A Rata, A Cata, A Flata…and Kata!

Dispatch Tulum, May 2009:

It’s a ghost-beach here, post-swine-flu scare. The tourists have mostly cancelled their trips, and we have the place nearly to ourselves. Employees outnumber guests at all the restaurants, hotels and attractions; we went to Hidden Worlds to snorkel in the cenotes, underwater caverns, and we were greeted at the door by the greeter, who greeted us, and explained our options: $25 per person would get us into one cenote. For $40 each they’d throw us a second cenote. Given that we were the only people there, you’d think they’d give us all the cenotes we wanted. The greeter turned us over to the cashier team: one woman took our money, a second woman put it in the register, and a third handed us our change. Then a Welsh woman appeared, the Director of Something, and gave us a general orientation about what to expect on our tour. We were then put on a jungle jeep and driven down a very steep and bumpy dirt road where we were met by Elena, who showed us to our lockers and took us to the head of the path, at the bottom of which Daniel took over and walked us to the cenote entrance and turned us over to our guide, Noah. Counting the driver and the man in the Mayan knickknack shop on the way out, it took ten paid staff to handle our visit. And each time we met someone, we started to bond with them, thinking they would be our guide for the day, only to have them dump us a minute later. No sooner than we got back to the States, I discovered this deal on their website:

We missed the Cenote Special, and we didn’t even get the Souvenir Snorkel. But the caverns were very cool.

 

 

 

Fig. 1

Joaquin at Alamo Rent-a-Car assures us that it’s just bad luck that we got a flat tire about two and a half minutes after renting the car, and he also assures us that despite the fact that we purchased an exorbitant amount of insurance to cover every possible contingency, such that our base rate of $12.50 per day became $55, sadly, none of it covered flat tires. Meanwhile, while I actually do know how to change a tire, the jack I find in the trunk looks only vaguely jack-like and I can’t begin to visualize how it works. Miraculously, we had just picked up a young female hitchhiker named Kata, who happened to be the one person in Tulum that we knew—Shari had met her the previous day at our hotel–and thankfully, she has a cell phone and calls Joaquin for us, who comes directly over and has me literally try to push the car onto the jack, which seems like a bad idea to me—“Poosh, Senor, poosh”– and then as he tries to use a big rock to prop up the jack, (See Fig. 1) he says, “You may not believe me Senor, but I never change a tire my whole life.” I do believe him. So Joaquin gives up and goes to get what Shari calls a “mechanico,” convinced that she can turn any word into Spanish just by adding an “o” at the end. (When we were in Hidden Worlds and our jungle jeep encountered another jeep coming toward us, Shari said to our driver, “Muy traffico,” which means “Very traffic.”) She uses an “a” at the end for feminine words, so flat becomes “flata.”

 

So Kata saved us from the flata, which struck us as oddly serendipitous, given that only the previous night, our first in Tulum, a cata had rescued us from a rata.

Fig. 2

Having lived in the country for many years, we’re generally not all that squeamish about rodents, and even now, living in Richmond, our cats brings us birds, decapitated bunnies and wild chipmunks on a daily basis. But a rat in our hotel room on our first night in Mexico, well…let’s just say I smelled a rat. Thankfully Luna, (Fig. 2) the eponymous cat of the Cabanas La Luna, wandered into our room—we had the door open to enjoy the ocean breezes—and she proceeded to play cat-and-mouse with the rat, with lots of scurrying and squeaking going on in and around our bed as we sat bolt upright, surrounded by mosquito netting, (Fig. 2a) putting our money on Luna.

Fig. 2a

When things got quiet and Luna hopped up on the bed to settle in, we took it as a hopeful sign that she had scared away the rat, and we finally turned the light out and fell asleep…only to be awakened suddenly by a thrashing explosion of activity as the rat scampered over Shari’s head and Luna leaped across her pillow in hot pursuit.

So all in all, it wasn’t really a very restful first night, and we waited until morning to take the crab outside that had crawled up the mosquito netting above our heads. (Fig. 3)

Fig. 3

More to come…