the colonial city of Valladolid I sat down to drink coffee at a late night cafe. I had my paperback copy of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, but instead of reading the book I started talking to two backpackers from Berlin. They were also staying at the Hostel Candeleria. They were on vacation from their studies in New York.

Nadine had thick brown hair and a flat slow German drawl. She chain-smoked. With her right elbow on the table, she held the burning cigarette near her shoulder. Nicola seemed younger, short and big-lipped and enthusiastic, easily surprised, wide-eyed and giggly. Right now, however, she was shaking her head.

“My God, I just heard the worst news,” she said.

“She’s so unlucky,” said Nadine with a slow sardonic chuckle and long draw of smoke.

“Yes unlucky, my flatmates are all leaving the apartment,” said Nicola. “I get back to New York on the 29th and have to move on the 30th. I have nowhere to go.”

“Do you have a lot of stuff to move?” I said.

“I have a big bed,” she said. “A very very big bed. Oh, God.”

“Come on, Nicola, we live this kind of life,” said Nadine dismissively, waving smoke back and forth like a thurifer. “Always moving from place to place.”

“I am not a circus performer!”

“We don’t know where we’re going to be next month,” said Nadine. “I like that.”

Later when the cafe closed we moved to the hostel’s outdoor kitchen. We drank tequila and red wine and cerveza. Nicola cooked omelettes. Music played all night through hidden speakers: German hip-hop and strange Beatles covers and an anti-vegetarian rap song (“fuck you, tree-hugger, I like ribs”). We were joined by a bunch of people including a young Israeli couple: Ari was deeply tanned with a light orange-brown beard, and his girlfriend Malka flinched when a coconut dropped from the trees onto the canvas roof above the kitchen.

“I live twenty minutes from Gaza,” she explained.

Nicola offered to make me an omelette.

“No thanks,” I said. “I don’t eat eggs.”

Nadine lit another cigarette and said, “I buy my eggs from this crazy woman in a village outside the old east section of Berlin. She drowned her husband in the river. Everybody knows.”

“How is this possible?” asked Nicola.

“In those places somebody like that will never be arrested.”

A Dutch guy who now lives permanently in Valladolid told us he was not going back to Holland. “My old friends from school call me and tell me they just spent twenty thousand euros on a kitchen. And now the neighbour has a better BMW. What is the meaning of this shit? My kitchen here cost five hundred dollars. It’s good. I go back to Holland for two days and I am bored.” The Dutch guy looked at our clothes. “Why do you all wear dark, drab clothes? The Mexicans wear yellow and pink, they dance in the streets.” The Dutchman was also wearing dark, drab clothing. “I know!” he said. “I’m just as bad!”

Later, as the night became chilly, Ari and I sat alone drinking beer. He had done his military service. He had finished studying. He did not know if he would stay in Israel. “I can’t see the political situation there will get better for maybe fifty years,” he said. He was on his own global prowl.

The Hostel Candeleria in Valladolid faces one side of a public square. To its right is the Candeleria Church. To its left is the Biblioteca Publica Regional. In the mornings I wrote at the library as the sun baked the red concrete exterior and the hot wind came through the big windows. A couple of people walked in to borrow a book or study. There were no English books on the shelf, but I practiced my Spanish with Anthony Burgess’s El Derecho a una Respuesta (The Right to an Answer). The library had many works by Carlos Fuentes, Mexico’s most respected novelist, and out of revived interest I used the hostel’s wi-fi connection to listen to a recent interview from WNYC radio discussing Fuentes’s newly translated novel, Destiny and Desire.

One night Clare felt like a pizza, so I accompanied her to a little place where one cost 30 pesos. We disturbed the waiter from his comfortable spot in front of a TV showing Rocky III, which seems to be the most popular movie in Mexico. Other nights we went to a supermarket and bought rice, beans, champignons, tortillas, avocado, jalapenos, limes, chillies, sauces, and beer. We cooked at the hostel. You can spend about five or six US dollars on food and drink and have meals for two or three days.

On the morning we left Valladolid, I heard a familiar melody coming from the hostel’s garden. Somebody was playing the old standard ‘Tonight You Belong To Me’ on a battered ukulele. The player, a guy of about 22, had a red beard. Ironic or unironic? I wasn’t sure. He was part of some sort of travelling drama-musical troupe from the US. A tall girl with a long black lace skirt — a New York actress — took the ukulele and played her own sweet song about springtime in Brooklyn.

Jazzin’ Mérida

Mérida, the capital of the state of Yucatán, was the first city I’ve discovered on this global prowl that seems a viable place for an expatriate writer. It’s affordable, culturally dynamic, slummy, small-scale, and chaotic, beautiful in the way a ragged novel by Dostoevsky is beautiful, which is to say not despite but because of its decay and grime and energy. Wandering around town at night is like being on the set of Touch of Evil: the town’s garbage provides the mise-en-scène.

The Israelis had travelled to Mérida ahead of us and left us word where they would be staying. We walked from the Mérida bus station over to the city’s Zocalo. This central square features the Cathedral of San Idelfonso, built in 1598, as well as an unimpressive Museo de Arte Contemporáneo. In the middle of the square there are clowns and buskers, young women weighed down with blankets for sale, and men selling hammocks.

In the hostel common room we had an unexpected reunion with two members of our Ragtag Carny Crew. Nadine from Berlin lay sprawled on the couch. “I’m sick in the belly from this Mexican food.”

A two-year old boy seemed to have the same problem. He threw up over the hostel’s kitchen floor. We tried to talk to him in several languages — “Where is your mother and father?” — but all the kid could do was grunt. Nicola and Nadine changed his nappy and vomit-soaked shirt. The boy was soon back to running wild in the hostel.

The centro historico of Mérida is densely populated. The even numbered streets run vertically and the odds horizontally. Once you understand that it’s easy to navigate. Most of the streets, perhaps all of them, are one-way and narrow. The footpaths are narrow, too. For some reason there are plenty of ancient VW beetles on the road. I was able to play ‘punchbuggy’ for the first time since childhood. Few of the buildings in the city are taller than two storeys. At night on the corners you find stalls selling hot dogs, churros, tacos, and tamales. Plenty of news kiosks, too, with a relaxed attitude to selling soft- and hard-core pornography. Across Mexico papers such as El Grafico and La Prensa put photos of headless bodies, victims of the drug cartels, on the front page.

The bootleg DVD stands and clothing shops blast music at an unbearable volume. Some shops have professionally-designed interiors and others are dark caverns. You pass numerous barber shops and beauty parlours. Many alleys lead to parking stations. My favourite discovery? Some of the pharmacies have poker machines.

The local population is mostly descended from the indigenous Mayans. Some of the old women are tiny, barely four feet tall, and they stalk alone along the streets, weighed down by their bags. Few people have mobile phones. Many of the bars for locals are screened off from the street by saloon doors. One night I wandered into one of these dive bars. Black breasts were shaking on a TV screen and a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe was keeping an eye on things. The bar was a grimy green. I was taller than all the other men by about a foot. Everybody turned to stare at me.

“Hola,” I said.

“Buenos noches,” said a smiling guy in a cowboy hat. This was not a place frequented by gringos.

A guy with no legs crawled into another bar to beg. I followed behind him because I heard a live band up ahead. Beyond the first room was a brightly-lit performance hall with a long bar. I bought a bottle of Sol cerveza and sat down at one of the plastic orange chairs. Gringa bikini babes advertised Sol on big banners. On the bandstand a quintet was performing some sort of Mexican ska. The musicians all wore purple. Not many people were listening. A grey-haired couple danced. A few dusty workers knocked back shots of tequila.

Middays in Mérida were hot. Clare and I tried to stay indoors and take a siesta. One day a few members of the troupe from Valladolid checked in to the hostel. I said hello to the New York actress.

“Oh, hey again!”

The wild two-year-old kid’s calloused knees allowed him to crawl across the floor tiles with the speed of a cat. Unfortunately he stumbled and smacked his forehead against a wall. He screamed.

“This is crazy,” said the New York actress. “Where’s his mom?”

That night I was, as always, after live jazz. In the darkness I walked up Calle 56 to the block between 55 and 53. I was looking for Jazzin’ Mérida, the only jazz joint in the city. It was closed. Hadn’t been open for ages. The street was deserted except for a passing nun and a tailor sewing in an open garage strewn with clothes and cardboard boxes.

The next morning I walked to the Mérida English Library, north of Zocalo Square on Calle 53 between 66 and 68. The library has a small shelf of second hand books at ten pesos each, but mostly it operates as a lending library which you can join for a small fee. The place is a hangout for older American expatriates.

“I came down here in 2007, partially for political reasons,” a mature blonde woman told me. “It was still Bush then. I wanted to escape the Fox News onslaught and all that craziness.”

“Why do Americans come here to live?” I said.

“Well, the health care is unbelievable. And when Americans come down here they love the creative atmosphere. Mexico has been misrepresented in the media. The gasoline is dirty and you should fill up on the US side. False. It’s full of swine flu. False. And the drug war? Well, Mérida is the safest place in Mexico. I feel safe here. I used to live in Namibia. Now that’s dangerous. You walk the streets afraid somebody will kill you for your wristwatch. But Mérida is safe. The people are wonderful.”

She said that the English Library was a way expatriates could repay Mérida for its hospitality. The expatriates were organising art shows and other cultural events such as lectures on ‘Aging Successfully’. Right then a large group was about to begin a tour of the expatriates’ gardens. Would I like to join it? Unfortunately I had work to do. I wrote all morning in a small reading room decorated with biblical paintings.

A notice board in the library featured advertisements for Spanish lessons, acrylic painting and drawing classes, tango lessons, and apartments for sale or rent. Here’s an example of the kind of deal you can get for US$600 a month: a furnished apartment on Calle 53 (right in the centro historico) with three bedrooms and two bathrooms, with all utilities including DSL. No wonder American retirees are coming down here. A 2006 article in International Living explores the affordability of private health care in Mexico, as well as the Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social, Mexico’s social security, which is available to foreign residents for US$300 a year. The Mexican government requires people seeking residence to have a guaranteed monthly income of $1,000 plus $500 per dependent.

It was time for Clare and I to say goodbye to our Ragtag Carny Crew. The global prowl must continue. Ari and Malka were about to head back to Valladolid. The Carny Kids were staying on in Mérida. And as Nadine and Nicola prepared to leave for Campeche, they said: “You two should really check out Berlin…”