hurricane season
on leaving the country and loving my fate
Yesterday morning I woke up to condensation on the outside of my windows, the jungle that stretches to the horizon pressing in at the dirt tracks on the edge of Tulum. I walked two blocks for coffee, mate, cigarette, discovered a reformer pilates studio in my condo and lay in the 32°C sunshine next to the rooftop pool reading Blood Meridian. Everyone told me not to come to Quintana Roo during hurricane season and I ignored them out of blind trust in providence/fate—and I was right to do so. I’m paying £21 a night. The hurricanes rarely make landfall and only brush the coast, leaving behind a gentle breeze and some flooding (people seem to take this in their stride) before battering Florida and the Carolinas. I have the magical sensation of having discovered a secret to life that no one else knows.
I got to Mexico two and a half weeks ago, flying to Cancún and then taking a bus to Playa del Carmen. I’d booked an AirBnB close to the beach with a rooftop pool and gym (again, just over £20 a night) to give myself time to settle in and learn a bit of Spanish. Two days in, a car of British diplomats showed up and said that Helene was about to hit and that they had a spare bed in Mérida, which is on the other side of the Yucatán peninsula and wasn’t in the hurricane’s path. I’d been unaware of this, but the rain seemed heavy and the wind was strong enough that their train (the much-opposed Tren Maya which cuts through the jungle) was cancelled, so I threw some clothes in a bag and went with them.
A note on buses in this part of Mexico: the main company, ADO, runs three types of buses. The standard buses are comfortable enough, with reclining seats, a bathroom and slightly annoying TV screens playing Spanish-dubbed films (so far I’ve seen Northern Ireland-set Nowhere Special, with a terminally ill James Norton, twice, and the Keira Knightly Anna Karenina, which in Spanish makes Tolstoy seem like a telenovela.) The bus we got to Mérida was ADO Platino, the best class, with very plush armchair-like seats and personal TVs, two bathrooms, and a row of single seats which is ideal if you’re by yourself. This is a very pleasant way to travel. The bus I got to Mexico City (read on) was the normal sort and twenty-five hours long. I would strongly advise against doing this.
In Mérida, we played cards on the terrace and watched lightning fill the whole sky. There was a cactus about twenty foot tall in the garden and geckos stuck to the ceiling sheltering from the storm and tremendous peals of thunder and a pool lit with neon, where I floated and saw flashes through my eyelids. It had been thirty-three degrees all day, dropping to the high twenties at night, and away from the sea it felt even hotter. We went for dinner and the diplomats ordered guacamole con insect, which arrived crusted with giant crickets (the kitchen apologised for having run out of ants; I didn’t eat the bugs.) They knew each other from working in Cairo together and had an old-fashioned boyishness about them, explorer mentality, telling stories about running out of petrol in the desert coasting down mountains. They said that everyone in the Foreign Office hates Lord Miles because they keep having to bail him out when he gets kidnapped by the Taliban.
In the morning, I brewed a pot of coffee that tasted like chocolate and we set off towards Chichén Itzá. Cities end suddenly here, giving way to dense rainforest and vultures circling overhead and occasional roadside stalls—made of sticks and covered with tarpaulin—selling refrescos and coconut milk. One of the diplomats, the one based in Mexico, told me that you could get a driver’s license here without taking a test. I mentioned that I’d booked a bus to Mexico City and he asked me the route and said I’d probably be ok because the bus hijackings happen in the west of the country, Chiapas and Oaxaca, where the cartels ferry people and drugs towards the US border. ‘They sometimes board buses and tell everyone to empty their wallets’, he said casually, ‘and if they’re foreign they might kidnap you.’