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March 17, 2007
They Paved Paradise and Put Up a Parking Lot
Let me set the scene for you: Erich’s to my left, hidden under his pillow and fighting with me in his sleep for who will get the blanket. He’s rolling over towards me, slowly… closer… with his fingers feeling for the blanket line. Meanwhile, Rosa (whose real name is Genevieve) is dangling over us in her pink hammock, like a Mayan trapeze artist of sorts. Back and forth, back and forth she goes… Now, let me tell you how we got to this point.
On Thursday night, I left Merida to go to Isla Holbox, an island on the northern side of the Yucatan Peninsula. Erich and I planned the trip rather late, and only because of our puente (the Mexican term for an extended weekend) at school. We both had really wanted to go, so we thought that we should jump in on the opportunity.
10:30 pm: I find myself sitting in front of the Envy nightclub, down the block, waiting for Erich and his host mom to pick me up. My host family doesn’t drive at night. Erich reiterates that he has invited Rosa, another girl from his program to join us. She was having problems finding people to travel with and would ultimately end up defraying the cost of our hotel expenses. And being the good people that we are, we didn’t want her missing out of an opportunity to travel.
I hop into Erich’s mother’s Brady Bunch/Partridge Family bus-van, only to find myself having slight flashbacks of my family’s own long “van history”; we make our way to the ADO Central Bus Terminal where we meet up with Rosa.
“No problema,” his mother tells us. I can hear Dona Sarita’s words in my mind as well: “No hay un problema. No hay nadie en la isla; no te preocupes hijo.” Okay, I think to myself. When they call me hijo, I know they are really serious and that I shouldn’t worry. I know that I will have no problem finding a hotel room on the island without a reservation. After all, Gabby tells me that she vacationed to Isla Holbox nearly 10 years ago for her luna de mile and she didn’t even see any other form of life on the island. No problem, no problem. I say the words over and over but more and more I continue to worry like a Stern.
“Chiquila…Chiquila…” The woman is calling the city over and over into the microphone to the ten people that seem to be waiting in the bus terminal late at night. “That’s our stop,” I say. We need to take the bus from Merida to Chiquila and then hop on a ferry to Isla Holbox. “Not a problem,” I thought. With Erich’s guidebooks, my keen traveling skills, and Rosa’s--- well, with Rosa, I guess--- I felt comfortable making the voyage.
We hop on the bus. I start thinking of my experience last year, when I took a bus during Spring Break from Brandeis University to NYC after visiting my good friend at his school. Runaways, drifters—any of those here? I didn’t see any. Only some tourists in the front and some Mexicans scattered throughout the back of the bus.
Erich and Rosa fell asleep—I was on my own. She’s got her blanket and he’s got his “prissy” little pillow (no, it’s really not prissy, I just kept saying that) and me—well, I’ve got my IPOD.
45 minutes and the bus stops. The driver tries to evict and Mexican from the bus. I wondered what he was doing, what had happened. Did he not pay? Was he a wanted man? Was he masturbating in public like those drifters that ride the bus and go back and forth between Merida and Progresso? The drifters that are probably leading free lives in Mexico as child predators and rapists?
He doesn’t get off the bus. He refuses to. Until the second pit stop.
We continue on. People hopping off, people hopping on. And from what I can see, they’re hopping on from the middle of nowhere. I look out the window. Just trees and dirt. Where do these people come from? Where do they live? Are they homeless? Abandoned? Poor?
We get to Chiquila at about 5:30 in the morning after all of the stops. By the end, its just the three of us and two couples of tourists. We all wait on the dock together, watching the sun rise and waiting to board the ferry to Isla Holbox.
“Where are you from?” I asked. I could tell they looked a little bit more confused than many of the American tourists that I’ve seen. “Germany,” says one couple. “Holland,” says the other. How cool, I thought, to be traveling with two couples (who, I ultimately found out later did not know each other) from Europe. As Rosa and Erich were taking pictures, I started talking to them.
“Where did you learn your English? What’s Europe like? It is cold? I have a friend studying there from Michigan, you know…What made you come to Yucatan? To Quintana Roo? How long will you be here for?”
“I’m German,” I chime in with a wide smile. “I know I don’t look it. People tell me I look Chicano or Italian or Puerto Rican, but I really am German,” I say. “Look,” I say, as I point to the dark sky. “Ein Klein Nachtmusik.” I start spewing out all the German words I know—any of the words that I’ve heard my grandparents say over and over again since I was a little boy.
After talking with them for a while, I decided it was time to move on. I walked to the front of the barcito and climbed into the little navigation area where the captain was. “Dime,” I said. “Tell me. Is the legend about Holbox really true? Was this island really once home to Pirates of the Caribbean? Was it once home to drug warlords?”
I was repeating everything that I had heard from Carla, a Mexicana friend from my Literatura Caribena class had told me just before I left. “Es la verdad?” I questioned. “Hijo,” he started. (Uh-oh, there was that “hijo” again) “Hay drogas en todos lados de Mexico.” He then asked me why I spoke Spanish bastante bien and I told him that my father had graduated from the Universidad de Guadalajara. “ Eres Chicano?” he asked me. I replied in the affirmative, only hoping to get more substantial, credible tips about what to do and where to stay on the island.
After all: a Mexican and Chicano are like family, right? And who’s to say that I really wasn’t Chicano? Mexicans come in all shapes, sizes, and skin tones just like the people of the United States. But he really didn’t give me any more information. He just kept laughing on and on about the legend that I had questioned him about…
So okay, we’re finally on the island.
“I think we should look for a hotel now,” I suggest. “Just to be sure that we have a room.” Erich was originally thinking about waiting until midday. But my way won out. We made our way to the hotel. “No hay espacio,” they told us. What?! My host mother’s words kept ringing through my head: “No hay problema.” You will have no problem. No problem. That good old Stern nervousness was now kicking in more than ever before. “Maybe we should split up,” I suggest. And that’s exactly what the three of us did.
One “lo siento” after another made me sick. What was the problem? Why was everything filled? Were we really at Isla Holbox and not Cancun? I decided to seek help from a taxi-cab driver, riding a golf-cart in the sand.
“Need a room?” he asked. I nodded and hopped in. We drove up and down the beach, begging with each of the dueños of each hotel to give us a room. But there was noting. “Where did you lean your English from?” I asked. “Germany,” he told me. What’s with all these people that I was meeting from Germany? And what was with all of the hotels and built up areas? Why wasn’t the island desolate like my mother had told me? Had they paved paradise?
To make a long story short (and I mean a long story, short), Rosa ultimately ended up finding one room in a hotel in the Centro of the Island (off the beach by 2 blocks) for the three nights. The room was the size of my E. Quad single with one double bed and a hammock hook for a small, chico-sized hammock. It was after hearing of such arrangements that I knew our island adventure was going to be interesting…
Bueno, we moved in and made our way to the beach right away. We spent the first day hanging out, playing with my awesome Frisbee and boomerang that I had bought from Walmart. We also went walking and realized that most of the island (with the exception of the small hotel-strip) was really deserted and not built up at all.
And after taking our siesta that day, we all woke up and started talking…
And this is the part of the blog that I’m trying to emphasize here, so just listen up:
I guess that I just consider myself to be really lucky to be in the company of such smart, interesting, and well-spoken people. Erich and I spoke a lot about religion—he’s a devout, practicing Catholic like a good buddy of mine at Michigan. And like my friend at Michigan, I have the utmost respect for Erich. I was interested in hearing about his religious practice/ perception of religion here in Mexico and in turn, he was interested in hearing about my perception of religion/ experience as a Jew here in Mexico.
We spoke for a long time, just like we did last weekend when we were at Gran Plaza together; only this time, it was about religion.
What does it mean to be a Christian? A Catholic? What direction to be both see for the Cathoic church? What are its virtues and its shortcomings? What does it mean to be Jewish and what commonalities can be observed with Catholicism from its practice?
And after religion, we moved onto other topics: family, school, friends, life experiences, etc. Rosa chimed in as well at some points, but I couldn’t really tell if she was overwhelmed or not by the intensity of our conversation, the complexity of our ideas. So most of the time, she just listened.
I also knew that she was just listening because in some ways, she couldn’t offer any comments. I come from a very close family; we’ve done a lot together. And the same holds true with Erich. And both of our families (no matter how different or similar they might be) both have supported our studies in Mexico, which is something that really means a lot.
Rosa couldn’t say the same about her life. And to be honest, I guessed this from the very first time I spoke to her in the UADY. There’s a certain insecurity to Rosa—a certain vulnerability—that makes you wonder what kind of background she comes from. She opened up to a us a little bit about her family situation and about a few of her experiences, but the rest of the time, she just listened. And that’s okay. Hopefully one day, she’ll have plenty more to talk about.
Anyway, Erich and I spoke for three hours without moving. And those are the types of conversations that I’m really fortunate to have.
By nighttime, we were out on the beach yet again, watching the stars, and this time it was I who was doing a lot of the listening. The two of them showed me the constellations (something of which I don’t get to see or appreciate on a regular basis at home in New Jersey or at home in Michigan).
Sometimes, it’s nature’s wonders that really add to life’s enjoyment.
We walked the beach, together. Just the three of us. We watched the shooting stars. We felt our toes form the cold, wet sand. And we were happy.
And so this morning, Saturday, I’m writing this entry in bed by hand (later to be transferred to computer). I sit in bed waiting patiently for my friends to wake up so we can start a new day again.
Erich’s to my left, hidden under his pillow and fighting with me in his sleep for who will get the blanket. He’s rolling over towards me, slowly…closer… his fingers feeling for the blanket line. Meanwhile, Rosa (whose real name is Genevieve) is dangling over us in her pink hammock, like a Mayan trapeze artist of sorts. Back and forth, back and forth she goes…
And now you know how we got to this point.
Posted by jlsumich at March 17, 2007 10:42 PM