HOW CAN MEXICO ADDRESS ITS STREET DOG PROBLEM?

Smiley, My Favorite Beach Dog

Mexico has many, many street and beach dogs. If you've been to Mexico, you've seen them—animals without a home, often hungry, sometimes unhealthy or hurt, sleeping on dusty pueblo streets. 

Unfortunately, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography, Mexico leads the pack in Latin America for the highest number of street dogs. Of roughly 18 million dogs in Mexico, 70 percent live on the street.

HISTORY

Mexico street dogs are scrappy and street-wise, a catch-all breed that most likely descends from stray and feral dog populations that roam the country's streets and beaches. Often these dogs aren't companion animals but forced to become self sufficient scavengers, canines closely related to dogs that roamed thousands of years ago.

PUERTO MORELOS

We were in Puerto Morelos for years and eventually ran into Smiley, one of the town's beach dogs. He started to hang out on our beach, coming for weeks at a time, and going equally as much. Beach dogs develop an attachment to people for a while, then move on. At times he was there every morning and he'd join me on my beach walks. People thought he was my dog. Nope, he's a beach dog I'd say. 

Beach dogs are uncannily smart and always seem to know where their next meal will come from. Before he made his way down to our beach a kilometer from the square, we'd seen him around town, not unlike his mother, Princess Coconut. Coconut was named by the staff at Johnny Cairo's, a local restaurant, where she hung out. She was a permanent fixture at the front entrance, and they gave her a pink rhinestone collar, thus the name. She'd follow young tourist couples who had doggie bags right out the restaurant door. Smiley had learned his tricks from Coconut. They'd follow the couple for a week, then move on. Maybe it was the best of all worlds. They'd have effusive love and food for a short while, but when things got too permanent, time for a change.

For me, I could always tell when it was time for Smiley to leave. He'd join me under the palapa where I'd read daily, lying on the sand next to me. Then one day he'd be a bit farther away, then the next—mid beach—then finally, at the shoreline. He would turn and give one last wag and trot off. A couple weeks later he'd resurface. No chagrin; he needed his space. And we always welcomed him back with open arms. 

We tried to take him to the vet once—but that didn't work out well. Somehow we wrangled a collar around his neck and nudged him into the back seat of the car. That lasted about two seconds. He pulled out of the collar in a move that would have made Houdini proud, jetted out of the car and into the yard. He waited for us at the gate, expectantly and a little nervous. Of course we obliged, opened the gate, and he bolted out into the sascab road. So much for good intentions.

ISSUES

Why does Mexico have a stray dog problem? The street dog issue—in Mexico and elsewhere—is complicated. Sometimes it comes down to pet owners who bit off more than they could chew, but often it comes down to limited access to spay and neuter programs—the keys to solving animal homelessness in the country. Often too in Mexico, dogs are expected to find their own food. It's a horrible sight to see homeless dogs, but even worse when they're starving.

Luckily there are many organizations and pet rescue associations that aim to spay or neuter dogs or find them a new home. Here's a list of pet rescue organizations in the Riviera Maya. If you live in Mexico and want a dog, consider adopting one from an organization such as those listed below. It's also not hard to re-patriate dogs, and organizations like these can set you up with the right forms and information on getting your new pooch from Point A to Point B.

Sparky on Isla Mujeres (photo Lynda L. Lock)

Author Lynda L. Lock, formerly of Isla Mujeres, adopted Sparky, a spunky little Heinz 57, who was so captivating he worked his way into her Isla Mujeres Mystery series, beginning with a cameo in book number one, Treasure Isla. And it didn't stop there! In the photo above, one can easily see he acclimated to his Life of Riley, waiting in his personal golf cart for the caddy to bring his clubs.

Many Mexican dogs find new homes abroad. This list of pet rescue services and organizations from Cancun down to Chetumal, though far from complete, is a start if you're thinking of taking a little bit of Mexico home with you in the form of a furry, four-legged creature. If you're local and need assistance with health issues or neutering, these organizations can assist or point you in the right direction. If you're not from Quintana Roo, locate a "pet rescue" organization in your area through Facebook. Many of the organizations need assistance in the work they do and if you're on an extended vacation and want to show support, get in touch and offer your services. Your love and kindness can create a whole new world for a stray and add an extra spoonful of sugar to your life as well. Viva Mexico! 

CANCUN

Cancun Animal Rescue and Adoption

Contact through Facebook page.

Riviera Rescue AC (Rescue-Foster-Adopt)

Contact Matteo Saucedo through Facebook page.

HOLBOX

Refugio Animal Holbox

Contact through Facebook page.

ISLA MUJERES

Isla Animals, Isla

Contact through Facebook page.

Clinica Veterinaria de Isla Mujeres AC

Contact through Facebook page.

PUERTO MORELOS

Food Bank for Cats and Dogs Puerto Morelos

Contact Claudia Mendiola through Facebook page.

Puerto Morelos Sterilization Project

Contact Betsy Walker through Facebook page.

Puerto Morelos Cause4Paws

Contact Diane Curtis through Facebook page.

Riviera Rescue AC

Contact Matteo Saucedo through Facebook page.

PLAYA DEL CARMEN

The Snoopi Project-Riviera Maya

Contact through Facebook page.

Coco's Animal Welfare, Playa del Carmen

Contact Coco through Facebook page.

SOS El Arca

Contact through Facebook page.

AKUMAL

Street Dog Strides

Contact through Facebook page.

TULUM

Alma Animal Tulum AC

Contact Alma through Facebook page.

Help Tulum Dogs

Contact through Facebook page.

MAHAHUAL

Costa Maya Beach Dog Rescue, Mahahual

Contact Heather through Facebook page.

CHETUMAL

Pancitas Felices, Chetumal

Contact Karla through Facebook page.

If you enjoyed this post, check out my other works, Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya. It's available on Amazon with tales of expat life and living within 100 miles of four major pyramid sites. Also, check out my website at www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are available on Amazon where you can find my overview of the 2012 Maya calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed—Demystifying the Prophecy.

WHY WRITE ABOUT MEXICO?

Back in the 80s I fell in love with Mexico. When I began traveling to Mexico’s Caribbean coast, first stop was Isla Mujeres, an island just twenty minutes by ferry from Cancun.

In 1983 Cancun hadn’t become the tourist hotspot it is today, and getting there from San Francisco took eighteen hours. My husband and I flew Mexicana Air which was a drama in itself. Though the flight was said to have a lone stop— Mexico City—before we reached our Cancun destination, Guadalajara became a port of call along with another airport we stopped at in the dead of night and never learned the name of.  

With so many starts and stops, we lost time and ended up arriving to Cancun so late we nearly missed the last ferry to our little Mexican island. By sheer luck we reached the dock in time to board the empty boat, enjoying the warm Caribbean breeze as we chugged towards our tropical destination.

This was the beginning of my love affair with Mexico, and years later after we’d moved there from California, I opened a bookshop and began writing travel articles for local newspapers and Mexico websites, eventually writing a travel memoir about my life in a foreign land, Where the Sky is Born. 

After finishing another non-fiction, Maya 2012 Revealed, a journalistic overview of the 2012 calendar phenomenon, I began my research for Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival. I’d lived in Mexico and owned a business there long enough to see the creeping dominance of the cartels and their effect on the daily lives of citizens. I'd kept news clippings and written notes in a journal on various incidents I'd heard about.

Obviously it would have been folly to write non-fiction about the country's overlords. I was well aware of the cartels' swift carriage of justice to any Mexican journalist who dared write about their exploits: 119 assassinated and 30 missing since 2000.  My personal heroes—journalists Anabel Hernández and Lydia Cacho—had both undergone their own dramas by daring to be so bold. Hernández was targeted for writing Narcoland, a scathing exposé of government officials cozying up to the Sinaloa cartel. In a raw display of power to detain her, cartel henchmen dressed as federal agents cordoned off an entire Mexico City block, checking for her door to door. Luckily she was not home. 

Lydia Cacho was not so lucky. After reporting on the sexual peccadilloes of Cancun politicos, she was kidnapped, thrown into the trunk of a car, and driven to Puebla where her attackers planned to stage a kangaroo trial to put her in jail indefinitely. Through luck, friends in Cancun discovered where she was being held and secured her release. Afterwards she went back to reporting at Por Esto in Cancun. When asked about the attack she replied, "I don't scare so easy."

For me, I decided to write cartel fiction that pulled stories straight from Mexico papers. Using current news as prompts for stories is an old ploy. If Dostoyevsky could do it, so could I.

My Mexico notebooks were filled with outlandish, unbelievable tales. Since my love of Mexico goes deep, I wanted to expose cartel corruption and mirror the chaos and destruction they've created. By writing fiction, I felt I could reach a larger audience and make readers aware of the social injustice taking place in my adopted homeland. Thus I began my research for Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival. Four years later it was finished. Tulum Takedown came out in March 2020, book two in the Wheels Up trilogy.

I view the trilogy as historical fiction, an insider's close-up of a disastrous situation. As the quotation by Charles Bowden at the beginning of Tulum Takedown states, "Underneath the cartels lies the disintegration of a nation." 

For more writings about Mexico, the Maya and the Yucatán, check my website at www.jeaninekitchel.com. Subscribe above for my bi-monthly blog posts.

PIRATES OF THE MEXICAN CARIBBEAN — HIGHWAYMEN BY DESIGN

Pirates! Images of swashbuckers with gold teeth, eye patches, and peg legs come to mind -- or Johnny Depp. But in reality, many of the pirates who navigated the waters just off Mexico’s eastern shores from as early as the 1600s were men with unlikely backgrounds for the sport they took on.  A handful were full-fledged gentlemen, most with seafaring backgrounds. Many were sanctioned by queens or governments, and a few ended up with titles. Some were hailed as heroes.

A better description of these romantic buccaneers is privateer.  In an era when slave trading, spices, and territorial expansion sparked global economics, European nations—England, France, Holland and Spain—waged their wars on the high seas.  With Spain’s recent discovery of the New World and its riches, the only unity on the Atlantic was the common goal of sacking all Spanish galleons.

Adventurers by nature, highwaymen by design, the word pirate conjures familiar names from history such as Jean Laffite, Sir Henry Morgan and Sir Francis Drake.  Lesser knowns, however, such as Giovanni de Verrazno and Fermin Mundaca have equally compelling stories.

ISLA MUJERES

While Morgan and Lafitte are said to have walked the shores of Isla Mujeres in Quintana Roo and buried treasure there, Isla’s most notorious resident was Fermin Mundaca, a slave trader who transported African slaves to Antilles, preferring the more ‘respectable’ title of pirate. In 1860 when the British campaigned against slavery, Mundaca took a powder on the white sand beaches of Isla Mujeres. There he rented out his boats to the Yucatán government to capture rebel Maya along the coast who were then sold into slavery to Cuban sugar plantations, an act that hardly endeared him to the locals.

On Isla Mujeres, Mundaca used his wealth to build a large hacienda named Vista Alegre. He filled it with livestock, birds, and exotic gardens, still viewable today. The entrance arch, El Paso de la Triguena (The Brunette), was named for a beautiful girl from the village, Martiniana Gomez Pantoja, with whom the elderly pirate fell in love after seeing her one-time only. He nicknamed her the brunette. But the dark-haired beauty, 37 years his junior, married her childhood sweetheart and Mundaca grew lonely and mad.  He died at age 55 in Merida, still in love with the girl. To be near his lost love, he built a tomb that remains empty and can be found in Isla Mujeres’ colorful, crowded cemetery, one street before North Beach.  Etched on the headstone are the symbols of the pirate—skull and crossbones—with the words he carved as his epitaph, “As you are, I was.  As I am, you will be.”

JEAN LAFITTE

Jean Lafitte, born in either Haiti or St. Malo, France, liberated New Orleans twice: first from high tariffs by supplying stolen goods to customers without a middleman, and then by liberating the city of the British in the U.S. Battle of 1812.  Targeted at first by Andrew Jackson as a bandit and rogue, he was later named a gentleman and a patriot, for without him, one of the war’s most decisive battles against Britain would have been lost. Soon after he was named Territorial Governor of Galveston, (still Mexican soil) but with changing times, he was harassed by stricter U.S. policies that restricted his maritime activities.

As a farewell and parting shot, he torched Galveston and according to legend, sailed into the Caribbean.  Rumor has it he stopped on Isla Mujeres, then moved on to the Gulf of Mexico.  In the Yucatán, in the small pueblo Dzilam de Bravo, not far from Progreso, a CEDAM (Club de Exploraciones y Deportes Acuaticos de Mexico) memorial plaque commemorates him. In the town’s cemetery, CEDAM workers found a weathered tombstone with the epitaph, “Jean Lafitte Re-Exhumed.” Could it really be the grave of Lafitte?

CHINCHORRO REEF

Mexico's Quintana Roo coast is rife with pirate stories. Xcalak (100 miles south of Cancun) was a known haven for pirates. Bacalar narrowly escaped their ruin, and Ascencion Bay was one of the great pirate harbors of the 17^th century.  Wild and isolated, its treacherous mud flats sent countless vessels to their doom, while pirate ships waited in hiding for the passage of Spanish galleons laden with gold, fighting against trade winds on their way to Santiago de Cuba.

In the Museo de la Cultura Maya in Chetumal, Quintana Roo, one exhibit displays how pirates used Banco Chinchorro to their gain. Chinchorro is a deadly circular string of rocks on a low-lying limestone shelf that extends out from the sea. It’s 30 miles long and 20 miles wide, just off the shores of Majahual.

Pirates placed lanterns along the reef, signaling ships this was clear passage. But actually, the lanterns lured them to their doom onto the treacherous rocks. It’s rumored that thousands of ships had their downfall on Chinchorro Reef. A May 2020 archeological expedition near Mahajual brought up a 200-year old sailing ship believed to have fallen prey to pirates.

For more pirate tales, there’s the CEDAM Museum in Puerto Aventuras, north of Tulum.  Check out Museo de la Cultura Maya in Chetumal, and Petit Lafitte, a hotel four kilometers north of Playa del Carmen, to see the white sand beaches that may have attracted one pirate extraordinaire. Find a copy of Pablo Bush Romero’s Under the Waters of Mexico. Venture over to Isla Mujeres, and see the renovated Hacienda Mundaca and stroll through the pirate’s gardens, now made into a small zoo. Walk through the cemetery there or drive to Dzilam de Bravo, Yucatan, to view Lafitte’s commemorative plaque and find the gravestone with his name on it.  Ahoy, matie!  There’s treasure to be found.

ISLA AND ME

     

Paul and Me at No Name Restaurant on Isla Mujeres

Waking at Maria's on Isla Mujeres was paradise personified. Nestled in a low comfortable bed in the corner of the rustic stucco room, I stretched and took in the slightly musty smells that accompanied a Mexico vacation. A thick branch of fuchsia-colored bougainvillea spilled across the screened window, leaving way for a clear view of the Caribbean. I heard waves lapping on the shore. Maybe this was perfection personified. Time to greet the day and find out. I crawled out of bed.

A few hours later Paul and I were hopping out of a taxi onto the main malecon of Isla right across from the No Name restaurant. It was 11 a.m. and the streets were quiet except for a few vendors who had set up their wares, mostly fruit and vegetables. Ivory colored jicama with a bright dash of chili pepper was arranged on one cart. Too early for that. Another vendor sold bunches of small ripe bananas tied with rope. Next to the banana vendor, a faded blue cart displayed cups of mangoes sliced like tropical flowers, gorgeous and edible. The owner, sitting on a stool next to her cart, smiled as she peeled more sticky fruit into an art form all its own. I paused.

     "Mango, por favor?"

     "Cinco pesos."

     "Gracias." I said as I dug the coin from my bolsa and handed it over. "Que bonita dia!" What a lovely day.

     "Si, por supuesto," she answered.  "Where are you from?"

     "San Francisco, California."

     "Aaah, California!" she smiled big. "I know someone from California. I was in a movie. The people in the movie, they were from California."

     Her conversation strained the bounds of my newly acquired adult ed Spanish. Slowly I put her words in comprehensive order. The struggle was worth it. We were talking—in Spanish!  Did she say ciné?  Aka movie?

     "Of course!  Against All Odds!  This was that street, the street Jeff Bridges went up to ask if anyone had seen the woman he was searching for on that small island.  This island! And wait a minute!

     "Paul!  I think this woman is the one from Against All Odds!"

     "Yes, yes," she said, now beaming a huge smile my way.  "Jeff Bridges, movie, me!"

     "You're famous!  Famosa!"

      She started laughing and Paul and I broke into laughter, too.  "It's her," he agreed.  "We're right where they filmed the movie."

     Against All Odds, filmed in three Mexico locations--Isla Mujeres, Tulum and Chichen Itza--had been a catalyst for our Mexican sojourn.  We'd never seen water that color of turquoise, nor pyramids of any kind and the sultry movie with Bridges and Rachel Ward had catapulted us across the border.

     After saying our good byes with a few more exclamations on this mujera's fame, we walked to the plaza and the back down to the malecon.  Today we'd decided to go to the mainland.  We boarded the ferry for Cancun.

     Hours later after lunching at an outdoor cafe and shopping at Mercado 23 for silver and trinkets we ventured into the hotel zone to go to dinner on a splurge.  Someone had recommended a hotel-restaurant on the beach with great food and we thought a day and a dinner in Cancun would be fun.  The restaurant had all the amenities all right.  Beachside, low lights, candles. But where was dinner?  Talk about the slow food movement.  This one had crawled to a stop.  After our second request to the waiter about our dinners, we started to panic, slightly.

     "What time is the last ferry?" I asked Paul.

     "At 10."

     "Uh oh.  I'm beginning to wonder if we'll make it."

     "Let me call the waiter over and ask him to bring the check when he brings our dinner, so we can dash out of here."

     At 9:30 p.m. after gulping a delicious fish dinner, with our margarita high slowly fading into oblivion, we bolted out of the restaurant and into the arms of a waiting taxi driver.

     "Puerto Juarez, the dock!"

     As we sped off I caught sight of our waiter at the door, waving good bye.

     The trip to Puerto Juarez was longer than we thought, much longer.

     "We'll never make the ferry," I groaned, now desperately nervous.

     "You're probably right."

     As we pulled up at the dock, madly throwing pesos at the driver, Paul, first out of the cab, spotted what we didn't want to see.  "Oh, no!  It's already left!"

     "Oh, darn!  No.  No.  No!  Now what?" I cried.

     "We'll have to find a hotel here in Puerto Juarez," Paul said.

     I stomped around the dock's parking lot in a huff.  "God, could they have been any slower at the restaurant?  What are we going to do?  This place is a total dive!"

     "It's hotel time.  We've gotta go look for one.  Now."

     That brought me to my senses.  Forget about the warm breeze, the lapping water, the backside of our departing ferry now far in the distance.  It just sunk in; we had to find a hotel in this hood.  Yuck.  These were the early days, and Puerto Juarez hadn't gone through its beautification process yet.  Hardly.  Its most outstanding feature was the steely facade of a military base on the outskirts of town; nothing looked like a tourist mecca here.  Nothing at all.

     I dragged myself back to the pot-holed street and looked both ways.  About a block farther down the road I spotted a sign for a hotel.  As we approached I could tell from the looks of it this was not the Ritz.  Very unappealing.  Very unappealing, indeed.

     "A room," I choked looking at the hotel clerk. "How much per night?"

     "Thirty pesos."

     Oh great, three dollars.  "Can we see it, please?"

     As the clerk led us down a dilapidated, unlit walkway, around a towering banyan tree to a concrete building with a dented door, I knew that paradise wasn't waiting for me inside.  As he turned the key into an ancient lock and the door creaked open, the familiar tantalizing odor of bug spray wafted across the threshold.

     "We'll take it," Paul gagged, giving me the what can we do look as he turned his face away from the smell.  He was right.  In Puerto Juarez it was pretty much lights out by this time of night.

     We followed the clerk back to the office like dead men walking and shelled out thirty pesos.  On retrieving the key I asked if there was a place nearby to get a cold drink.

     "There's a cantina across the street."

     "How late are they open?" I asked.

     "Til midnight but we close the office here at 11 p.m.  If you stay out later, just ring the bell and I'll come let you in.  After you leave I'll close the gate behind you."

     We pushed open the authoritative gate, hearing the click of the lock behind us as we sauntered outside the hotel walls, about two meters high, with the de rigeure broken bottle top finish on top--definitely not a style choice--and wandered into the town's lone cantina.

     We each ordered a Pacifico.  One was all we could take.  It was nearing 11 and we didn't want to miss another deadline, not two in one day, even though we were on Mexican time.  But the thought of staying in that grungy hotel room with eau de DDT wafting about, well, we just couldn't go back too soon to that before we were sleepy enough to pass out.

     Good as his word, gate shut.  Paul was right behind me.  I turned the iron latch--it wasn't 11 yet--and nothing.  What?  I turned the latch again and pushed.  Nothing!

     "Oh, no.  Locked out.  Now we're locked out!"

     "He said to ring him," Paul, ever in control, responded.  Now he was turning and pushing the latch, too.

     "Where's the bell?  Is that it?  Toca, with the arrow pointing to it?  What a weird way to say ring.  Toca means take.  Take the bell?"

     "Just ring it already," Paul said.  Language class was over.

     "Toca, toca, toca," I said each time I pushed it.  "I don't hear anything.  Have we been gone that long?"

     "Try again."

     I pushed til my index finger went numb.  "Now we have a three dollar hotel room and no way to get into it! What are we going to do?"

     "Let me think a minute.  Over there.  At the end of the wall.  See where there's no broken bottles?

     "Yeah, what about it?" I asked, thinking bad thoughts.

     "I think it's time for a reverse jail break."

     "Don't be ridiculous!  You could never climb over that wall!" I said.  Who did he think he was?
Spiderman?

     "Not me, Juanitia," he smiled at me charmingly.  "Tu."

     "Me?" I choked, shocked.

     "But I'm in a skirt."

     "I promise I won't look."

     "Oh, shut up, " I said, realizing he was right.  That was the only way.  All hands on deck. "Okay."

     In the dim light of a lone street lamp we made our attack at the far end of the hotel wall.  Good thing it was dark out, I noted.  I wouldn't want to be caught dead climbing into this dive.

     Paul bent over and laced his palms together providing me a step up so I could then reach the one spot on the wall without broken glass.  I was just at the point of almost heaving myself over when I heard him gasp.  What the heck?

     "Buenos noches."

     Buenos noches?  Who could he be talking to?  In his conversation mode he'd backed away from his helping me over the wall stance and I was dangling unbecomingly about six feet above ground, with my skirt moving up my backside rapidly, not a fashion choice.

     I twisted to the side, no easy feat, and looked down on a Mexico policia.  Police!

     "What are you doing?" he asked.

     Paul:  "Helping her over the wall.  We're locked out, but we have a key, see?" He held up the church key that would open our room inside the gated, walled compound, from which we were firmly locked out.

     "Why not just ring the bell?"

     "Toca el timbre?" I asked.  He gazed up at me.  Could he see up my skirt?  I wondered.

     "Si, toca el timbre."

     "Locked out."

     "I'll try," the policia said.  Toca, toca, toca.  We waited.  All three of us.  Two by land, one by air.

     "They are asleep," he said matter of factly.  "It is late."

      That it was.  "But," he said with what I am sure must have been a smile on his face, "I'll help you."

     "How?" Paul asked.  "Call them?  Do you have their number?" as he scanned the sign for the name of the hotel. Hotel Fizal?  How in the world did they come up with that?

     "No, no.  We both push her."

     So with my bottom now being gently pushed by Paul and a gendarme, my skirt slowly hiking up in an unladylike manner, I made my way up and over Hotel Fizal's two meter wall.  I started to laugh as I touched dirt on the other side.

     "I'm in!" I yelled, feeling like one of the Dirty Dozen.

     As I started to walk down to the gate and let Paul in, I heard him speaking to the policia.  "Mil gracias, and buenos noches to you, too."

WHY THE MAYA?

Chac Mool at Chichen Itza

I've been totally entranced with the Maya since I started visiting Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula in the 1980s. Living in California made the west coast an easy destination, and I'd traveled extensively from Guadalajara and San Blas to Acapulco and back more times than I can remember, but had never ventured to the Yucatan or Quintana Roo.  But the pyramids had always beckoned, and it wasn't until I met Paul, who later became my husband, that I made the trek cross country to Mexico's east coast.  Well, I fell in love. Totally, unequivocally, hard.  I've never made it back to the west coast since.  There was just something about the Maya, the pyramids, the culture, and the outbackness of the Yucatan that did it for me.

AWESOME VACATIONS

We started out early on just having awesome vacations.  First we traveled to Isla Mujeres in 1983. It was so 'undiscovered', that when we went to a travel agent in San Francisco, she'd never heard of it.  We assured her it existed as a friend told me there were two great islands off the Cancun coast --Cozumel and Isla Mujeres.  She said if I wanted to get a more real feel for Mexico, go to Isla Mujeres, so we did.

We arrived on the last ferry from the mainland, in those days called the people's ferry, and by the time we reached the hotel, El Faro, out near North Beach, they'd given away our reservation.  It took them an hour to locate our room.  We discovered an outdoor bar under a palapa, settled in, tired from the long trip,  and sipped a cool drink while they figured things out. The air was warm, there was a light breeze, the stars were out.  I felt like I'd died and gone to heaven.  I could have just slept under that palapa.  I was falling in love.  With a place, with a country.  Ayyyy caramba!

FALLING FOR ISLA

Our adventure started the next day when we ran into the ferry captain at a little restaurant on the beach we nicknamed The No Name Cafe.  He was moonlighting as a waiter--his aunt owned it, he explained-- and he helped her out in the daytime.  This was our first clue that Mexico was different from where we'd come from.  People led different lives.  Completely different.  Waiter by day, ferry captain by night?  He was friendly and fun, and we said we'd be back.

The Author at the No Name Cafe

Although we liked El Faro, we'd heard about a romantic little place on the beach far out of town called Maria's.  It had only six rooms and a great French restaurant, and we knew it was hard to get reservations--at either place.  We hopped into a cab around noon and breezed on out there. Wow.  What a set-up.  The cabanas were situated down a garden path crowded on either side by bougainvilllas, flor de Maya, and hibiscus. The path itself was made from cement that had been hand stamped with little iguanas, just too cute to describe.  We saw the charming restaurant with zapote deck nestled on top of the cabanas.  It had a palapa roof, enormous jungly plants, white table cloths on the tables, candles and flowers, too.  This was the place!  We were ushered in by a waiter dressed in white; only one other couple was dining.

MARIA'S

He brought us the menu and we ordered French onion soup and little else that I can recall.  The day was hot and we were really there to try and get a reservation for the cabanas.  "Do you have any openings in the hotel?" I asked.

"You have to talk to Maria," the waiter told me.

A few minutes later Maria came out.  She was worldly, in her forties, dark-haired, curvaceous and quick.  She took a liking to us, sat down at our table and asked if we'd like a glass of wine.  "Por supuesto!"

She assured us she had one room, not her best, but if we were willing to take it, the couple who was occupying the best room would be leaving in two days.  A fait accompli!  We had a room at Maria's.

"Why don't you go down to my beach," she instructed, "and look at the large tortugos.  Sea turtles."

At Maria's on Isla Mujeres

SEA TURTLES

Following her instructions, we passed the compact kitchen and an enclosure for her live lobsters with scale nearby, then wandered down another garden path that soon led to the beach and there it was:  white sand, bleached out Adirondack chairs just waiting for someone like me to sit in them and that flat turquoise sea.  A wood stick cage with door wide open sat on the far side of Maria's dock.

"I want to put my feet in the water," I told Paul, as I ambled towards the sea.

Bath tub warm.  My favorite part about the Caribbean.  The water is so warm.  I waded in up to my ankles, stood and just stared, and then I saw him.  A huge sea turtle!  His green mottled body swam towards me with his flippers outspread.  He must have weighed three hundred pounds, and he was right in front of me.

WHAT COULD BE BETTER?

"He always goes in at night," I heard someone say.  Where did he come from?  I turned and recognized the desk clerk who was doubling as a beach sweeper, now standing next to me.  "Into the cage.  She has us let them out each day, but they always go into the cage at night, on their own."

"Interesting," I said.  "You'd think he'd want to be free."

"But we're at Maria's," he said.  "What could be better than this?"