It starts raining the morning after we arrive and keeps raining. The air smells of nothing. It's been washed clean. We ask to borrow an umbrella at the front desk for the walk to breakfast. They've got one, but it's rusted and has one rib broken, which dangles in little ellipses and puts ocular membranes in pretty obvious peril.
I learn quickly that a properly constructed thatched roof, upon which they rely almost exclusively here (including in the bathroom of our cabana), can be remarkably free from leaks. I've always thought they were just a way of pandering to the romantic notions of tourists, but I abandon that perspective entirely after a day or so of trotting from one to another, dodging drip lines that leave the sand saturated and wash it away to expose the limestone that underlies the whole peninsula.
In the restaurant associated with Cabanas Tulum there's bossa nova and downtempo French music with accordions and they have tables right on the beach. The surf is startlingly big for the Caribbean. It's choppy windswell and isn't beautiful to a surfer, but I rent a paddleboard and go out to practice my paddling and catch a few waves. The waves are bigger than they look from the beach, but still messy. Our cabana faces east, so the sun sets behind the beach, projecting a yellow light onto the waves and making the foam on the surf beer-colored.
Coffee and tea (respectively) are the only things we consume containing water of unknown provenance, silently hoping that some combination of heat, acidity and antioxidants will mitigate the risks of impure water. In the morning, maintenance staff is out with a good ladder checking the rope-and-board swing set on the beach, which is used exclusively by adults for sitting. The two men re-tie one rope and give the top pole a bounce to check its ability to support weight.
Every vacation has it's break-even point. That moment when you expressly or tacitly realize that "if I was dragged home right now, it'd be ok." Ours never quite comes. There's just too much rain. Days pass without the sun becoming any more than a dim bulb behind a linen sky.
The beach sand is fine like flour, so fine you expect it to become muddy or clumpy when wet, but it doesn't. The water is clear and a million colors of blue, like an advertisement for the latest iPad display. It's still Mexico, though. Each day a little garbage washes up.
This peninsula sits on top of the Chicxulub crater, which is the remnant of the six-mile-wide rock that collided with our planet and wrote the last chapter of the dinosaur saga in strikingly unequivocal language. Extinction-level events are the sort of thing I keep track of and, shuffling around under the thin veneer of tangled jungle canopy, it's hard not to feel a little imperiled from time to time, merely by association.
There are effectively three Tulums. One is an archaeological site, six hundred years and more old. This one is pretty well fixed in time. Another is a township. It's a real place, indifferent and unknowable to the tourist and containing 18,233 people as of 2010. Then there is what people like Jaime and I are supposed to think of when we say or hear Tulum. It is a stretch of beach with a single road lined on either side by single-story boutique hotels or cabanas. It is popularly said to generate its own electricity (and you will hear and see any number of generators during your time there). It is for people who are privileged but don't want to vacation in the way they thought of privileged people of their parents' generation vacationing.
In Tulum there really are places with taglines like "Planetary Soul Food and Chai House." The following is a sampling of the means of doing yoga available here: on a paddleboard, smeared in mud and honey, acro (as in acrobatic - this is done on a tight rope), on the beach (natch), nude (there's a naturalist resort in town called Por Que No?). The beach is top-optional for women. Nearly everyone here looks preternaturally healthy and exceptional by all sorts of metrics, but mostly body mass index, height and resting heart rate.
In Tulum you will find yourself in a restaurant called Posada Margherita. At the bar, if you're reasonably good looking and dressed appropriately, some guy will introduce himself to you, announce he's from LA and that he is a talent agent who "represents actors," which is hard to believe because he looks a lot younger than you and like he has a low-stress lifestyle. Maybe he just has better prescriptions. He'll introduce his girlfriend who's wearing a romper and has expensive-looking hair.
"Why Tulum?" he'll ask.
"Why not?"
He'll tell you about how The XX played a show there last week. How he "was there."
You are not in the Yucatan. You're in Brooklyn. You're in Coachella. Don't order a Mexican beer. Order a cocktail or whatever you would order at your favorite bar at home. It's $14, but it's worth it, because you won't find anything like it in the rest of Quintana Roo and - let's face it - margaritas and tequila shots are for the fat guys in cargo shorts and their wives with acrylic nails and bedazzled tank tops up in Playa del Carmen. Your cocktail is 4 ounces of Talisker Scotch, with vermouth and bitters. This is the way to approach this town. Don't project your expectations of Mexico onto it. Treat it as you would any place you're accustomed to hanging out. The word "authentic" has no place here, unless you're describing the spiritual experience you had drinking a detox smoothie at your eco-chic hotel.
I'm sitting on the deck reading Harpers and the rain has briefly stopped. A wedding is starting on the beach next door and I wander down with a glass of good tequila plata and stand in the surf letting it cleanse the blisters on my feet from dancing at my reception and rubbing on the neoprene deck mat of the paddleboard. I watch the processional. I go back up to the deck and finish reading an article about Musahars eating rats in India. I finish the story and start another and I can hear the recessional.
The dirty little secret of the physical sciences is that our universe is almost certainly a deterministic one. All events are set in advance. Moreover, any neurologist worth his MRI machine will tell you that free will is almost certainly an illusion. The mind is just another bit of the cosmological clockwork set in motion 14 billion... You get the point. There's no room in the machine for the fascism of a God, the decisions of man or even the rolling of dice. And how this relates to a vacation in the rain is that it must be embraced as inevitable. Pull out one event and one's life warps into something unrecognizable. There's no meeting, no moments of truth and no wedding. We had to be here and it had to be at this time and in this weather. So there's no place for regret or bitterness. One must embrace the uncertainty. And if you can't, you might want to consider the sunrise shiatsu-yoga session, or at least try the $14 cocktail.
I learn quickly that a properly constructed thatched roof, upon which they rely almost exclusively here (including in the bathroom of our cabana), can be remarkably free from leaks. I've always thought they were just a way of pandering to the romantic notions of tourists, but I abandon that perspective entirely after a day or so of trotting from one to another, dodging drip lines that leave the sand saturated and wash it away to expose the limestone that underlies the whole peninsula.
In the restaurant associated with Cabanas Tulum there's bossa nova and downtempo French music with accordions and they have tables right on the beach. The surf is startlingly big for the Caribbean. It's choppy windswell and isn't beautiful to a surfer, but I rent a paddleboard and go out to practice my paddling and catch a few waves. The waves are bigger than they look from the beach, but still messy. Our cabana faces east, so the sun sets behind the beach, projecting a yellow light onto the waves and making the foam on the surf beer-colored.
Coffee and tea (respectively) are the only things we consume containing water of unknown provenance, silently hoping that some combination of heat, acidity and antioxidants will mitigate the risks of impure water. In the morning, maintenance staff is out with a good ladder checking the rope-and-board swing set on the beach, which is used exclusively by adults for sitting. The two men re-tie one rope and give the top pole a bounce to check its ability to support weight.
Every vacation has it's break-even point. That moment when you expressly or tacitly realize that "if I was dragged home right now, it'd be ok." Ours never quite comes. There's just too much rain. Days pass without the sun becoming any more than a dim bulb behind a linen sky.
The beach sand is fine like flour, so fine you expect it to become muddy or clumpy when wet, but it doesn't. The water is clear and a million colors of blue, like an advertisement for the latest iPad display. It's still Mexico, though. Each day a little garbage washes up.
This peninsula sits on top of the Chicxulub crater, which is the remnant of the six-mile-wide rock that collided with our planet and wrote the last chapter of the dinosaur saga in strikingly unequivocal language. Extinction-level events are the sort of thing I keep track of and, shuffling around under the thin veneer of tangled jungle canopy, it's hard not to feel a little imperiled from time to time, merely by association.
There are effectively three Tulums. One is an archaeological site, six hundred years and more old. This one is pretty well fixed in time. Another is a township. It's a real place, indifferent and unknowable to the tourist and containing 18,233 people as of 2010. Then there is what people like Jaime and I are supposed to think of when we say or hear Tulum. It is a stretch of beach with a single road lined on either side by single-story boutique hotels or cabanas. It is popularly said to generate its own electricity (and you will hear and see any number of generators during your time there). It is for people who are privileged but don't want to vacation in the way they thought of privileged people of their parents' generation vacationing.
In Tulum there really are places with taglines like "Planetary Soul Food and Chai House." The following is a sampling of the means of doing yoga available here: on a paddleboard, smeared in mud and honey, acro (as in acrobatic - this is done on a tight rope), on the beach (natch), nude (there's a naturalist resort in town called Por Que No?). The beach is top-optional for women. Nearly everyone here looks preternaturally healthy and exceptional by all sorts of metrics, but mostly body mass index, height and resting heart rate.
In Tulum you will find yourself in a restaurant called Posada Margherita. At the bar, if you're reasonably good looking and dressed appropriately, some guy will introduce himself to you, announce he's from LA and that he is a talent agent who "represents actors," which is hard to believe because he looks a lot younger than you and like he has a low-stress lifestyle. Maybe he just has better prescriptions. He'll introduce his girlfriend who's wearing a romper and has expensive-looking hair.
"Why Tulum?" he'll ask.
"Why not?"
He'll tell you about how The XX played a show there last week. How he "was there."
You are not in the Yucatan. You're in Brooklyn. You're in Coachella. Don't order a Mexican beer. Order a cocktail or whatever you would order at your favorite bar at home. It's $14, but it's worth it, because you won't find anything like it in the rest of Quintana Roo and - let's face it - margaritas and tequila shots are for the fat guys in cargo shorts and their wives with acrylic nails and bedazzled tank tops up in Playa del Carmen. Your cocktail is 4 ounces of Talisker Scotch, with vermouth and bitters. This is the way to approach this town. Don't project your expectations of Mexico onto it. Treat it as you would any place you're accustomed to hanging out. The word "authentic" has no place here, unless you're describing the spiritual experience you had drinking a detox smoothie at your eco-chic hotel.
I'm sitting on the deck reading Harpers and the rain has briefly stopped. A wedding is starting on the beach next door and I wander down with a glass of good tequila plata and stand in the surf letting it cleanse the blisters on my feet from dancing at my reception and rubbing on the neoprene deck mat of the paddleboard. I watch the processional. I go back up to the deck and finish reading an article about Musahars eating rats in India. I finish the story and start another and I can hear the recessional.
The dirty little secret of the physical sciences is that our universe is almost certainly a deterministic one. All events are set in advance. Moreover, any neurologist worth his MRI machine will tell you that free will is almost certainly an illusion. The mind is just another bit of the cosmological clockwork set in motion 14 billion... You get the point. There's no room in the machine for the fascism of a God, the decisions of man or even the rolling of dice. And how this relates to a vacation in the rain is that it must be embraced as inevitable. Pull out one event and one's life warps into something unrecognizable. There's no meeting, no moments of truth and no wedding. We had to be here and it had to be at this time and in this weather. So there's no place for regret or bitterness. One must embrace the uncertainty. And if you can't, you might want to consider the sunrise shiatsu-yoga session, or at least try the $14 cocktail.
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1 comment:
I can see it all, not just because I have been there, but because of your artful drawing of the place.
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