Closing a chapter

We had one last tranquil week in Mexico and a rude awakening during our layover in New York city that closed the chapter on our adventures in Central America.

We spent our second week in Zicatela with an already established daily routine that included trips to one or other of the local restaurants and a late afternoon trip to one of the beaches. 

Anne started referring to the several young baristas and waitresses that I struck up conversations with in Spanish as "your girls" - a reference to how charmed I was by them.  At one coffee shop in particular there was a lovely young girl who was happy to correct my Spanish and suggest ways to greet her, place orders and promise to return soon.

Our casual Spanish conversation is improving and I’m almost at the point where I’ll be able to say that my Spanish is as good as my Afrikaans.  As I'm writing this I'm imagining my friend Kees saying loudly “and that’s not saying much!”

Kees and his family are South African friends we met in 2001 after we had been in the USA for about 9 months and he is off on his own journey right now with an RV, his destinations unfolding a little like ours, excepting his wheels never leave the tarmac.  He has also been documenting his travels.

We have more or less been insisting to our waiters that we’d like to use Spanish where possible.  The waiters in Zicatela and La Punta come from all over the world and all speak fluent Spanish after spending a few months at the coast. 

A French girl told us that she came to Puerto Escondido for a 5 day holiday two years before and had never left and an Italian waiter insisted we try his home-made pesto to remind us of Italy when he heard we'd visited Florence.

A sweet Argentinian girl (another one of “mis chicas” according to Anne) said “Oh I remember you!  En Español!” when we stopped by for the second time and passed us a menu in Spanish as she led us to our table.

At one lunch in a quiet restaurant near our AirBnb  I asked the waiter if the woman behind the counter in the kitchen was his mother.  He is young, perhaps early twenties and we discovered the restaurant (in retrospect this is probably true of many of them) was run by his mom and his two brothers and when I asked where his dad was, he shrugged matter of factly and said "who knows?"

Our beach trips - after my workday ended or on weekend days - continued to feature crazy big waves on most days and mostly vain attempts on my part to body surf. 

I did catch a few good waves but invariably got tumbled and ended up with a pile of sand in my hair.

There is a portion of the main beach that has a rocky outcrop in the ocean close to the beach and has slightly less violent waves.  Anne took to going there in the early afternoons because of the flocks of pelicans that hovered and dove into the sea there.  She called it Pelican Beach.  

Really close to Pelican Beach is a lookout where on the Saturday we saw a girl and her family dressed up beautifully for the young girl's quinceañera.  Turning 15 is a huge deal for young girls in Central America and there are usually large parties to celebrate the right of passage into womanhood.  The young girl wore a peach colored dress and her mother wore a head-dress that reminded us of Frida Kahlo's. 

I remembered that at the Frida Kahlo museum they mentioned that she had adopted some of the traditional clothing and headdresses of the Tehuana in the Oaxaca region because this was where her mother was from.

 

Our sunsets on the beach also came with some pretty spectacular surfing and wake board action which were amazing to watch.

The beach had this sign as you enter that said “no smoking” multiple times in multiple languages but was largely ignored.  We usually had to navigate to a spot closest to the water to allow the sea breeze to  reduce the chance of cigarette smoke triggering Anne's asthma.

 

Since we’d given up the scooter, our taxi rides were filled with conversations with the drivers and a chance to repeat a set of common topics.  Where are you from?  How long did you live there? Where are you going next?  Do you have children?  All of which offer a wealth of phrases to practice and to listen to how the taxi drivers phrased things.

At the end of our 11th week in Central America we headed back to Mexico for one day.   We spent the day visiting Nick and the small coffee shop near him where we were greeted warmly.  We also met his girlfriend from Colombia who speaks a little English. 

She loved hearing some of our family anecdotes told in halting Spanish.

The trip to New York involved an Uber ride from JFK airport.  The driver was from Venezuela and apologized at the start that her English was weak so we ended up with the same pattern of questions and phrases in Spanish that we had practiced in Mexico for the hour long trip to Manhattan.  She was quite interested in the composition of people and languages of South Africa and complemented us on what she considered unaccented Spanish. 

Our hotel in New York was in the evocative Hell's Kitchen section of Manhattan, just a few blocks from Times Square.  

A restaurant in Hell's Kitchen

 We met Matt, who took the train trip from New Haven especially to meet us and his girlfriend joined us at an Indian restaurant for a surprisingly affordable meal on the Sunday evening.  We were so engrossed in our conversation with them that we forgot to take a photo of all of us.

 

On the Monday evening after work we headed out to find a clothing store.  I am traveling really light and my jeans were showing signs of falling apart so we had decided to find a new pair and to look for some new shoes for Anne because her shoes had suffered the same fate as my jeans.

We have been to New York about 5 times altogether and Times Square is one of the places we've always visited.  This time around, though, we really had no intention of going there but our route to the nearest Levi store went right through it so we had no choice. 

If you've never visited there you should know that it is always teaming with people and has probably the most expensive restaurants in the country.  

 

It was loud as usual and had a bunch of crazy costumed characters who we deftly avoided only to be interrupted by a man with the question “do you have a minute?”  It was innocent enough and our guard was down so we politely replied that we didn't - to which he, with a broad disarming grin replied "it’s because I’m black isn’t it?" which made us both laugh.  "No, it’s not…"

He then asked where we were from and Anne said "South Africa" to which he replied: "Well then, you’re blacker than me!" which was pretty funny too.

I got sidelined by what appeared to be his friend who passed me a small CD sized sleeve with a marketing card in it and QR codes while he did the same for Anne. 

He said that he and his mates were in a band and were promoting their tour.  He asked my name and then invented a gansta slag nickname for me "T-smooth" which wasn't too original (Anne was given the nickname "A-sexy") and then dropped the question of whether we were going to be able to help them with a donation.

 

I'll claim that our recent visits to Central America, where we didn't really experience any "hard sells" lulled us into complacency and we ended up donating to "their band" at which point they revealed that they were in different bands!  Who would have thought!  One even offered to bring over a credit card machine for a donation which left me gasping.

Anne stopped donating after handing out 3 bills and we made our way out of the group which was now 5 people, two of them complaining rather aggressively that they were being short-changed.

As we walked away I said to Anne “did we just get fleeced?”  She was unfazed.  “We did!”  But I think we were also a little impressed at how it had gone down.  “Damn we were so naive, but they were so entertaining!”

One the way home we found a little Italian restaurant off a side road. Also affordable and with a server from Uruguay and a waitress from Kazakhstan.

On the way home a older guy with a white cane tried to strike up a conversation near our hotel in Hells Kitchen and we brushed him off rather rudely.  We had learned our lesson.

Misdirection in paradise

The small coastal town of Puerto Escondido is a short 1 hour flight on a small plane from Mexico City.  

The airport is a single runway airport and reminded me of the Kimberley airport where you had to walk down the mobile staircase directly onto the runway and the heat would hit you as you step off the aircraft. We were dressed for the Mexico City weather and had to shed a sweatshirt immediately.

Our host offered to pick us up from the airport and he and his wife arrived within a few minutes of our Whatsapp message.  They could speak some English but we valiantly kept speaking Spanish explaining to them that we really wanted to practice.  Naturally they had to revert to a few English words to go over some of the details of where to shop and wash our clothes.

The apartment is in the higher part of the town on a street called Septima Norte (7th street) and overlooks the ocean with a view that includes some of the houses on the edge of the town.  Fortunately it had ceiling fans and the bedroom had an air conditioner to use at night.

Dawn over Centro, Puerto Escondido

 

We had last eaten at 10am at our favorite little coffee shop near Nick's apartment in Mexico City but once we had put our things down in the apartment Anne was keen to make our way to the ocean after we had changed into something cooler.  

Our host told us the name of a good swimming beach which looked to be a 20min walk on Google maps so we set off in the late, hot afternoon down the long hill towards the beaches on the Southern side of the town.

The temperatures here only vary by a small amount between day and night.  We are in the winter now and the nighttime temperatures "plummet" to 72F (22C) at night and go up to 86F (30C) during the day.  Every day.  

An article on the climate in Puerto Escondido says: "The temperature in Puerto Escondido varies so little throughout the year that it is not entirely meaningful to discuss hot and cold seasons".  I suspect it is a little less comfortable in the summer when the humidity is high and the few people we have asked all said it is much the same all year around.

The beach is called Carrizalillo (which I still struggle to pronounce).  It has a staircase with 157 steps and was fairly crowded with tourists and locals.  The waves are what we used to call "dumpers" in South Africa - they break right on the beach and dump you in the sand. 

The beach edge is pretty steep which made me wonder about a rip-tide but there were plenty of people swimming just beyond where the waves were breaking.  A fairly large number of surfers - mostly people learning to surf - were out quite a bit further where another set of waves were breaking.  The waves out there are a lot smaller and slower to break which make it an ideal beach for learning to surf.

The sea is warm for the Atlantic - on average around 84F (26C).  This surprised me but I guess 84F water feels a lot cooler than 86F air temperature for a number of reasons.  It is a very comfortable water temperature for swimming and I didn't hesitate to get in with Anne.

There was a sign at the top of the stairs warning that smoking and nudity (among other obvious things) are illegal, but a small percentage of people ignore these rules.  Topless bathers are less offensive than someone smoking upwind of you but it is easy enough to move as long as only a few people are doing it.

A rather nice tradition is that, on days when the sun sets unobstructed by clouds, the whole beach erupts into applause and whoops as the last ray of sun disappears below the horizon.  A tradition that is repeated at some of the other beaches that face West along this coast.  

After sunset we walked the 20min back up the hill and decided that we'd visit a Peruvian restaurant (called Chicama) that our friend Gina had recommended to us.  I looked it up on Google maps - about a 15min trip - and we started walking down the main road thinking we'd get a Taxi on the way.  At the bottom of the main street we came out onto a 4 lane highway that Anne took an instant dislike to.  It was more or less deserted of pedestrians and not well lit.  It was our first night so we had no idea how safe it would be to walk there.  We'd already walked 10 min so I figured we'd be ok to keep going but naturally our patience with things in general was waning quickly as our blood sugar continued to spiral downward.

A few minutes later, Anne asked how far we still had to walk and I casually opened google maps to check and saw that I'd had "by car" set when I had looked for the restaurant. "By foot" put us around 15 minutes into a 1hr 6min walk!

We had heard that Taxis are easy to get in Puerto Escondido but we hadn't had much luck walking down the main road and on this highway there was nowhere for a taxi to stop.  None of the ones we saw were looking for a passenger.  So after walking for another 10 minutes we decided to go across the road to a rather nondescript looking Hotel where the really sweet receptionist said she would help us get a taxi.  

When we asked if she knew of a nearby restaurant she let us know that they had a restaurant on their top floor so without hesitation we went up to take a look.  We were the only people in the restaurant which had a simple functional layout but the view was rather nice and we were starving, so we took a table at the edge of the balcony.

We took a look at the menu and ordered drinks.  We spotted what looked like safe choices of meals: "Carne" (meat) for me and "Pescado" (fish) for Anne, as there didn't seem to be anything even vaguely vegetarian.  We used google translate (thank you Google Fi) to check out other items on the menu but one item which included "small grasshoppers" and another for octopus convinced us that there weren't really any other options that we'd choose.

I had assumed that my "carne" was a steak and asked for it to be cooked medium which somewhat puzzled the waitress.  I think she just put it down to me not knowing much Spanish because she wandered off to get the chef to start preparing the meal. 

The meal was a surprise.  Anne got a whole, very boney small fish, grilled to a crisp.  The presence of the head and the staring eyes were so distracting that after staring back at it for a few moments, she cut the head off and wrapped it in a napkin - out of sight, (kind of) out of mind.  

My meat was prepared in a very specific way called "carne asada" which is a thinly sliced piece (1-2mm) of beef, also grilled to a crisp and served with beans and rice and some salad and tortillas.  I had seen this style of preparation previously in street food in Mexico City.  The intention is to break up the meat and wrap it in tortillas but it was as tough as leather.

My mind and stomach were prepared for a juicy steak cooked medium rare and Anne had imagined a white fish fillet with some delicious sauce.  After a few moments of dull recognition our hunger gave us the big mental adjustment needed and we ate.

Once we had eaten though, we started to feel a little more human and the receptionist accompanied us out on the dual lane highway to try to help us flag down a taxi.  She was so helpful and compassionate - we were two lost gringos who really needed help.

A large mural on the 2 lane highway not far from our Hotel of the first night

After 10min of waiting in vain I told her that we might try walking back up one of the side roads close to the hotel and she agreed that we may find a taxi easier that way.  She refused the tip that Anne offered her for all of her help and waved goodbye as we headed off.  Sure enough as we rounded the nearest corner a taxi was dropping off a passenger and we were able to get back to our apartment without much fuss, exhausted and a little shell-shocked.

In retrospect we should probably have taken care of eating right after visiting the beach at one of the restaurants close to that beach but, even though some mistakes were made, cool heads prevailed and we didn't have a "hangry spat" on the Puerto Escondido highway.

We did visit the Peruvian restaurant the next night as a treat to ourselves - by taxi this time.  

What an amazing experience!  

The young people serving there, particularly behind the bar made it the happiest restaurant we've ever visited.  They were singing along with the music, dancing and mixing drinks in the most engaging way.  We each had a meal of potatoes and egg and a delicious sauce.  I took a shot of the famous Guatemalan Rum (Zacapa) which the barman said was the best drink in the house.

We stayed in Puerto Escondido Centro for just over two weeks with a daily routine that involved me working from 8am local time until 4pm (excepting for a few days where work intruded into the evening) and then taking a taxi to the beach.  After sunset each day we would walk all the way back to the apartment in the cooler dark - on some days stopping at a restaurant - we found a couple that sold a steak called the New York which was right up my alley. 

We tried 3 other beaches but tended to always return to Carrizalillo because despite the rough waves on the beach, swimming beyond them is rather comfortable and the evening ritual of the sunset is a good way to end the day.

On the Saturday of the weekend after arriving we had paid for an early morning trip on a boat to see dolphins, whales and turtles.  We had mixed feelings about this while we out there - the captain of the boat didn't see two turtles that he motored over and at the beginning of the trip about 10 boats were juggling to get close to the only pair of whales that were spotted that day (he said it was a mother and child) .

Despite these misgivings it was amazing to come in among a pod of dolphins chasing fish and leaping about and be able to drop into the water and see some of them swimming near us - even if briefly.  We also got to swim close to a turtle though to be fair it was more swimming away from us than with us.

On the way back we saw a few flying fish.  They are quite incredible because they can glide for a really long time.  At first I thought I was seeing a bird with a shiny stripe gliding just above the waves and then it was gone!  When I spotted the second one I suddenly realized what it was!

When we got back we went to a nearby beach where we were offered a day long rental of a beach recliner in shade and all the food we could eat for $600MX pesos.  I'm not a big fan of hanging out at a beach all day doing not much and fortunately we aren't big eaters because by about 4pm when we decided we'd had enough the owner calculated how much food we'd had (breakfast, lunch and some drinks) and when he was satisfied that we had not spent over the $600 he said all good, thank you and I paid him.  I realized that his "all you can eat" was indeed conditional on the all not going over the offered price for the recliner.

I've had an interesting relationship with pesos while we've been here.  The conversion rate is around 18pesos to $1 US so $600MX is $32 US for both of us for a day on the beach including breakfast and lunch but somehow after paying for things like taxi rides and meals in the center I found myself starting get annoyed when suddenly the price is $20MX higher for a taxi ride.  It is like $1.25 but somehow I'm not making the conversion any more, just reacting to the higher price.

Of course the cab drivers had a few things that they did that I had to learn about over days of using them.  The rate when we got there was $40MX from our house to the beach but a number of drivers were asking $50MX which was confusing and then halfway through our stay it was consistently $50MX.  I suspect this is the "tourist" price because plenty of locals use the taxis and I doubt they tolerate a lot of price increases.

The other trick is claiming that they don't have change when you don't produce the exact amount.

Our first trip to the Peruvian restaurant cost us $100MX but later in the week we did another trip and the driver said $150MX when I asked how much it was.  Anne heard the 50 but I just heard $100MX and so I gave him $100MX when we arrived and he put up a bit of a fight before letting it go.

I suppose having the right change for $40 and/or $50 for local trips and $150 for the longer trips to the further towns was the best approach.

We thought about renting a scooter but decided that the taxi drivers and the sudden speed bumps and potholes in the road made it a little unsafe.  Besides renting a scooter would be a daily cost more than the price of the taxi to the beach.

Further east of Central are two communities that have a lot more tourist activity - Zicatela - which has this long curved beach with impressive waves and La Punta which is a beach near the end of this long beach with a row of restaurants and shops and tons of people.  La Punta is where the Peruvian restaurant is.

Our next AirBnb rental is at Zicatela and they have a pool which should make it pretty luxurious.

On our last visit to Carizalillo a young couple started dancing on the beach - I swear that they had only just met but they got a good round of applause from everyone nearby when the music stopped.

Dance of the Flyers

We arrived back in Mexico City and back to visiting the little coffee shop close to my son's apartment every day. He has very fast internet and our Airbnb internet was patchy so I  tended to work in his guest room during the week.

My daily routine was to stop there for breakfast for their delicious coffee and bagel combination with scrambled egg, bacon and cream cheese on my way to his home.

The cafeteria has a group of friendly workers.  Most of them are young women who greeted me with smiles every day, waiting patiently for me to make a hesitant order (even though after a couple of days they knew what it would be) in Spanish and then helping me with the prices.  Working with numbers in Spanish is so hard. Even though I know most of the numbers individually the combinations when you are buying vary a lot. Particularly since we have to deal with hundreds and thousands quite often.  For example, breakfast cost us about $480 MX ($2.60 US), so it was a challenge to hear them speak it quickly and then work it out in my head. The cashier usually turned the screen for me to see the number and then said it aloud to help me.
 

So after five weeks my Spanish was much better and the experience at the cafeteria was more conversational and less hesitant.

Our last week in CDMX (the common abbreviation for Ciudad de Mexico) included another trip to the Fine Arts museum. 

Anne and Gina getting into the entrance line which stretched to the main road

This time for a great show of traditional dance and music through the centuries and from different parts of Mexico. Our tickets were bought by Nick's lovely neighbor as a parting gift.  She had hosted us for drinks on Christmas Eve and had generally been very welcoming when we had met her on the stairs and so this was a generous gift to us.

 

The theater in this building is spectacular with a Tiffany glass curtain on the stage

and a beautiful stained glass circle under the dome - which gleams gold from the street.  

 

The highlight of the show for me was a dance that had a cowboy and his lasso dancing with several girls, him twirling the lasso and them spinning in long, flowing dresses.

 

The last weekend in the city included the long awaited trip to the Museum of a

Anthropology and the central park Chapultepec and its castle.

 

The museum has the most amazing feature as you walk in - a free-standing pillar which supports a massive roof.  The pillar spills water over onto the tiles below where the water is collected and sent back up.

You really need to visit this museum a few times to fully appreciate it.  I was pretty exhausted after visiting the first few halls showing prehistoric and Mesoamerican and then through the Aztecs.   There are so many small details and of course the struggle of reading many of the Spanish descriptions.  

There are, of course many descriptions in English but they are less frequent.

At some point a voice on the loudspeakers started saying something in Spanish that was several paragraphs long.  Then the voice started again in English and said simply "Please don't touch the exhibits" which, by the way was the only phrase that I understood in the Spanish.  Anne said he had gone on to say something about following the rules and showing respect for the museum  etc.

There were a few notable things for me in the first few halls that I really appreciated.  The first was that the little models showing pre-historic people were all anatomically correct - no flat surfaces where the genitals should be. 

No genitals in this diorama, but an example of the detail in a post-prehistoric scene

The second was that the statues and carved images from the Mesoamerican times were very alien to my western view.  I was able to distinguish faces in the carvings but many of them depicted a person with a headdress on that also had human facial features - these are hard to look at and decipher and I'd like to learn more about the significance of these depictions.

Finally the amazing number of artifacts found and preserved from a massively large timeframe.  From small figurines to large artifacts like the large sculpture that Anne had told me about that had a large hole in the middle for sacrificed human hearts.

The casual descriptions of these sacrifices were hard to read, including the famous ball game that had a ritual component to it (no doubt only exercised during significant rituals) where players who undertook moves in the game that went against the sun (whatever that means) were decapitated and their blood soaked the earth to bring good fortune to the community.

 

This game was played widely with I suppose only some instances where a mistake in the game could be fatal - but it did give me pause thinking about how spectators and participants felt about the relative value of their life in the community.  I suppose their view of death must have been so incredibly different from ours.

 

After visiting the remaining halls with a much lower concentration on the details we walked outside and discovered that the Dance of the Flyers (Danza de los Voladores) was about to start in a park across from the museum, near the entrance to Mexico's central park.

 

This is an ancient ceremony still practiced in some parts of Mexico and in Guatemala where it lives as a Mayan ritual.

 

The pole is immense and the participants scale up it without any protection.  At the top they tie ropes, that have been wrapped around the pole many times, around their waists and with a man sitting at the top playing the flute, singing or drumming, the ropes gradually unwind as the flying men circle the pole.

From there we walked across to the immense central park of the city where the paths were full of visitors and small impromptu tented shops selling candy and oddities.  

 

The best seller that week was a small spider creature that you could wrap around your neck and which had a tube and a trigger that allowed you to squirt water from its tail (like the thread of a web).

We walked to the castle in the park (Chapultepec Castle).  The viceroy of New Spain (an office that Spain used for the governor of both the West Indies and the territories claimed by Hernán Cortés) ordered the construction of the castle in 1785 soon after taking office.  He died a year later of suspected poisoning and the castle was sold to Mexico city in 1806 after not having had an owner.

The building is beautiful with amazing views of the park and the city.  The halls and stained glass windows are spectacular and the entrance ceiling and several walls in the palace have been decorated with murals painted to depict significant historical events in Mexico painted over 200 years after the castle was first built.

A man stopped us while we were in a hall with a mural that spanned the entire room to tell us that he lived in the USA but was from Mexico.

  He wanted us to be sure to understand how significant these murals were.  These panel were painted by David Alfaro Siqueiros painted between 1957 and 1966 and depict the revolution in Mexico between 1906 and 1914 starting on the right with the period of decadence where can-can dancers entertain the aristocrats while the common people have plunged into slavery,

moving on to a worker's strike that the painter believed was the beginning of the revolution following with ideologues who predate the leaders of the Mexican Liberal Party (Karl Marx is recognizable here)

followed by popular leaders and Constitutionalists and finally in the next room a revolutionary who has abruptly stopped his horse with bodies behind him - signifying the end of the first stage of the revolution.

Another mural that was quite powerful was painted by Jorge González Camarena and is displayed in one of the halls.  It signifies the violent clash between the eagle warrior signifying Mesoamerican culture flourishing in the region and the Spanish conqueror. 

The are both extinguished in the battle and out of this emerges a small eagle on the bottom right that will become the Mexican homeland built out of these two worldviews.

The gardens feature a fountain and great views over the city.

A photo from Nick's camera shot by a friendly visitor to the Castle

In the front of the castle are the statues of the Boy Heroes (Los Niños Héroes), teenage cadets who fought to the death defending the Castle against the American forces in the Mexican-American war. 

One of the boys, in an attempt to prevent the capture of the flag, wrapped it around himself and leapt to his death over the cliff on which the castle is built.  A ceiling mural depicting this act by the teenager is painted above the entrance stairway of the castle.

Anne's photo of the ceiling mural

 

A hundred years later Harry Truman visited the monument to these boys and, when asked by reporters why he had done this famously said: "Brave men don't belong to any one country.  I respect bravery wherever I see it."

We were pretty exhausted after the day of walking and we made our way down past this monument to the city-side entrance to the park where we caught an Uber back to our airbnb.

The next day we would be flying out to the amazing beaches on the southern part of Mexico.