Places I Have Lived, However Briefly. As a Tourist.

My all-time favorite?  

A house in San Miguel de Allende. It was 300+ years old, had 3’ thick walls, and a huge courtyard around which all of the rooms on three floors were arranged.  The third floor was the rooftop garden which had an almost all-glass room, a bedroom, built on it.  

One of the group of us who went to Mexico that year had heard an NPR story about a serial rapist in San Miguel who went from rooftop to rooftop during the night in order to have access to houses and bedrooms. The not-terribly motivated police had been stumped about his access until a tourist did some checking and figured out the common factor in these crimes—-rooftops. The same traveling companion who told us about these rapes volunteered for the beautiful top floor bedroom. Am I suspicious of her motive in telling us this story our first afternoon at the house? Yes, yes I am.  

View of San Miguel from our rooftop garden.

Most celebrities met as a result of renting? (Made up category, I know.)

Two.  For a bit over a month I lived in a house on Cape Cod. I had graduated from college and was living at my parents’ home and working at the same tedious typing job I had had during summers while I was in college.  The company offered me a full-time regular job; I said Hell No and accepted the invitation of a friend to move to the Cape. We rented rooms from two Air Force guys who were periodically stationed in Greenland. My room led to the rooftop patio over the garage and I could hear the ocean at night.  

The “celebrities”? One was a woman who claimed that she was Ernest Hemingway’s granddaughter. We thought that she was a bit old to be his granddaughter in the late 60s, but we were 19 and 20 so I guess anyone older than 30 was old to us. She, whoever she really was, told us her sad life story over iced tea after she ordered us into her home to be chastised for picking daisies along the road. Her house was way off the road so we hadn’t assumed that the flowers belonged to anyone, but she came screaming down the driveway shouting at us that the flowers did, in fact, belong to God. I am not personally in touch with him, but I do suspect that he would have preferred that the flowers enjoyed some time in a vase of water in our house rather than having them wilt into nothing on the scorching hot seat of our convertible while we "visited" with the crazy lady. I don't know what induced us to go into her home with her since we did have a getaway car. Curiosity and stupidity I suppose.

The other celebrity meeting took place, again on Cape Cod, when I was hitchhiking. Yes, I hitchhiked. Just that once. I would be mortified if my children or grandchildren hitchhiked, but I was young and dumb, and the sixties were a kinder time (say I). As Maya Angelou is supposed to have said, “I did then what I knew then; when I knew better, I did better,” as in, I don’t hitchhike now. There are cell phones and Uber now, y’all.

Back to my ride:  I am convinced that Truman Capote picked me up; he sure looked like him. We had a nice chat, we stopped at his home and he invited me in while he went to get some papers, but I stood in the doorway. We went back to his car and he took me to my destination. 

See?  Kinder times. 

I did once use the Googles to see if Mr. Capote had ever lived on Cape Cod, but I couldn’t find a trace of him there, so he might not have been my driver, but I like to think he was.

Mr. Capote.  Um.  Doesn't look like Cape Cod.

Strangest rental story?  

That was the million dollar+ condo we rented for a week in Puerto Morelos, Mexico.  We hadn’t intended to rent it and we could never have afforded to rent it, but the night before I was to fly there, I had a call from the owner of the house to tell me that her considerably more modest stand-alone house on the beach was now surrounded by armed guards, and we wouldn’t be able to get into the house. Seriously? Armed guards???

A group of lawyers owned the land the houses were on, but the homes themselves were privately owned. The lawyers wanted to use the land to put up a high rise condo complex.  The other homeowners had already capitulated and had sold their houses to the lawyers; the homeowners we rented from were trying to keep their house.

At first the lawyers cut off the above-ground electricity to the house; the owners buried the electric cables. The lawyers hired a bulldozer to dig a trench around the house, thereby cutting off the electricity again. The owners re-attached the power; the lawyers cut it off again, and stationed armed guards around the house. The owners had the guards arrested and put in jail; the lawyers paid off the police and the guards went back to work.

Not OUR armed guards; I was too chicken to take their photos, but ours looked like these men!

Fortunately for my friends and me, the homeowners had a friend who managed the condos up the beach and he arranged for us to have use of an empty one for the week for the same rent we had paid for the house. It was wonderful, luxurious and right smack on the beach.  A few years ago we went back to Puerto Morelos and the house was gone; ALL of the private homes in that area were gone and a huge condo complex was in their place. I am sorry for the homeowners; I don’t remember now how much they had been offered for their houses, but I do remember that it wasn’t much for a home on the beautiful Caribbean beach. 

Weirdest place?

My friend Jean and I were the only two women left who wanted to go to Mexico the year before last, and we rented a house on the beach. We went through all the houses available through HomeAway and picked one. We thought. Apparently we had picked two different ones, both coincidentally with the same rent, sent in our deposit and showed up on schedule. Jean had specified a house with no stairs. We got there after following a handyman from the rental agency in town.

First problem? Stairs. Two bedrooms were on the second floor; one was on the first. So Surprise! but we could work with that. Jean took the downstairs bedroom.

Second problem? The rooms, except for bedrooms and bathrooms, were outside. There were roofs over the living area, kitchen and dining area, but there were only walls on one side, the side that adjoined the bedrooms. That was not what either of us had ever anticipated.  

During the flight to Mexico, Jean had kept insisting that there was no view of the ocean and I had kept arguing that there certainly was, for heaven’s sake, look AT THE PHOTOS!!!  After a lot of confusion on our part and that of the handyman, we realized that we had been looking at two different rentals, and since the photos of the one I was viewing didn’t show the LACK OF WALLS, I hadn’t known that we would essentially living outdoors. This place was the closest I ever need to come to camping.

Our "home away from home"  Outdoor kitchen and dining room below, outdoor living room above. Bedrooms to the left.

View from the outdoor living room. 

Fancy plumbing!

However, there was an advantage to this arrangement. One morning, from the living room upstairs off of my bedroom, I saw a lot of people standing on the beach wall pointing out to the ocean.  I joined them to see what was up, and what was up were three whales, possibly more, playing in the water. They entertained us for about 15 minutes and then continued their journey north for the winter. I would never had seen them if I had been living in the house Jean thought we had rented: it was next door, and because of the landscaping, there was truly no view of the beach or ocean from there. And because it had walls, imagine that! I would never have heard the commotion on the beach, alerting me to the sight of the whales.

Younger daughter in Ireland last year.  I want to go there!

So I am.

Next adventure?

Ireland, in September.  dH and I are going, but we aren’t staying any one place long enough to rent a house.  We’ll be in hotels, but I have heard there are castles that rent rooms to tourists. Hmmm…..

Puck's Castle, Ireland

Ummmm no.  Not this one.  

Ah Mexico!

Well, Mexico.  I have retrieved the photos I can retrieve after my disastrous experience with Apple, iCloud, and the geniuses at the Apple store, so here goes.  Let’s see what I remember….

When I say that I love Mexico, I suspect that I mean a different Mexico from the one most North Americans love.  They, I think, judging from the people I meet on the plane and at the airport, mean the “resort” Mexico, where you can drink the water, brush your teeth with the water, put toilet paper in the toilet to flush, wash your hair because there is enough water pressure, reliably have trash taken away, and have lots of locals to take care of your every need.  

A perfectly wonderful way to visit Mexico, but probably not a lot different from resorts in Miami, along the Gulf coast or the west coast of the US.

The Mexico I love is the houses we rent in small, very small villages, where we eat most of our meals outside while we watch the cafe owners cook. The staff wash the dishes in the sink, by hand. Nothing fancy in these places except for great, fresh food.  Quite often the restaurants are on the beach.  The literature left in the house told us that the trash was picked up “most mornings” and that the tv and vcr work, but that the area gets “no television.” We could walk everyplace we wanted to go in the village and everyone seemed friendly, although a lot of North Americans seem to have discovered Puerto Morelos, a tiny town on the Caribbean between Cancun and Playa del Carmen.  At times it looked as if we were in a Ft. Myers, FL overflow area.  

We were a block off the Caribbean so that was a frequent destination for walks.  This was our local bar:

Bar on the left.  Massages on the right.

right on the beach.  

The second night we spent of our vacation, this storm headed our way. 

We took our pina coladas, made with fresh coconut milk from coconuts that had fallen on the beach, and walked a block to our house.  It rained, hard, for a couple of hours and then for the rest of our stay, we had perfect weather, no air-conditioning necessary, which was good because the house wasn’t air-conditioned.  

For a side trip we drove halfway west through the Yucatan, and then due north to Rio Lagartos, an even smaller town.  The waters off Rio Lagartos are protected (part of a UNESCO World Heritage site)because they are a great stopover for so many migrating birds.  There is a species of flamingos that winters off the west coast of the Yucatan, and then summers in the waters north of the Yucatan.  We were too early for the huge migration that comes in April and May, but we did see several dozen of the huge, brilliant pink flamingos that had come early this year.  We took a boat trip for a couple of hours at sunrise (yawn...not my best time of day) and saw many more species of birds that we don’t see often at home.  

Rio Lagartos

We stayed in a funny little hotel, the only one in the village, and since it was Valentine’s Day when we arrived, the rooms were staged for the holiday.  I was given the Honeymoon suite on the third floor, and it came complete with these swans

and toilet paper with hearts on it.  I was alone so the ambiance was kind of wasted on me, but the view from my porch wasn’t:

Mangroves in the distance off of Rio Lagartos

I slept really well until the rooster in the lot behind the hotel, where my door led to the outdoor hallway, decided to start crowing at ‘0 dark hundred 0'clock.

BAD, BAD showoff rooster

The drive through the Yucatan to get to and from Rio Lagartos was strange---our GPS, which was worthless, kept telling us to turn right,  But for miles and miles, there was no place to turn right.  It also kept saying “toll road.”  No toll roads at all.  Fortunately there was no way to get lost:  straight west, straight north.  The road, such as it was (infrastructure is not a big priority, or any priority, in a lot of places) went through tiny settlements of Mayan people:

Their homes have been built the same way for centuries.  The Mayan families sleep in them, in hammocks, but live the rest of their lives outside.  There are openings for windows and doors, but most of the time, there are no actual windows or doors.  Cooking, sitting, playing i.e.., living, takes place outdoors.  Unfortunately, the Mayans also live ON the road, and that makes driving through these little settlements dangerous (for them).  In one place there was a little girl, maybe three years old, sitting on the edge of the road as if it were a chair.  The ground dropped off from the road just enough to make the road a comfortable chair height for her.  No one else was around and she was completely oblivious to us. Driving incredibly slowly is the only safe way to get through these ten- or twelve-home settlements.  

The Mayans seem to primarily get around via very old wrecks of bicycles, with children straddling the rear wheel or sitting on the handlebars, on foot, or occasionally, in old cars.  Some had three-wheeled bicycles with large wire containers on the front for packages or people.  It is really a strange juxtaposition to see North Americans in tourist areas on their expensive bicycles: they are in the usual North American biking clothes and have helmets on.  It’s like seeing a kite next to an airplane---the difference is striking.  

There were cisterns on top of cinderblock structures near some of the homes, just as there were on top of homes in Puerto Morelos.  Because rain isn’t dependable I suppose that someone must come with a large truck of water and fill the cisterns in both the town and rural areas, but I never saw that happen so I don’t really know.  (I do know that in a house with multiple faucets, gravity isn't all that when it comes to creating volume and water pressure.) 

Cistern

The black thing on the whitish stucco is the cistern on our house.

I also don’t know what passes for bathrooms and sewers in these Mayan areas.  I think that there might not be any.  The people are so far away from larger towns and cities that I also don’t know what they do to support themselves, unless they just live on what they grow or kill. 

If you listen to the news, you would think that carnage is everywhere in Mexico, but according to the State Department travel alerts, the most dangerous areas are in the northern part of the country, where drugs cross the border illegally and practically non-stop.  So we felt free to walk everywhere, even in the evenings, when we would go to the town square and watch the local teenagers being teenagers:  riding skateboards in the little park.  A few locals mingled with the a few dozen tourists at cafes and in little shops, which were all apparently open until the last patron left.

I went to the tourist areas in Playa del Carmen in order to take a ferry to Cozumel, another tourist attraction.  Terrible places thanks to all the tourists and the businesses they attract.  Crowded, noisy, crowded, noisy, and did I say crowded?

I took a video of our trip out to Cozumel, just in case the ferry sank and we all drowned.  (I had visions of the iPad with its video floating into shore, being discovered, and put on international news stations.) I am apparently only a fair-weather sailor; I was terrified.  The crossing was so rough that an attendant went up and down the aisles handing out barf bags.  Unfortunately, the video I took to show how rough it was disappeared from iCloud when everything else did, and I can’t retrieve it.  I did capture, not intentionally (I was too focussed on our imminent deaths), a woman vomiting into a barf bag, so maybe it’s better the video is gone because I WOULD have shared it with you.  

I hope that the village of Puerto Morelos is spared the development that has taken over Cancun and Playa del Carmen, and thanks to the Meso-American Barrier Reef System, a National Marine Park one hundred meters offshore, perhaps this is possible.  Cruise and cargo ships can’t come inside the coral reefs offshore so all you see from the beach are the small fishing boats that the locals use.  

I like to think I could live there at least part of the year, but there is no LYS, and there also is no mail service.  The only way to get and receive mail is to have it addressed to a "Don Someone," and pay him for each piece of mail you send or receive.  I have no idea how he gets access to the mail.  

NO LYS!!!  No mail service for internet shopping!!!  Impossible.

The view of "downtown Puerto Morelos" from the beach a block from our house.

Ah, Mexico...

First of all, there's the beach. Sigh....... I really, really miss the beach.


A week ago today I left the warmth of the Yucatan in Mexico. This is the third year that I have gone with friends to various places in Mexico: the first trip was to Sayulita, a small fishing village north of Puerto Vallarta on the Pacific; the second was to San Miguel de Allende, a centuries-old city in the high desert in the center of the country; and this year we went to Puerto Morelos, a tiny fishing village between Cancun and Playa del Carmen on the Caribbean.

SO, first things first. The top picture is the beach in front of our house; the second picture is the view from my BED!!! I fell asleep every night watching the white foam from the waves breaking on the beach. I awoke every morning to the soft sounds of the waves washing up onto the beach. It was a wonderfully relaxing vacation.

But Cancun and Playa del Carmen are so Americanized, Canadianized, and Europeanized that they are cities I have no interest in visiting. The beachfronts are lined with wall-to-wall, enormous, gaudy resorts, condos, and hotels. Instead of staying there, we rented a house on the beach just north of the town of Puerto Morelos. It was quiet and sort of remote, but I suspect, based on the construction already begun, that in under five years it too will be overbuilt and overrun by tourists from all over the world. That's just fine; I understand. I am, after all, a tourist too. I know that resorts are perfectly nice places and they provide jobs for the locals, but I prefer being where I can see old Mexico, or at the very least, Mexican Mexico. San Miguel de Allende, by contrast, was wonderful, and I could go back there again and again. It's centuries old, very colonial, and we were able to rent a 400-year old house in the center of town. Amazing!

There was little to do in terms of sight-seeing in this part of the Yucatan. We did drive inland one day to a place called Coba, where there is a large site full of ruins from the Mayans. It was in what the locals call a jungle, but I guess it's technically a "dry" jungle. Our pedi-cab driver was a descendant of the Mayans and could speak Mayan as well as Spanish and some English. He took two of us on an hour tour of the many ruins. The third of us had been there thirty years ago and took the time to go bird-watching.

I considered climbing this, and then, after watching a youngish man struggle to get down the ruin, re-considered and just took pictures. It really was amazing to see these old, old structures, and picture the Mayans building and using them, and living in the jungle many centuries ago. Below is a typical Mayan residence built of sticks side by side for walls, and thatch for the roof. Usually, two or more of these were joined by walkways for a family's home. I suppose this is not original, but there were enough of them scattered around everywhere we drove once we were inland that I suspect that some people still build and use them. The poverty in Mexico is stunning, and so it's no surprise that people would still live in these.

The Yucatan and the jungle are supposed to be filled with wild and potentially dangerous animals: jaguars, ocelots, monkeys, crocodiles, boa constrictors, and coatamundis. The coatamundi and crocodile are the only wild animals we saw, much to my dismay! I really wanted to see monkeys in the wild, and a jaguar would have been a treat (as long as I was in a car or a building).

Meet Mr. or Mrs. Coatamundi. He is wild, but he was near a hut where the staff sells snacks and water. I saw tourists tossing food to this guy, so that's why he was so accommodating about having his photo taken.

Anyhow, the trip to Mexico was wonderful. It is the first of the trips where it occurred to me that I was someplace WARM when it was COLD at home. During the past two trips I was so entertained by sight-seeing and doing other tourist things that I hadn't even considered what a really GREAT idea Mexico is in January!

Travel

On Wednesday I leave for Puerto Morelos, Mexico with three friends. I thought I had it all worked out. First step: Buy a new suitcase that is large enough to carry everything. (I like to pack everything I can think of and then make choices about what to wear when I'm at my destination.)

I first went to Macy's where there is a BIG sale and newspaper coupons to add to the sale discount. Nope. Luggage was still hundreds of dollars. Then I remembered that a friend had told me to buy luggage at places like T J Maxx or Marshall's. At T J Maxx, I found a 30-inch, HUGE, RED Samsonite suitcase for $89.00. Score! I was hoping to find red luggage so that it was conspicuous on a luggage carousel at the airport, so I'm quite happy with my find.

Second Step: I came home to pack and had thought that all of my summer clothes would be stored in one place. Nope. Would be all clean. Nope. Would be already ironed. Nope.

Rats. So now my packing is much more involved than I had expected, and I have to iron. I hate to iron.

And as a note on packing, I travelled last spring to Paris with a friend who retired from US Airways, and travelling non-rev with her means taking only carry-on luggage. Ouch. That was really, really difficult for me. But somehow I did it (wearing the same black pants every day helped) and managed to bring back a copper saucepan, two clocks made from round wooden cheese boxes, and fragile geese salt and pepper shakers. I have no idea how I managed it, but I did, and I probably should let packing so lightly teach me to do better on other trips.

Or not.