Playa del Carmen, Land of Poison and Excess

Playa del Carmen is little more than a tourist trap...a glorified shopping mall where people sell over-priced shit that nobody needs to willfully ignorant tourists who think they're getting a great deal just because they're in Mexico. There's really very little to say about this last destination, but the people we're staying with here are extremely hospitable. Accomodations would cost a fortune here, so it's great we've got these guys to stay with. They're a gay mexican couple with an apartment five blocks from the beach. They love to talk and make sure we're comfortable. Couldn't ask for much more--Spanish practice, a few full meals and a good air mattress, all free of charge.

As for the place itself, its full of frat boys, pasty-white obese beasts with fanny packs and sun hats, and everything can be bought with American dollars for over twice the price of a true Mexican bargain. Money exchange places are everywhere, but the rates are shit and nobody cares. All the restaurants have their "specials" out front, but the deals are terrible...the tourists just can't be bothered to figure out what the real deal is, so they all get robbed blind and they all deserve it.

What happens in Mexico stays in Mexico, bro. I'm taking another tequila shot...this one goes out to Phi Delta Kappa!

Squeezed Dry in Belize or, How I Lost All My Money (And Then Some) On A Tropical Island Paradise

So my last post was back in Guatemala, and a lot has happened since then but I´ve been Internet-less, except for essential Internet use, because I lost all of my money (and then some.)

Basically what happened is this: Remember my bitching that a money transfer was `taking too long` to go through? Well that was for a very large transfer from the account where I NEEDED the money to where I already had LOTS of money. Therefore, the transfer went through and I was in the red in my main account by over a hundred dollars. To make matters worse, there were pending ATM withdrawals that only processed after I was in the red, leading to piles and piles of overdraft fees and ATM fees totaling in the HUNDREDS of dollars.

In other words, I lost hundreds of dollars and was sent tumbling down a financial hole of death, and the only thing that saved me were two loving parents with enough time and money to save their retarded son. They were pretty furious with me, but doubtless not as furious as I was with myself--I´ve never made such an unnecessary, stupid, careless, and DESTRUCTIVE mistake in my entire life. I could have completely screwed myself over, but thanks to my parents (and Hannah for lending me money in the interim,) I was saved from the dumbest mistake I´ve ever made. I now owe my parents hundreds of dollars more than I`d originally budgeted for the entire trip. I was feeling very sorry for myself, but as the old cliche goes, there´s always someone who´s got it worse than you...


Enter Dennis Larsen. We met Dennis at the bus station right after crossing the border from Belize back into Mexico. He `s a 60-year old former Army Ranger and Green Beret with a white moustache, pot belly, kind eyes, and gentle smile. He was in Mexico trying to get to Belize to find his son, who had been missing there for 3 months. Dennis presumes that his son is dead, but the matter is complicated by the fact that his son is an FBI field agent, and is often going on mysterious international trips. Dennis is sure he`s not on a mission, however, because he always calls and lets him know just in case, even if the FBI office won´t say (and they ussually don`t). Dennis has a feeling there`s foul play involved, and if he finds those responsible, he has pledged to kill them with his own two hands...and those hands are trained to kill.

`They won`t even see me coming,` he said.

Green Berets are easily some of the most badass human beings on the planet earth. Granted its been a few years since his army days, but Dennis has the passion of a greiving heart.

Dennis´ troubles don`t stop there, however. His passport and bank card were stolen by a trio of clever theives, so he`s been forced to delay his mission to find his son and shack up with friends in Mexico for a couple weeks until he gets another passport and some money wired in from his daughter. Dennis is divorced, and two years ago lost his entire life savings, or most of it--something to the tune of half a million dollars--in hospital bills after taking a 60-foot freefall off a ladder during a construction job. The only thing that saved his life was a pile of soft construction sand he landed in, but the Doc said he´d never walk again and put in 7 metal pins to hold his bones together. Well, Dennis is walking--the man is a former Green Beret, for christ`s sake--but he is divorced, alone, broke, and on a (probably futile) mission to avenge his FBI operative son`s likely death. Even at home in Florida he has to live on $1300 dollars a month. In Mexico you could make that happen for sure, but in the States? I don`t know how he does it.

Dennis Larsen taught me to stop feeling sorry for myself.

Anyway, Belize is goddamn beautiful and not nearly as pricey as we`d feared, at least not in the off-season. We spent a day in San Ignacio, which is nice enough, and a few days in Caya Caulker, a Belizean island paradise. The island itself is tiny, and full of colorful characters, like The Coconut Man--a coconut/drug dealer who tries to sell you drugs when you tell him you aren`t interested in his coconuts. We went snorkeling with sting rays bigger than my body, and snorkeling over the barrier reef seeing at all the fish through the perfect turquoise carribbean was absolutely beautiful. I only wish we could´ve afforded scuba diving, but maybe next time.

Anyway, we are in Merida, Mexico now, staying with this dude Daniel, and will end at Playa del Carmen, where we can hop over to Cancun quickly for our flights home.

Tickle Me Tikal

Cadet one to Starbase! Notify Vice StarCommisioner Gorn immediately, the Peten sector of Guatemala quadrant is hotter than hyperspace! No cadet could last half a starling in this heat without those Thermocooled Skinsuits Headmaster Trillian promised us. Interplantary politics, bollocks! How is a Star Cadet supposed to learn the ins and outs of interstellar diplomacy on a budget of a quarter sextillion credits per trimester? I´ll link my coordinates to the HoloCube immediately, and hopefully Starfleet Academy Beta can get turned around before reaching this over-heated hellhole.

That being said, Antigua was an awesome city but we had to get moving on. We got to this little island on a lake called Flores, and as mentioned in very clear terms above, it´s hotter here...even hotter, I maintain, than the chemical reaction resulting from high-speed intergalactic travel.

It is the tropics, after all.

From Flores we went to the ruins at Tikal, which were awesome, and got up close and personal with some spider monkeys. I got some good video of one doing mundane monkey-things. The ruins were incredible...hard to imagine what they looked like in their heyday, all populated with badass Mayan jungle-thumpers hauling sacrificial animals through the jungle from temple to temple. Our hostel here in Flores offered us a very cheap room. It´s so cheap because the floor is nothing but dirt and loose rocks. Occasionally a baby chicken wanders in to drop turds and peck at stuff.

The British owner of the hostel assured us there are ¨no mosquitos,¨ because whenever they lay their eggs on the lake fish come and eat them before they can hatch. Being that he was British, he managed to make this logic sound perfectly credible and reasonable. I didn´t give it a second thought until I woke up in bed covered in itchy bites.

It was then I realized the gaping hole in this sly Brit´s story: there have to be mosquitos to lay the eggs on the lake in the first place. Needless to say I felt like a fool; so easily accepting this man´s lie just because of his classy British accent and convincing hand gestures.

I am having money problems. Trying to keep my debit balance low in case my card gets stolen backfired severely because of paypal´s FILTHY LIES about how long transfers take. I have 70 bucks in overdraft fees and a negative balance, so its time for emergency measures (Mom and Dad? Do you read this?) Our next stop is also Belize....the most expensive country we´re visiting on this trip. Poor timing.

A Tainted Final Day in San Pedro

Update on last entry: I saw the hippies smoking a joint on the terrace. The archetype is complete.

Anyway, our last day in San Pedro started pleasantly enough...we rented a double kayak and went out on Lake Atitlan, getting a closer view of the volcanoes and paddling around the blue waters.

After kayaking we got lunch. On our way back to the hotel, we spotted this adorable puppy. It wasn´t just adorable in the way that all puppies are innately cute because they´re puppies...it was the cutest goddamn thing I´ve ever seen in person, and you could tell just by looking at it it had a heart of pure gold, and had nothing but pure LOVE.

This fact makes the rest of this story all-the harder to tell. A little boy, maybe the puppy´s owner, scooped it up in his arms. The puppy, not wanting to be picked up by this particular boy, struggled to escape (it probably had a bad experience with him in the past, but who knows.) So instead of bending over and letting the precious creature fall softly to the ground, he just let it drop.

If he were standing over grass, it probably would´ve been fine, but he happened to be hovering right over the curb of the street. The puppy landed very awkwardly, sort of half on the curb and half on the street, and right away you could tell something awful had happened. Immediately it tried to run away from the boy, but it was limping and stumbling, trying to walk without its front-left leg, maintaining a high-pitched whimper that could´ve broken Adolf Hitler´s heart.

Now, I don´t really blame the boy for dropping the dog, breaking its leg, and altering the course of its life forever (its leg would never properly heal, and would make this dog lame forever anever.) Any little boy could´ve dropped a dog by accident. What deeply disturbed me was the fact that after dropping the dog, and clearly causing it a severe and life-altering leg injury, was that the kid couldn´t have given less of a shit about it. In fact, he continued dancing around impishly, chasing the dog and watching it stumbling and squealing in pain, tossing bread crumbs at it.

He would´ve acted with more regret if he´d spilled his Coca-Cola, and this seemingly sociopathic non-reaction filled me with such hate and rage I wanted to break the little 7 year-old boy´s legs. I do not think this logically makes me a bad person. Guatemalan or not, it seems to me that any normal seven-year old with any semblance of a conscience would have felt absolutely terrible about dropping this impossibly adorable puppy-dog on the hard curb. The boy was obviously forged by the hammer of lucifer and was sent to the surface of the earth to crush and destroy all things adorable, decent and reasonable. That much became clear.

I decided I wanted a beer after witnessing this atrocity, which Hannah and I were helpless to avert but could only comfort the puppy with a head-rub. You could tell it still trusted humans, thank God, just not this bastard-child, and it still had all the same love in its heart. In any case, one little shop didn´t have beer, so we were directed to a ´yellow house´ up the street. On the front stoop a drunk was collapsed, and more impish children were tossing bread crumbs in his hair and giggling while they scurried away. The man was so completely covered in flies he may as well have been a pile of horse shit (in fact, its worth mentioning that we encountered a pile of horse shit on our way to rent kayaks, and there were significantly fewer flies attracted to it than were surrounding the man.) I wouldn´t have been surprised to discover that he was dead.

We stepped over him and into the house. On a bench against the wall were two filthy homeless drunks slunched over themselves. The middle of the room had a wooden counter, another drunk man leaning against it, with a fridge and bed behind it. The drunk at the counter informed us that he ¨knew the owner,¨ and so he started screaming his name for us so we could buy beer. He screamed it six or seven times before the owner, also buck-ass wasted, came shuffling in and asked us what we wanted. As I negotiated with him for my beer, the drunk counter-man reassured us that the drunks in the corner were loco, indicated by a twirling motion of his finger around his temples. It reassured us none. I paid for my beer and we left the piss-stained walls of the yellow house.

For the homeless drunks, the dank place must have been peaceful compared to the outside (just look at the guy collapsed on the stoop, being taunted by children.) It was a safe place to be drunk and awful, a piss-soaked sanctuary where the dregs can be miserable in peace and it almost seemed acceptable to sell the last crust of your soul to liter-sized bottles of Gallo beer.

So in that 10-minute period, we´d witnessed two of the most stereotypically depressing things in existence--puppy abuse and alcoholic hopelessness.

¡GO AMERICA!


On a lighter note, Antigua is a completely awesome little city.

San Pedro La Laguna

We arrived here yesterday morning and checked into our ultra-cheap hotel...there are stunning views of Lake Atitlan, with mountains and volcanoes all around. At dawn the mountains are lined with orange and yellow light.

The hotel, again, goes for about $2.50 per night, and its not even a hostel...no mixed dorms, no shared showers, just private rooms with lakeviews. The terrace outside our room, however, is not private; we share it with the people in the next room up.


Picture: Hills around Lake Atitlan. Our view from the hotel terrace is like this, except panoramic and a bajallion times more impressive. So take this picture and multiply it by a bajallion, and you have an approximation of our hotel view.



I went out onto one of the terrace hammocks to do some reading and enjoy the view, and our hotel neighbors were out doing the same. Our neighbors, as it turns out, are Mondo Euro-Hippies. One of them, a dreadlocked German with colored ties around most of her skinny dreads, was dancing around in a flower skirt twirling these rainbow-colored hippie balls tethered to her hands on long cords. She twirled around, her flower skirt blowing lightly, her eyes closed, humming softly as she did figure-eights with the hippie balls with the lake and mountains in the background. If she had a lit joint between her lips it would have been the perfect scene.

Now, I think the essential difference between Euro hippies and US hippies is the fact that they spend those precious, valuable Euros instead of weak, pathetic US dollars. At $2.50 a night, that comes to something like 1.7 Euros, according to a conversion website I found. At that rate, the hippies could literally live at this hotel, sustaining solely on the sale of handmade hippie-crafts, light drug dealing, and panhandled money from tourists impressed and/or entertained by hippie street drumming. Pretty good deal.

Hot Springs/San Pedro.

Tomorrow we bus it to San Pedro. We booked a hostel which apparently has stunning views of Lake Atitlan from some of the rooms; hopefully we get a room with a view.

We went to the volcanic hot springs today outside Xela, they were awesome...and hot. As we approached in the van, you could smell the sulfur from the volcanoes and couldn´t tell the clouds from the volcanic steam. When you got real close to the volcanic rocks where the heat comes from, the temperature becomes unbearable. If you were patient I bet you could cook an egg by those rocks.

The hostel we found is about three bucks a night for a private room. SICK! From there wé´ll do a lake Atitlan tour, and then go to Antigua, Guatemala.

Xela

Picture: Xela´s central plaza. Xela is short for ¨Quetzaltenango,¨ which is the city´s full name, but is actually a shortened version of the original Mayan word for the area.





When we first arrived here in Xela (Shee-la), Guatemala, it looked like there was very little to do in the city itself, a first impression that was confirmed by Hannah´s ¨Central America on a Shoestring¨ Lonely Planet book. The town itself is very pretty, though, with narrow cobble streets and low tin-roof buildings with a pretty central plaza, all completely surrounded by a beautiful panorama of green hills and volcanoes. The city is a popular launching point for many excursions to hot volcanic springs and volcano-hiking. We´re going to the hot springs tomorrow, as well as a market that has some of the most freakishly massive vegetables in Central America. The minerals in the water from the surrounding volcanoes account for the massive produce, bringing forth a bounty of nutrient-rich, radioactive freak plants that turn you into a superhero with just a few small bites--carrots as big as the length of my forearm, for example.










Picture 2: A market stand in Xela, though not the one with the volcanic freak-veggies. Couldn´t find a picture of them on the ´net, but I´ll return with my own photos of them.




Yesterday we stayed in a hostel that offered a massive free breakfast, and tonight/tomorrow night we´re staying in Oscar´s house, someone else we met through Couchsurfing.com. Last night we went out to a vegetarian feast with him, his friend Eddy, and some of Eddy´s students from the Spanish school that he teaches at here. Apparently this town is very popular for Spanish students; there are schools everywhere. We were all talking about where we´re from, and Oscar was astonished and appalled when I told him that New York City is not the capital of New York, but Albany, a place he´s unsurprisingly never heard of.

Tonight, like we did for Ronny, we´re cooking Oscar and Eddy dinner as a token of our gratitude for Oscar´s offering a free bed and bathroom (with hot water this time, unlike at Ronny´s place).

Couchsurfing has given me plenty of good Spanish practice, not to mention free lodging and local perspectives on these cities. Next Hannah and I are heading to San Pedro, a town by lake Atitlan where things should be cheaper--we were very dismayed to find that Guatemala seems to be more expensive than Mexico, not less. Other than that it´s great here...so far so good, Guatemala.