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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   the ride to Tulum
Friday, February 17 2017

location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY, USA

We'd gone to bed a little on the early side so that what happened first thing this morning would be less unpleasant. The alarm went off sometime before 4:00am and we rousted ourselves from the comfort of our bed. I fed the cats and built up a fire while Gretchen loaded things into the car. We always travel light, but one never wants to forget anything when traveling internationally.
Gretchen had somewhow arranged for our Mexican adventure to begin at Stewart, the airport in Newburgh. We'd have to make a connection in Philadelphia, but I will gladly make multiple connections if it means flying out of an airport only 30 miles away, particularly one as pleasant as Stewart Field. I've mentioned this before I'm sure, but long-term parking at Stewart is only a couple hundred feet from the entrance to the airport. It's so close that we could leave our jackets in the car and walk through the wintery parking lot before a chill had much of a chance to set in. It definitely was winter that we were leaving behind, with temperatures in the low 20s and a bit of a wind blowing.
A guy from Port Authority was accosting passengers and having them fill out surveys, and since Gretchen was in the bathroom and I had nothing else to do, I filled the damn thing out. The only recommendation I had for Stewart was that it have more vegan food options available. It seemed like a reasonable enough request.
I looked up at some point and saw Ken, one of the two seed library guys. He would be flying to Philadelphia too as part of a wide-ranging seed-related trip that would take him to California and back. So we ended up traveling with him. Had Ken not showed up, I'm sure Gretchen would've just a read a book or something. But now she was talking with Ken about all sorts of things, including recent Trumpian outrages and possible things she could do for the seed library given her current state of underemployment.
The plan of leaving our jackets back in the car had seemed like a good one initially. But then when it came time to board the plane it all came back to bite us. Our Philadelphia-bound bird was little two-engine prop plane, and there was no jet bridge. We had to walk across the tarmac and board the plane via a stairway. This wouldn't've been a problem, but there was some hold up inside the plane, causing us to get caught waiting in queue out in the winter wonderland. Gretchen borrowed a hoodie from Ken, but it really wasn't enough. There were also a couple babies stuck with their parents in the queue. The parents wrapped them up and held them close, though nobody seemed to be freaking out too much, suggesting the parents had not chosen the helicopter path.
Gretchen and I regard babies (and fat people) with dread as we board planes. I'd even joked with Gretchen about how funny and unfortunate (and absurd) it would be if I somehow found myself seated between the twin babies that would be on this flight. But then it sort of turned out that I was. One of those babies was seated in a lap directly across the aisle from me and the other was seated in a lap directly in front of me. Fortunately, these babies were the best-behaved babies I've ever seen on a plane. They interacted quietly and playfully with their respective adults, and the worst thing they ever did was burst into giggles. Actually, I think one also took a massive stinky dump in her diaper, but that was reasonable. She was a little baby.
Before our plane took off, I could heard Gretchen and Ken talking behind me, and their conversation kept distracting me from the thing I was trying to read. I've always found other people's conversations annoying on airplanes, and this was no different. Fortunately, once our plane started moving, the only real sound in the cabin was the roar of those two propellers.
Our flight attendant was a warm white woman in her fifties. She came around to each of us individually to help us with the connections we would be making in Philadelphia (something I've never experienced on other puddle jumper flights). When she heard I'd be making a connection to Cancún, she joked that we weren't heading that way. But then she asked if she could come along. I later overheard her talking to some people in front of the plane. She'd originally had some other job and then tried to retire, but it hadn't worked out. So here she was, in another career as an airline attendant.
Evidently the security we'd gone through in Stewart was sufficient to get us on an internationally-bound airplane. The flight to Cancún was on a big jet liner with two aisles and a 2-4-2 arrangement of seats. We weren't given our seats until we went to the gate, and fortunately we were given a pair near a window. Interestingly, though this was a Mexico-bound flight, nearly everyone on the plane was clearly an Anglo-American. Not only that, a lot of them seemed like the kind of douchebags that give Americans a bad name. A lot of them appeared to be of college age, suggesting they might be on some sort of high-end version of a Miami Beach spring break.
I was too sleepy to focus on much of anything for most of the flight. As we passed over the American south, I noticed a fair number of fires burning, sending smoke billowing up and merging with the haze that makes looking down from 40,000 feet a little like gazing into a pond. These fires were usually less than an acre in size, but they were scattered everywhere below, with always about four or five within view. Down in Florida (which I haven't often seen from above and never from the ground), I saw a great many circular lakes which I thought to be collapsed sinkholes. Near the southwest tip of Florida, some sort of large plantation (sugar cane?) had the severe geometry and tiny details of a computer memory chip. From there, our plane turned west and I could clearly see all of the Florida Keys.
Using my laptop (Hyrax), I watched a fair amount of The Galapagos Affair, a documentary entitled about European primitivists who homesteaded in the Galapagos beginning in the 1930s. Gretchen's parents had recommended it before last year's Galapagos trip, but I'd never gotten around to watching it. It was interesting, but I was so tired that I fell asleep somewhere in the middle of it. It's important to note that this was just from tiredness; I'd taken no ambien and drunk no alcohol.
For some reason our plane zigged and zagged all along the eastern Gulf of Mexico on the way to Cancún, narrowly avoiding Cuban airspace. When the Yucatán came into view, it did so all in an instant, with the massive grid of Cancún stretched out below us. Our plane continued westward, flying around a massive tract of mostly-unbroken jungle northwest of Cancún (this was, I would later learn, the Area de Protección de Flora y Fauna Yum Balam). As we descended towards the Cancún airport, I could still see across the sea to a strip of land on the northeastern horizon: Cuba.
One zigs and zags between ropes for awhile before making it to a Mexican immigration officer. There's a rule that one isn't to use electronic devices in this line, so the scene of all these young people standing around without looking at devices felt anachronistic. One teenager, though, couldn't help himself and could be seen typing with his thumbs. I hope he spent his Mexican vacation in a Turkish prison.
In the old days, we'd get out of some foreign airport and then try to figure out what to do next on our own. Gretchen would've done the homework, though inevitably something would go wrong, and we'd have to improvise. In recent times, Gretchen has tried to leave less to chance by hiring various services. For today, for example, she'd contracted with Local Expert (a division of Expedia.com) to shuttle us from the Cancún airport to downtown Tulum, today's destination. Somebody was supposed to be waiting for us with our name on a placard (which has become something of a unicorn fantasy for Gretchen), but of course there was no such person. Eventually we found someone from Local Expert who was able to hand us off to someone else, and then there we were, waiting with no proper place to sit for a south-bound shuttle to arrive. It was looking like our string of vaguely-unpleasant airport arrivals wasn't going to be broken today. Our phones didn't work and there wasn't much to do except look at the birds. A semi-tame female grackle strode up while a few drops rained down on both of us from a passing cloud.
At some point Gretchen entertained the idea of just hiking out to the main drag and catching a south-bound colectivo (a van that affordably transports locals), but the walk seemed like a long one and it wasn't clear she'd be refunded for the money she'd already paid Local Expert. So we stayed and grumbled about the situation and how poorly this service had been organized.
Others American waiting for their shuttles seemed a bit more cheerful, perhaps because a good number of them had already started drinking. At various places on the way out of the airport vendors had been selling cheap Mexican beers (Coronas, Modelos, and Tecate) and grossly inflated prices, and Americans eager to get a jump start on their vacation had been giving them brisk business. An older couple nearby looked particularly absurd drinking directly from their respective beer bottles, each at least 24 ounces in size. That's a behavior one normally stops doing in ones 20s.
Finally we were in our air-conditioned shuttle waiting to get going. Things were looking up. But then seven more people were crowded in with us (this included somebody's kid). Most of the newcomers had beers in their hands and they already seemed drunk and boisterous. Speaking as someone who likes to drink, I have to say that it is never pleasant to be in the company of drunk people while sober. And I'm speaking of interesting drunk people. These people, however, were conventional American dullards, the kind who'd reflexively voted for Donald Trump just because they'd heard he would make America great again (and who doesn't want that?). The worst of this bunch sat up in the front seat near the long-suffering driver. He kept beseeching the driver (in English, of course) to go as fast as possible over bumps (topes) so we'd "catch air." The drunk guy's wife kept trying to reign her husband in, but every time the driver slowed for the bumps, he'd start up again.
Out shuttle dropped off our first couple a little south of the airport at a super fancy resort (at least in the view of the drunks in the shuttle). Our disgorged passengers were greeted by short brown women bearing glasses of champagne, giving the whole thing an off-putting colonial vibe.
After the drunk guy exhausted his beers, he switched his conversational focus from catching air to procuring more alcohol. He even asked Gretchen and me if it was okay if we "stopped for cocktails." (We didn't say anything in reply.) The drunk guy kept saying we should turn into PEMEX station, but the driver kept driving.
Eventually our driver took us through the gate of Playacar, a resort in Playa Del Carmen. After we'd passed through several security checkpoints, the place took on the appearance of an extreme version of perhaps a foreigner's view of America, with lots of retail establishments offering familiar American brands crammed one against the other. There was even an escalator lifting people from the sidewalk into a realistic airconditioned simulation of a generic American shopportunity. The place so thoroughly catered to Americans not really wanting a Mexican experience that I had the feeling there was a Taco Bell in there somewhere. Somewhere in this retail hellscape was the resort's drop-off point. Once the drunk guy and the others were safely disgorged, the driver let out an embarrassed sigh and apologized. Gretchen, of course, felt the need to apologize too. For better or for worse, those loud & ugly Americans had been her countrymen.
The drive to Tulum took at least another 45 minutes. By the time our driver let us off at Hotel Sofia, we'd been in the shuttle for about three hours.
I should mention that the soundtrack for most of the ride (at least the part when we were riding with the drung guy) was various American pop hits from the 1980s remixed over a dance beat. One such tune was a reworking of "Eye of the Tiger" at a slightly faster-than-expected tempo. There was also an airing of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," though that sounded like the original.

Hotel Sofia was where Gretchen had stayed last year when she'd spent a week in Tulum learning Spanish. It's a beautiful little hotel with its own courtyard, cheerful freshly-painted colors, plants, and even a tiny pool that (as far as she knew) only Gretchen had ever used. Our room came complete with WiFi and a big screen connected to something, though we never tried it out.
Food options in Tulum proper aren't, as Gretchen indicated, all that, but after all those hours in the plane and the shuttle, we needed to eat. So we set off towards Chetumal-Cancun, the main drag. A short way across that, we came to La Hoja Verde, which Gretchen had categorized as "alright." Most of the diners there were American, and service was slow (which later proved to be characteristic of Mexico, not this restaurant). The food proved greasy and bland, but if one ordered hot sauce (as I did), it could be made reasonable. For a drink, I ordered a maragarita. It was strong. Our takeaway summary of La Hoja Verde was "where the food is edible and the drinks are strong."
After dinner, we walked up and down Chetumal-Cancún. Eventually we ducked into a shoe store so I could find more tropically-appropriate footware than my Keens. For the peso equivalent of two American dollars, I bought a pair of flipflops. Initially they seemed comfortable, but after a few blocks I realized the little vertical rubber poles that rise between the big toes and the next toes over had rough little ridges on them that would surely cut incisions in my toes if I walked very far with them the way they were. So the moment we got back to our hotel, I unwrapped masking tape from my stack of antacids and wrapped it around those rough little inter-toe poles. The antacids now had to go somewhere, so I put them in the bag the flip flops had been in in the shoe store.


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