Rating: ★★★★☆
Reviewer: Mark Epstein
Welcome to the Yucatán in the 1980s before adventure was spoiled by fancy hotels, safe drinking water, fine dining, world class transportation and our own personal prosperity. A magical tour of good times punctuated with nausea, fear or nausea and romantic queasiness waited for each of us on the Mexican Riviera.
The highlight of the trip (for me) was the tour of Chichen Itza by way of Ferry and Bus. No one will say that we were not warned about the bus to Chichen Itza but it was my good fortune to be lulled into a false sense of ruggedness by the appearance of a very modern, very clean, very air conditioned bus that made me ask: “What’s all the fuss about…Mexican busses aren’t so bad”. After a day exploring the ruins and a night at what will probably remain the cheesiest “Laser” light show (not lasers just flood lights), we returned to a clean unexceptional hotel where we would spend one night and then return by bus to Playa del Carmen in the morning.
Bright eyed and unsuspecting, a dirty old bus packed with locals, farm animals, chain smoking Italians and a mystery liquid that washed over my sandled feet as the bus lurched forward and back and side to side as if aiming for potholes and playing chicken with the cliff edges along the road. All the while, the heat, the ash/smoke of Italian cigarettes, merged with the smell of human sweat and animals squawking and crying out with each bump.
Finally the bus came to a stop in a small town with a handful of stores where we hoped to find refreshment. As the door swung open, an older women slowly waived her hand across a plate sending dozens (maybe hundreds) of flies into the air simultaneously. “Meat pies” she called out dashing my hope of settling my nausea with a little snack and a cold soda. I looked away as best I could and saw a street vendor hawking fruit drinks. “No,” Ania said “that’s not a good idea - the fruit might make you sick”. So I got a lemon lime soda from a little store and as I was buying it I saw some sealed Toblerone bars. “I would like a Toblerone bar too,” I told the storekeeper, purchased it and stepped away to let others make their purchases before reboarding the “real” Mexican bus — it turns out yesterday’s bus the first class bus that runs just one day a week.
Peeling back the wrapper on the Toblerone — feeling like I made a savvy choice to stick with sealed food — I discovered perhaps a dozen little worms writhing in what appeared to be a natural ritual that might transform them into an entirely different perhaps flying insect. “OK,” I thought, “a bad piece of luck.” This bar must have had it’s seal broken. “Pardon me,” I said to the storekeeper, “this Toblerone has worms.” He looked at the chocolate bar and offered me another. Worms. And another. Worms. Still another. Worms. “Shit, they all have worms.” Then I felt guilty. Here I was making this poor man open Toblerone after Toblerone — rejecting one after another. Now I didn’t even want a damn Toblerone, even if it didn’t have worms in it.
Suddenly, the bus driver signaled that it was time to get back on the real bus — the bus that everyone had warned us about. The day before I was thinking, “man people really must be pretty weak and whiny to complain about this beautiful air conditioned bus. But now we were on the real bus — the one with chickens, chain smoking italians, human sweat and that mystery liquid making its way between my toes.
As the bus pulled into Playa del Carmen, we all scrambled off as if we had been holding our breath waiting to make our way back to the surface. Now, traveling with some people the complaining would have simply made it a ruined day. Traveling with Carlos meant that getting off the bus meant time to debrief on the absurdity of the whole experience. In the afternoon and days that followed — years as it now turns out — the phrase “meat pies” accompanied by a gesture of waving one’s hand low and across an imaginary plate became instant comic magic with seemingly endless opportunities to revisit that magical moment of things actually getting worse when you couldn’t imagine how that might happen. “Toblerone” also entered a lifelong comic lexicon for positive anticipation shattered by unexpected and repeated disappointment. And to a lesser degree even the cheesy light show from the night before became immortalized by the expression spoken as if English was barely your fourth language over a crackling old PA System “:and they were DEE-POP-YOU-LATED”.
Travelling with Carlos meant having fun even— perhaps especially — when things go sideways. Laughing your way through the unexpected setbacks or stupid little inconveniences or misunderstandings is the best possible way to travel. You can’t control what happens to you on a trip (or in life) but you can control how you react it.
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