The Escape Succeeds and the Bugs Come Out at Night

Hi Carolyn,  (or should I say "Hola")


So, here we are again in Merida, Mexico indulging in another few weeks of thumbing our once cold noses at old man you-know-who.

 

 

 

The escape began with a 5 am trip to Toronto’s Pearson Airport. We leapt into the air just hours before that Texas Low we were talking about awhile back rolled into the area and let loose with another slow stampede of snow. I’m sure nobody noticed  the passenger in seat 12A letting loose with a fist-pump as the wheels left the runway .





Five hours later, deplaned and thru the customs gauntlet, finds us standing around Cancun Airport sweating in our Canadian/Canadien garb and awaiting the intercity coach to Merida. The siesta effect was already making itself felt. By mid-afternoon it seemed like we’d been up for most of a day. Still a four hour bus ride to go.






Ironically, the highway coach for this leg is air-conditioned to the max - a rolling refrigeration unit. The lined hoodie I whipped off when I hit the warm humid air at the airport in Cancun was back on after about an hour.






These behemoths are almost land bound airliners. All that’s missing is the flight crew. The first movie is the original Spiderman with Spanish overdubs. Picture’s fine but the whirr of the air conditioning, the mariachi music the driver is playing for himself ( I always like to sit where I can see out the front ) and the hum of the highway make it pretty-well inaudible. I’d never seen the flick so it’s even engrossing under these conditions. Boy, CGI just continues to get better, doesn’t it.




Got to Merida too late and too tired to jump right out and scout about. That would start next day. Some early observations from our third year in Merida:

The kitschy shops for the "touristos" are as jam-packed and colorful as ever.  Funny, I don't remember any Mayan pirates, though!







The place we stay at has a banana and a sour orange tree in the small courtyard just behind our casita. They were planted as waist-high saplings by our hosts a few months before our first stay. Both are now close to 20 feet in height. There is a big bunch of green fruit on the banana tree. Now I understand what Harry Belafonte was singing about. Some grass seed the owners planted to fill patchy spots in the yard has grown almost three inches in six short days. Things grow fast here!




The first day out on the streets made me wonder where the VW’s had gone. Their numbers seemed very sparse. It was while walking to the centre of historical Merida “ Centro “ that evening to find a place for dinner that I realized that they hadn’t been all hauled away to the scrap heap. The bugs came out at night. Their variety and ubiquity has only slightly diminished so far as I can see. There are still lots of beetle rattletraps about. They just seem to hide in the shadows more.




Here's the best one I've seen so far. I only had a momentary break in traffic to snap this pic, otherwise I’d have gotten closer. It’s a goodie, though!

We and our hosts, who also live near Owen Sound,  rented a little econobox and drove to some places of interest outside of Merida itself. The most notable so far has been Mayapan, another Mayan ruins site. This one's not nearly as huge and expansive as those at Uxmal and Chichen-Itza that usually grace the postcards. This area is often referred to as a mini-Chichen-Itza, we learned, as it displays the same type of architecture in the main pyramids.

While it was smaller it was no less entrancing. Its hard not to wander about in the eerie quietness and wonder just what it must have been like when this area was at its zenith and the place was teeming with Mayan life. We were there on a most unbusy day and shared the ruins with a fair number of reptilian occupants only, most of the time.




Anyhow, enough Mexican noodlings for the moment. We”ll be holed up here for another month so there will be plenty more to come.





The tendency to forgo comfort for style is still on display here as well, especially on the weekends downtown among teens and twenty or thirty-somethings. It must be treacherous to try and pick ones way through the rough and sometimes crumbling curbs and walkways of the centuries old inner city with all manner of traffic hurtling by only inches away while atop some of the impossibly high stiletto heels and in circulation sapping fashion denims.

I've just cracked open the one paper and ink piece of reading I brought along and its been most fascinating.  More on that later in the stay.

Ariba! Ariba!  To the cave of riddles we must now go, amigos.

My last one was snow - gone but not forgotten! I can only guess clothes hangers for yours from last time. My mind hasn’t been in riddle mode for a bit. I've not had time yet to build up a new stash of them. How ‘bout this one for this week:

 

 

 

Dug from the earth

 Wheeled around

Dressed up, painted up, fired up

And gobbled up by the gringos 

 

 

 

Adios for now,

 

 

Don