Years ago, my friend Deb and I decided to head south to Cancun, Mexico, for a week, because we both needed a break from how hard we were working. We actually wanted to see Isla Mujeres and then get a palapa on the beach near Tulum. Deb had been to Isla Mujeres before and had been enchanted by it. I had wanted to see Tulum ruins because it was a fishing outpost, as opposed to the agrarian city that most of the Mayan ruins I had previously visited were.
In those days, neither of us had much Spanish. Mine was relegated to Donde esta el bano?, an important thing to know when traveling abroad, and gracias, and por favor. I had taken one year of high school Spanish about a million years ago, but it had faded from my memory. Deb had taken three years of it, and seemed to remember it better than I, so she was in charge of communications.
After getting away from the airport, we caught a taxi to the wharf where the boat would take us out to the Isla. There was nobody waiting for the boat at the wharf, and no boat, so we dumped our packs and approached the little office to find out when the next boat was due to arrive. It was Deb’s time to shine, so I let her take the lead and just smiled, and stood behind her while she worked her magic with her Spanish.
The man in the booth looked up as we approached. I looked at the signage on the wall of the office, but could make neither heads nor tails of the writing there.
Deb whispered to me “What is the word for boat?”
“I don’t know” I whispered back..
Deb stepped up to the man, cleared her throat, and in a really thick Texan accent, said, “Um, Kewando viene el botaay?” She was hoping to say “When does the boat arrive?” Spanish, when spoken with a thick Texan accent, is almost unintelligible. The man looked startled, and said ‘Que dices?” (What did you say?)
Deb stood tall, and cleared her throat again, and said, “Um, Cooandoe viene ell boetay?” Same Texas drawl.
The man looked completely confused. He looked at me over her shoulder, and said “Que esta diciendo?” (What is she saying?)
I got a flash from deep in my memory, that “bote” in Spanish meant “can”, like a soft drink can, and that “boat” was actually “barco”. So, Deb was saying “When does the can come?” And I thought that “arrive” was something like “arribar”. So I took my best shot.
Trying to imitate a Spanish accent, I said “Cuando arribar el barco?” Which actually meant “When to arrive the boat?”
The man tried to hide his grin, and replied, speaking really fast, “Va arribar hasta una hora.” (It will arrive in an hour.)
We thanked the man, smiled, and went back to our packs. Deb looked at me and said, “What did he say?”
“Hell, I don’t know. You are the Spanish speaker.” We puzzled over it for a couple minutes, and decided he had said, “It will arrive in an hour.” So we sat in the shade, and sure enough, in an hour a small boat arrived, and we got on.
Isla Mujeres was a beautiful little island, with iguanas perched on rocks everywhere. We rented a motor scooter and cruised the width and breadth of it and had a fun afternoon. At a dinner of Mexican food that evening, because what else were they going to serve in Mexico?, we watched the sun set over the land to the west, and then we retired to a small guest room and went to sleep.
The next morning we took the boat back to the mainland, and got a taxi to take us to Tulum. Deb found a little place that was renting palapas on the beach, and we rented one. Our palapa, a small house made of bamboo with a grass roof, was, in fact, right on the beach, about 30 feet back from the high tide line, and had two iron beds with nice clean sheets, two chairs, and one light bulb hanging on a wire from the ceiling. The floor was sand.
We swam in the Gulf, and at dinner time, we walked to a little restaurant and had a quiet dinner. I ordered chicken with a chocolate mole, which even though I would never have thought of chocolate being a sauce to put on chicken, turned out to be absolutely delightful. Arriving back at the palapa, it was dark, so I flipped the switch by the door and the light bulb came on, and we settled in on our beds, and while Deb wrote post cards, I kicked off my flip flops, took out the book I had brought, and read for a while. The waves breaking on the beach just outside our door were very soothing, and I was drifting towards sleep. Deb too was fading so she said, “Sam, can you turn off the light?”
I remembered a sign on the rental office saying that the electric generator, which had been putt-putting in the distance, was shut down at 10pm, so I glanced at my watch, which said 9:45, and replied, “The generator will be cutting off in 15 minutes, so the light will go off by itself then.” Deb sighed, and got out of her bed, and walked barefoot over to the door, and reached up to turn off the switch. Mexican electric does not usually have a ground wire, just a hot wire and a neutral, and Deb was barefoot in the damp sand, providing a nice ground connection, and before I could tell her to flip the switch with her flip flop, she touched the metal switch plate, and it gave her a good shock. She screamed and jumped back. So, I got out of my comfortable bed, and used my flip flop to turn the switch off. Deb was kinda upset, but it was too late.
The next morning we walked up the beach to the Tulum Ruins to explore. There were lots of tourists in travel groups, waiting with their guides to go into the ruins. We weren’t part of a travel group so we just walked on in, and spent a couple hours exploring. Deb wanted to head back to the palapa, so she took off. I wanted to see what the tour guides had to say about the ruins, so I walked around listening to groups until I found a guide speaking in English, and kind of tagged along with that group. The tour guide wasn’t all that happy to have me tagging along, but there wasn’t much he could do about it, and I learned a lot about Tulum while wandering with the group.
Getting back to the entrance, there were still groups waiting with their guides, and the group near me was made up of what I thought were Japanese tourists, in matching t-shirts and ball caps, so I attached myself to them, and took yet another tour. I don’t speak Japanese, but it was interesting to hear the mellifluous language being spoken. It was obvious to me that the guides all had a prepared program, so we visited the same parts as with the other group, and it was all in Japanese.
That was so fun, that when we got back to the entrance, I again walked around until I found a group of Germans ready to head into the ruins, and I went with them. I spoke a tiny bit of German because of having had a good teacher in the German class that I took in my freshman year before my family moved and my new school only offered Spanish and French. So I heard the same tour monologue in German this time. It was great. I didn’t understand much of the German, but again, listening to the cadence of the spoken German was interesting.
Having learned everything there was to know about Tulum, in various languages, I headed back to the palapa. We laid in the sun on the beach all afternoon, and just before dark we walked back to the restaurant from the night before and had dinner. Yum.
Arriving back at the palapa in the moonlight, Deb treated the light switch like it was a serpent, and refused to go anywhere near it. I took off my flip flop and turned the light on, and we took the chairs out, and set them at the surf line as the tide was coming in, and gazed out at the ocean with a reflection of light from the moon coming from the east directly toward us. It was mesmerizing, and we sat there in silence, staring at the waves coming in for a couple hours. Deb turned to me, and laughed and said, “Should we change the channel?”
“No,” I replied, “I like this channel a lot.” And we sat there enchanted by the waves and moonlight until the incoming surf undermined our chairs and they were tilting to one side. We got up and dragged the chairs back to the palapa, and retired to our beds. I had half an hour of light left before the generator would shut down, so I got my book, and before long I was deep into my story.
All of a sudden there was a loud POP!, and the light bulb exploded, and caught the grass roof of the palapa on fire. Holy Crap! I jumped up, grabbed my towel, and beat the flames out before it could get the whole roof burning. So much for reading.
The next day I reported the issue to the office, and they told me not to worry, a man would come by later and fix the problem. Ok. That day we walked a long way down the beach, laid in the sun for a while, and swam in the warm water, and then came back to the palapa. Just before dark, a man came with a ladder, untwisted the wires on the melted light socket, and twisted a new light socket in place, taped the connections up with electricians tape, put in a new bulb, and we were back in bidness.
The rest of the time in Tulum was uneventful and we enjoyed a relaxing vacation, good food, and a lazy time, before flying back stateside.
Life is cheap in Mexico. 