The wind scattering the clouds across the sky. A coconut drink in my hands. My feet in the Atlantic Ocean. The waves lulling us to sleep every night. Life definitely didn’t suck a few weeks ago.
All that happened thanks to the incredible generosity of Red Monk a great musician and a wonderful human who happens to be a History on Fire listener. Since apparently hosting me, my daughter and my lady at his family’s hotel in Tulum, Mexico, wasn’t already kind enough, he also guided us to explore the cenotes and local Maya ruins.
Hanging out with him in Mexico brought back memories. The previous time I was there was 38 years ago. It was the summer of 1985, just a few weeks before a monster earthquake badly rocked Mexico City. My family didn’t exactly swim in money, but somehow my mother saved for long enough to take me with her on a vacation that I still remember to this day. Most people thought she was crazy. The idea of two young women (my mother and her friend Livia were both in their late 20s) traveling by themselves for 28 days in Mexico with an 11-year-old kid (me) didn’t strike anyone as the pinnacle of safety. Also not reassuring was the fact that we were on a shoestring budget. Once the plane tickets were paid, there was little left for anything else, so we’d have to rough it. My mother never particularly cared for other people’s opinions and saw difficulties as a personal challenge, so rough conditions weren’t going to stop her. Plus, she was a firm believer that few things like travel can shape one’s life so, easy or not, we were going to travel.
The first night set the tone. In an effort to save money, she picked a hotel that tourist guides listed as “economical.” ‘Economical’ was a delicate way of putting it. The place was mostly used by sex workers and their clients. In the room next to us, a lady was entertaining three drunk fellas. Cockroaches the size of my middle finger raced across the floor of our room. I mused out loud why other kids’ parents took them for vacations in pretty places in the Swiss Alps, while we started our vacation in a Mexican brothel. I still remember the three of us laying on the beds, wide awake, waiting for dawn so we could bolt out.
In the following days, I went through a learning curve. When the trip began, I’m fairly sure my mother looked at me as a soft kid who was overly pampered by my father. I’d love to say she was wrong, but I may be lying. But each day, I toughened up a little and things that freaked me out on day one no longer bothered me after a while. From Mexico City, we moved south, passing through Merida, Villa Hermosa, Acapulco, Guadalajara, Isla Mujeres, Palenque, Chichen Itza, Uxmal, and a bunch of other places whose names I forgot.
All our travels took place by bus. Air conditioning, of course, was not an option so we’d sweat gallons on a daily basis. To add to the excitement, one of the buses was home to a nest of the largest wasps I had ever seen. After a few hours, one of the wasps landed on my ear. My mom looked on with a mix of horror and curiosity about how I’d react. This was several days into our trip, so my standards had changed. I was so tired, hot and sweaty that I hardly moved. I just reached and crushed the wasp in my hand, miraculously not getting stung in the process. This Conan-the-Barbarian style display made my mother proud.
On another occasion, a bus stopped in the middle of nowhere, for no apparent reason. The driver kept looking at his watch as if he were waiting for something. After a few minutes, an airplane landed in a field to our right, crossed the road we were on and completed the landing to our left. I was sure in the Swiss Alps airplanes didn’t land on regular roads, so I’d have stories to tell my friends… if I survived.
Mexican kindness was on display on a third bus adventure. The driver didn’t see me trying to exit the bus and closed the doors on my arm. There was no padding on the metal so my 11-year-old-self flunked my Conan the Barbarian test and started crying. Two ladies promptly grabbed me, yelled at the bus driver, and took me and my mother to have ice cream to console me. So insanely sweet. I hope those ladies had good lives since then.
The good thing about speaking Italian in a Spanish-speaking country is that Italian and Spanish are barely two separate languages. After a few days, it’s fairly easy to understand what people are saying and make yourself mostly understood. I remember that being an over talkative kid, rather than shutting up, I managed to carry on in Spanish. One of my favorite interactions was with an architect who was adamant about learning how to flirt with ladies in Italian. I don’t know if asking flirting advice to an 11-year-old boy is a solid plan, but I did my best to help him out.
Visiting Maya ruins was one of the highlights of the whole trip. Seeing those giants of stone emerge from the jungle was incredible. Back then, Mexican authorities still believed in Darwinian tests of mental and physical fitness so they allowed people to climb to the top of all the pyramids. The steps were so ridiculously tiny that by the time you reached the top, you could barely see the way down. I remember thinking how it seemed impossible that in trying to climb those invisible steps people didn’t plunge to their deaths on a regular basis. Luckily, I didn’t know they actually did. Enough dead tourists later, the Mexican government would close the top of most pyramids to the public. But that was a few years in the future.
At Palenque, we experienced the magical properties of the place. People had warned my mother not to bring a watch inside the pyramid. Something about how the electromagnetic field made watches go crazy. It sounded like bullshit so my mother ignored the advice. We climbed onto the 7th century Temple of Inscriptions, and made our way to the tomb of the Maya ruler K’inich Janaab’ Pakal—which is pretty amazing for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that visitors these days can no longer share my experience since the tomb is now closed to the public. By the time, we emerged from the pyramid my mother’s watch was behaving erratically. It wasn’t exactly broken. It’d work perfectly… for a while. And then it’d stop for random stretches of time before starting again, and repeating the cycle. It never really went back to functioning the way a watch is supposed to. The meeting with Pakal was more than it could take. That’s what you get when you don’t listen to locals’ warnings.
Nature was incredible. Growing up in Milan, the only non-domestic animals I ever saw were pigeons and sparrows. I considered squirrels highly exotic, wild animals. In light of that I was blown away by Mexico. From seeing alligators emerging from small lakes to spotting a jaguar in the middle of the jungle to almost stepping on highly poisonous snakes, beauty went hand in hand with danger. In a hotel, close to Chichen Itza, I was walking barefoot in their garden and luckily looked down before stepping: in the exact spot I was about to place my foot, a scorpion was fighting a losing battle with a swarm of angry/hungry ants. Minutes later, a rainstorm washed through the area and I saw my very first hummingbird.
One spot we stayed at was smack in the middle of the jungle. There was a restaurant, a few cabins, a lake and nothing but jungle for miles around. I remember one of the waiters telling me how a few hours before his shift he’d take mushrooms, put a snorkeling mask on, dive in the lake and would end up swimming with mermaids and all sorts of other creatures conjured by the mushrooms. Then, when the effects would fade, he’d dress up and go to work.
Speaking of people fond of consuming psychoactive substances, once we got a cab to take us see a nearby waterfall. The guy was… have you ever seen the video for Michael Jackson’s Thriller? It was kind of like that except they were bright red. During the entire drive, he kept waving his hand in front of his eyes, trying to chase away whatever he was seeing that the rest of us in tridimensional reality couldn’t see. Then, he stopped the car in the middle of nowhere, pointed to an opening in the jungle that was no more than a foot wide and told us that was the trail to the waterfalls. As it turns out, he may have been drugged out of his mind, but he was right.
I very much hope it won’t be another 38 years until I visit Mexico again.
P.S. check out the hotel where our friend hosted us, and while you are at it check out his music!
After reading about your journey climbing up the pyramids, my conscious told me I had to share.
Thanks to listening mostly to Chris Ryan’s living abroad and world-traveling stories, some of your podcasts about growing up in Italy and moving to America (been following both of you since waaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy back at the beginning of both your podcasts, October 2012.) 5-6 years later in 2018, I finally grew some balls and decided I would travel around the world. I ended my lease, and then began downsizing, I gave away lots of my belongings to friends and family and sold a lot more. I ended up only making it halfway around the world (that is a whole other story,) now I live in Izmir, Turkey two-thirds of the year as opposed to Tampa, Florida the rest.
There are so many ancient places in Turkey it’s amazing, with Greek, Roman, and several other ancient civilizations' architecture everywhere. The cities are BEAUTIFUL!!! Especially in east Turkey. My favorite is Şanlıurfa aka the City of Prophets, where most travelers stay if they plan on going to my favorite ancient civilization by far, Göbekli Tepe. If you think staying in an Airbnb in America is cool, you have ZERO clue how awesome it is in Turkey, legit 50 to 100-plus-year-old castles where only 4-5 groups of travelers stay in them at once. Not only is staying in ancient castles extremely cool but to top it off waking up to a Turkish breakfast for 2 people is easily enough food for a family of 5, my favorite item being 4-5 tablespoons of chocolate sauce, you weren’t imagining things, you heard correctly chocolate sauce for breakfast. Didn’t I say Turkey was cool? The rooms feel like small houses (2-3 large rooms for each set of travelers) and maybe most importantly you pay with Turkish Lira. One drawback, however, is due to the religious people in Turkey, if you plan on staying in east Turkey, a man and a woman traveling together better be married because most places won’t let you stay at them.
Finally. Back to the original reason I am writing this “comment.” Climbing up the pyramids.
St. Patty’s Day 2019 I started my journey in Chris’s international home city, Barcelona, and then moved on to Madrid. After leaving Madrid it was on to Tangier, Morocco, where I stayed in a hostel, and where I met 3, 19 to 22-year-old boys all from different European countries, 1 from England, and only 2 of them knew each other before Morocco. We walked around the city the first day at the hostel I stayed at. At one point they bought some oranges and we sat down on a little grassy area in the middle of the city to eat them. I had OJ many times before as it is a staple in America and I was born and lived in Florida my whole life. I had no clue how delicious an orange could taste (if you like fruit you need to take a trip to the Mediterranean countries,) it seemed like the most delicious orange I had, had in my life.
The next day we added a couple of young girls to our team of international wandering walkers from even more European countries and went on you guessed it, a walk. At one point we were very close to a body of water, you may have heard of it, the Atlantic Ocean. Right next to a steep in my mind mountain and the young kids decided to walk up (standing straight up like it was a flat surface) the "mountain," well maybe not a mountain to them but definitely to me. I was wearing blue jeans and a long-sleeved red shirt. One of the girls was a little scared and she was semi-crawling up the mountain. But me? I HAD NO CLUE even after being alive for 45 years that I was scared of heights. I was very close to dragging my belly on the ground while crawling up on all fours at a very slow pace. About halfway up the redheaded British kid says, in a very heavy British accent, “Sam you look ah’bit like Spi-erman.” As hilarious as it was I wasn’t laughing as I was still SCARED AS HELL crawling up to where the rest of the kids were waiting for me. They were all watching, not sure if they were worried or just thought it was funny, that this old-fogy scaredy-cat from America was taking this long to crawl up to the rest of them.
The end.
P.S. Professor Bolelli, you recently brought up that crazy ass person that got kicked off Twitter. I wanted to say I am very glad to say with your discount I bought one of his backpacks before he went off the VERY-VERY-VERY DEEP END. I use it all the time, especially when I go back and forth across the pond to Florida and Turkey.
Nice. I was in many of the same places around that time: Isla Mujeres, Merida, Palenque, San Cristobal de las Casas. I don't remember any talkative Italian kids, but it's funny to think we may have crossed paths. Glad you got to go back.