Mexico (part 8, the last)
I'm not going to get to everything, even in two weeks. I won't get to describe in detail how my FitBit orgasmed when I reached 10,000 steps each day, or how many ways we described it. I won't get to the shopping trip where we each bought an item of beautiful clothing (I bought two, actually) to compensate for our original clothing being drowned, boiled, baked, and frozen. I won't get to the amazing musical museum we saw the day before we left. I won't get to a load of other things, either, but I'm not writing about this for three weeks.We went back to the villa to claim our clothes. They were still underwater. Many could now be consider tie-died, thanks to the chlorine. I wasn't attached to any of them, except a t-shirt C brought me from Montreal. I went into the pool and removed all the clothing while C wrung them out. Into the dryer on high.
You'd think this would be enough, but my bedbug paranoia is infinite, so after we got back to the hotel, with the newly-dried clothing still in sealed trash bags, I sent the few items I wanted to keep to the hotel laundry with instructions for hot water/hot dryer, "and it's okay if the colors run." When the clothing came back (same day--unbelievable), I took out my jeans and one pair of socks. Everything else stayed in the knotted trash bag, and when I got home, everything went into the freezer for two days.
If there's a bedbug left anywhere, I salute you, sir or madam. You are truly the best of the best, the GOAT of your kind.
Our last big field trip was to the cenotes, which are basically underground cave pools. The area around Merida has the most extensive series of cenotes in the world. The drive to reach the cenotes we visited took around an hour and fifteen minutes, in which time we went over approximately 7,000 speed bumps. At least.
Speed bumps in Mexico are different than the U.S. They come in multiple sizes, and they're not marked. There's no big "SPEED BUMP" sign right next to it. It becomes a strange game of spot-the-speed-bump, one we played better at some times than others. The hearty Toyota Avanza took it all like a champ, though.
We were driving on roads which were only one lane in each direction for most of the trip, and we went through a few small towns where every single person seemed to be out on a bicycle, a motorcycle, or a tuk-tuk. It was endless, this drive, punctuated (thump) every two hundred yards (thump) by a speed bump (thump).
When we reached Hubiku, we paid our fee and were directed to bicycles. Hmm what? What followed was a multi-mile trip along rocky, chalky terrain. "I went to swim in a pool and wound up in The Amazing Race," I said to C, who was well ahead of me. I'd selected a bike poorly, one far too small (a running theme of this trip). I must have cut quite the figure with my Mr. Bean impersonation as I pedaled.
When we did finally reach the cenotes, though, they were magnificent. I didn't bring my phone, because I wasn't sure if there was any place to put it while we swam, but he Hubiku link above has two pictures from the cenotes we actually swam in. Ancient people believed that these pools were a portal into the underworld, and I can understand why.
There's so much more, but you've suffered enough. We somehow fit all our crap into a duffel bag and two daypacks we'd purchased and headed home.
We'd survived.
Then, two days later, I got an early morning text from C with this picture:
Ah, that's more like it (she's fine now, and I never caught it, somehow, so my unicorn card is intact).
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