Who Picked This Place?: The Fantastical Vacations of a Bald-Headed Man and a Bird-Watching Woman

By Stuart Anderson

Book Description: In his last book about vacation misadventures, Travels with Anne, Stuart Anderson won our sympathy by describing his experiences, in remote corners of the world, with broken-down vehicles, clueless guides, unbearable traveling companions, miserable weather, and decidedly uncooperative wildlife. Unfortunately for Stuart, his new book, Who Picked This Place?, makes it plain that he did not learn a thing from those experiences. Thus, in Who Picked This Place?, we get to follow Stuart to unlikely vacation destinations across the world, and laugh out loud as:

Stuart and his bird-crazy companion, Anne, tour the Yucatan Peninsula and discover biting ants, angry monkeys, and the advisability of making sure the lid of that whiskey flask, in your luggage, is screwed on tight.

Stuart and Anne decide to vacation, for some inexplicable reason, in Mexicos most politically unstable state, Chiapas. While there, they try mightily to sweat themselves to death climbing Maya pyramids. They also go to church with a bunch of drunks who mark the occasion by chopping the heads off chickens.

In Belize, Stuart and Anne canoe a jungle river in the rainwhich turns out to be the prelude to a later adventure that involves traveling over miles of ocean, in a small boat, in a much bigger rain. In Belize, also, Stuart and Anne have a guide who is less interested in guiding than in hitting on all the available (and some of the unavailable) local women. That may explain why Stuart and Anne sometimes find themselves lost.

Anne wants to see polar bears in the wild, so she and Stuart go to a lodge on northern Hudson Bay that is miles and miles from nowhere. At the lodge, they share a cabin with the worlds most obnoxious photographer, and also with an elderly woman who has difficulties using the bathroom. All of them see polar bears way too close.

Annes dad goes with Stuart and Anne to Kenya, on a photographic safari. Annes dad, unfortunately, tends to stray from camp on foot and alone, into country inhabited by leopards and lions. He also tends to fall asleep in his dinner. Not wanting to be outdone by Annes dad, in Kenyan shenanigans, Stuart gets himself mistaken for a CIA agent, by some locals who try to recruit Stuart (the CIA agent) to murder one of their neighbors.

Stuart and Anne go off to southeastern Turkey, even though southeastern Turkey borders on places like Iran, Iraq, and Syria. All of their friends think that Stuart and Anne are crazy. The two survive the trip very well, despite the inconveniences of stopped-up toilets, 120-degree heat, and cave hotels.

In Panama, Stuart and Anne get sick, celebrate the New Year with forty aggressive Pakistanis, and go bird-watching with a guide who doesnt speak any English and doesnt know anything about birds.

Youll laugh, youll cry, as you share these and other adventures, on four continents, with the dauntless Stuart and Anne. And, like them, you will often find yourself asking a question that, for one or both of the books two protagonists, probably has an embarrassing answer: Who Picked This Place?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 13, 2006
• ISBN: 9781462834457

Stuart Anderson

Stuart Anderson grew up in Monson, Maine, and attended Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin, and Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, California. He has worked as a writer, editor, political researcher, publishing coordinator, and quality manager. He has previously authored or edited four books, most dealing with United States history. He lives in Upland, California, with Anne.

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Copyright © 2006 by Stuart Anderson.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2006903977

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter One

RARE BIRDS IN THE YUCATAN

Chapter Two

CHIAPAS:

MEXICO’S SOUTHERN EXTREME

Chapter Three

BELIZEAN INTERLUDE

Chapter Four

THE WHITE BEARS OF WAGER BAY

Chapter Five

KENYA: TRAVELS WITH CHARLIE

Chapter Six

TURKISH DELIGHT

Chapter Seven

POKING ABOUT IN PANAMA

To adventurers:

Adrian, Litten, Paddy, Don, Miguel, John of the Tat,

Jay of Bluff, and MJH; and, especially, Anne

Introduction

Sometimes, in the night, I wake up with a yell. This is very annoying to

Anne, my life’s companion, who usually occupies the bed next to mine. She will reach over and give me a good solid whack, and then she will ask, Another bad dream about a vacation?

And I will answer something like this: Yes, I dreamed we were vacationing on a beach somewhere. We were lying in white sand, and the water was lapping at the shore a few yards away. The sea was azure blue. It was warm and I could feel the sun on my skin. There was a line of palm trees behind the beach, and we spent a lot of time listening to the wind rustling the palm fronds. We just lay there, day after day. Sometimes, we ate and drank. It was horrible.

Or I will say: "I dreamed we were on a great white cruise ship. We ate every two hours, and drank in between the eating. The ship offered a lot of activities that involved doing supposedly fun things with other people. We put into an island port every couple of days, and we were expected to go ashore for a few hours and shop for souvenirs. I kept thinking, Our lives have come to this . . . ?"

Or I will say: We were in Las Vegas, and planning to stay a while. We were spending hours, every day, gambling. We were drinking the free drinks and eating from sumptuous buffets. We had tickets for Wayne Newton. Wayne Newton!

Or, on a particularly bad night, I might say: We were in France.

Anne is always understanding, on these dream-nights. She will sit on the edge of my bed, lay her hand on me, and give me assurances. She will say that we will never go on a vacation that doesn’t involve some level of physical discomfort, some primitiveness, some part of the world where people don’t speak English. She will say, We’re not going anyplace where I can’t bird-watch. She will say, You’re not dragging me off to a place where I don’t need shots beforehand. She will say, Don’t worry, Stuart. We’re never going on a normal-people vacation.

So far, we haven’t.

Chapter One

RARE BIRDS IN THE YUCATAN

Anne and I wanted to vacation amidst the ruins of barbaric splendor. We

considered going to visit what’s left of my family in Maine, but then I noticed a magazine advertisement touting some attractions of the Yucatan Peninsula. Come See the Mysterious and Majestic Mayan Ruins of the Southern Yucatan Peninsula, said the advertisement. These Are Big and Beautiful! Off the Beaten Path and Very Seldom Seen!

Naturally, I was taken. I’m always looking for places that are off the beaten path, and I’ve been fascinated by the Mayas since I was a kid reading National Geographic and picturing, in my mind, befeathered priests unconcernedly tossing virgins into sacred wells.

I did some research. I surfed the Net, found some guidebooks, eventually found my way to the website of a company called Ecoturismo Yucatan, in the Mexican city of Mérida. Ecoturismo had a standard itinerary for a grand tour of the peninsula that was relatively cheap and that included birding sites, for Anne, as well as virgin-sacrifice sites, for me. Ecoturismo would book the hotels, furnish an air-conditioned van, provide a bilingual guide to drive the van, and even hook us up with other independent travelers, if we wanted, to reduce the trip costs and give me people to write nasty things about in the aftermath of the adventure. The whole thing sounded perfect.

So Anne and I signed up for a November tour and waited to see if anybody else would happen across the Ecoturismo website and show some interest in joining us. And, by golly, someone did! They were a couple from San Diego, she named Rona and he named Ralph, and they claimed an interest in birds as well as archaeology. Between them, they also knew something about history and photography, had traveled in off-the-path places like Belize and Bulgaria, liked to swim and dive and bicycle. Anne opined they sounded scarily over-competent, but then Ecoturismo pointed out we would save two thousand dollars by inviting Ralph and Rona to join our tour. Over-competence be damned!

In preparation for the trip, I arranged to become deathly sick three days before we were supposed to leave. It could have been flu or it could have been a cold, but I got a runny nose, a headache, a sore throat, and a cough that just wouldn’t quit and kept me awake all night. Not wishing to be left out of the festivities, Anne told me she had a disintegrating wisdom tooth, which held promise of infection while we were in Mexico. In the last desperate hours before our scheduled departure, I went to my primary-care physician and begged him to give me some drugs. I must have begged pretty good, because I came away with a full year’s supply of decongestants, enough antibiotics to deal with both my respiratory infection and Anne’s troublesome tooth, and—best of all—a great big bottle of cough suppressant with codeine. I had hit the jackpot in the prescription-drug sweepstakes.

So Anne and I were fully prepared as we flew to Dallas and then on to Cancún, where Rona and Ralph—having flown down a day early—were supposed to meet us with our guide, Miguel. On emerging from immigration and customs, we had no trouble recognizing Ralph and Rona, mainly because they hurried over to us and said, You must be Stuart and Anne. We admitted to this, and Rona and Ralph introduced themselves, grabbed a couple of our bags, asked us how the flight had been (Awful, we replied), and led us outside the terminal, where we were greeted by the smiling, mustachioed Miguel, and the van in which we were to spend a good part of the next fifteen days.

It was eight-thirty at night and we had a two-hour drive to the town of Valladolid, our initial destination, so we hit the road immediately. Immediately, also, I noticed a couple of things. I noticed that, while Ralph was quietly amiable, Rona had a voice like naval gunfire, so she could have been talking to us from Texas, instead of the front seat of the van, and we would have heard her loud and clear. I also noticed that Miguel spoke perfect American English, which he explained by saying he had spent his boyhood in Los Angeles, his mother having decided when he was twelve to take the family back to Mexico because she feared Los Angeles would corrupt Miguel’s several sisters. I thought this a strange notion on his mother’s part, because I could not imagine Los Angeles corrupting anybody, especially an innocent girl. But I decided not to begin my relationship with Miguel by telling him his mother was a hopeless paranoid.

During the drive to Valladolid, Anne and I learned some more about Rona and Ralph. We learned that Ralph, now 71, was a retired history teacher, while Rona, 57, had been retired for twenty years as a result of somehow or other getting a lot of money early in life. We also learned that Rona was something of a pioneering feminist, an assertiveness trainer, a person who had spent at least part of her brief career teaching women to be unladylike. I was already starting to feel sorry for Ralph.

About an hour into the drive, suddenly and very oddly (it was nine-thirty at night and we were hurtling down a major highway), we heard the call of a bird. It sounded like the bird was actually inside the van, or at most just outside the window on the vehicle’s left side. Then we heard it again. Rona asked, What’s that?, and Miguel glanced over and asked, What’s what?

Rona—already, at this point, spokesperson for the group—said, There was a bird.

You heard a bird? Miguel replied.

Yes, very close.

There was a moment of silence, and then Miguel said, That was me, and made the bird sound again. We all laughed.

Little did we realize that this was just the first display of one of Miguel’s greatest talents: the ability, using just his body parts—tongue, lips, throat, vocal cords, nasal passages, lungs, chest cavity, armpits, shoulder joints, elbows, and palms—to fill most moments with sound.

*    *    *

By the next day, as we headed for the famous Mayan site of Chichén Itzá, Miguel had grown comfortable with us and was in full form. He made the sound of shifting gears as he accelerated or decelerated. He made the sound of squealing brakes as he rounded corners or crossed a speed bump. He broke into song. He beat on his belly to indicate a satisfactory breakfast. With his arms, he fanned the air until it hummed. He parked in places with likely birds and, exiting, filled the air with whistles and pshaws until the birds came looking. Then he slapped his thighs and clapped his hands, in celebration. All by himself, Miguel was a sensory extravaganza.

Besides the sensory pleasure of listening to Miguel, we had the additional pleasure of riding in a vehicle that smelled of whiskey. This was because Anne’s emergency flask of Irish whiskey had somehow opened inside her suitcase, bringing the scent of the Old Sod to a lot of Anne’s belongings. One of the things Anne most anticipated, upon our arrival at Chichén, was a chance to wash out her clothes and drape them all over our hotel room.

Sound and smell, that’s what I enjoyed as we drove towards Chichén. And pain, because I had gotten into a habanero pepper–eating contest with Miguel at lunch time, and Mexico is a country of machismo, so I could not let him win. I didn’t really mind having a blistered throat and not being able to talk.

We got to Chichén and found it heavily touristed. Chichén, you see, is only a two-hour drive from the beaches of Cancún, so people who visit the Yucatan to drink beer and lie on the sand can take a couple hours off, hop a tourist bus to Chichén Itzá, and be back at the beach before sundown. We got to Chichén and there were Italians there, and Frenchmen, and Englishmen, and Germans, and Japanese, and more Americans than there are in Vermont. Once or twice, I even saw some Mexicans.

The tourists moved about in infantry formations, guides at the front, cameramen in the first rank, babes in bikinis on the flanks, and fat guys in shorts protecting the rear. At first, Anne and I complained that we would never be able to get a picture without people in it, but, time and again, Miguel assured us the regiment in front would soon be gone. We asked him how he knew this, and he said tourists never looked at anything for more than two minutes; and, sure enough, within two minutes the way would be clear and we would move in, before the next regiment arrived, for a photograph of some platform, pyramid, or colonnade.

As he knew everything about making sounds and finding birds, Miguel knew everything about Chichén. He pointed out influences from central Mexico, symbols of this god and that god, glyphic writing commemorating something-or-other, allusions in the architecture to rain and war and Venus and the sun, the astronomical significance of this pillar and that hole-in-the-wall, and the easy way to identify a bathhouse (look for frisky men inside, I thought). As Miguel pointed things out, we nodded and said, Oh, yeah, I see that, and filed away the information and promptly forgot it.

I remember that each of the four stairways up the side of the Pyramid of Kukulcán has ninety-one steps, and there is a single step into the sanctuary at the top, so the temple has 365 steps all together—one for each day of the year. Similarly, the Mayan year had eighteen months, and the Mayan Long Count calendar moved in cycles of fifty-two years; and when you study the Pyramid of Kukulcán, you notice it is showing you eighteen terraces and fifty-two flat, enormous panels. Also, at the bottom of each of the four stairways, there are huge stone serpent heads, and the pyramid is so perfectly aligned, and the stone serpents so perfectly constructed, that at the spring and autumn equinoxes, the rays of the sun create an illusion that the serpents are slithering up and down the pyramid.

I climbed the pyramid, of course, as did Rona and Ralph. The steps are high and very steep, and Rona chickened out halfway up and stayed there until Ralph came down, clinging to a rope hung the length of the stairway by some good-hearted Mexicans. I tried to come down by this same rope, and found myself behind a very fat Italian girl, with breasts the size of watermelons, who was doing a lot more standing still than she was descending. When she stood still, I stood still, because I wasn’t going to go around her. In front of her, the Italian girl had a lot of friends who were helping out by mocking her movements and predicting her imminent free-fall to the pavement below; while she happily pointed out that if she went, they were in front of her and they went, too.

There was a lot of cheering when the Italian girl finally got down, and I must say I felt more cheerful myself. I joined the rest of our little group and we walked out past the legions of parked tourist busses and headed for the Balankanché Caves. These are caves near Chichén that were fortuitously discovered by a guide in 1959. Inside, there are dozens of Mayan pots, incense burners, and grinding stones, left there a thousand years ago, apparently by residents of Chichén, and left exactly in place by Mexican authorities after the cave entrance was discovered. Even more remarkable, the underground nature of the cave has the magical effect of increasing by a hundred times the natural humidity of the Yucatan air, so the 97 percent humidity of the outside world becomes 9700 percent once you enter the cave. I stood at the entrance, sweating moderately, then stepped inside into a hot bath. I pulled out my camera, noticed that the lens was steaming up, took a quick picture of some pots featuring painted faces, and then lost all hope of seeing through the camera’s view-finder. I asked Anne how she was doing, and interrupted her attempt to wipe away moisture from her camera with a gob of toilet paper. The toilet paper, unfortunately, disintegrated on contact with the air. I was feeling the same way.

We walked deeper into the cave, which felt similar, I imagine, to how it must feel to walk the bottom of a deep lake filled with tepid water. My shirt was soaked. My hat was dripping water. If I had had hair, it would have been flat. My feet were wet. Even my pants were starting to feel damp (this, in particular, worried me). After a half-hour of walking underground paths, gazing at ancient ceramics left as offerings to the underworld, wishing the fog would leave our lenses, and worrying about our cameras rusting, we left the Balankanché caves. I have never been so glad to get to a place where the humidity was 97 percent.

With the caves behind us, we went back to Chichén Itzá in hopes that the busses would be gone. Finding that they were, Anne and I said we wanted to go back into the archaeological site and take end-of-day pictures—it was about four o’clock, and the sun would be setting in another ninety minutes—free from hordes of tourists. Rona and Ralph whined that they wanted to try out the hotel swimming pool, instead, but Anne and I stood our ground and won a mighty victory. Miguel stayed with the van, Anne and I headed back to the ancient ball courts and plazas, and Rona and Ralph sulkily followed.

It was better without the hordes. You could better appreciate the size, the grandeur, the magnificence of the place. This was the greatest power on the peninsula for four hundred years, from the beginning of the ninth century to the end of the twelfth: a city that outmaneuvered its enemies, broke their armies, overran their outposts, captured their kings, and cut out their hearts to honor deities of rain and sun. Chichén’s people also knew how to build on a colossal scale, to convey the impression of overmastering strength through engineering and architecture. They built causeways, temples, pyramids, enclosed marketplaces, and royal residences, and decorated them with fanged serpents, preening eagles, snarling jaguars, and skulls; lots and lots of skulls. The people of Chichén Itzá also built a ball court so big that it is questionable whether anyone actually played ball on it: just running from one end to the other would have exhausted a person’s endurance, and the stone hoops that served as goals were so high that no mortal ballplayer would ever score a goal. Perhaps this ball court was built simply to overawe.

In the appealing light of the fading afternoon, Anne and I took our pictures, and wondered what possessed people with no metal tools and no machines and not even the wheel to pile up a million tons of stone to make this majestic city. What was the mix of thought and feeling that made them do all this?

I knew what my mix of thought and feeling was. It was the thought that we had better get out of here before the site’s five o’clock closing time, and the feeling that we would be in trouble if we did not. So Anne and I marched down the path to the nearest exit, and found Miguel waiting for us, without Rona and Ralph. We thought this strange, since Anne had seen them heading for the exit a long while before. Miguel had not seen them. The path coming in this direction branched at one point and headed off into the forest. Perhaps they had gone the wrong way. Maybe they were lost!

I began taking notes, hoping that at last this trip had provided a really good story. But no such luck. Rona and Ralph showed up, unscathed, fifteen minutes later, and we all went back to the Hacienda Chichén, our nearby hotel.

As Anne and I walked up the road to our personal bungalow, we passed again—for the third time that day—the hotel manager, who was a very handsome, arrogant-looking man whose major duty seemed to be patrolling the grounds in leather riding pants, sometimes with a horse attached. As we passed the man, Anne commented for the third time on how good-looking he was. I thought to myself that he didn’t seem so special: if you looked behind the great mane of hair, the piercing eyes, the square chin, the long legs, the big shoulders, the hard muscles, the leather pants, and the superb horsemanship, you would see someone just like me.

That night, at dinner, I ate more habaneros, for practice, and practiced my Spanish by doing all the ordering for Anne and me. At the end of the delicious meal, as Anne left the table to go ask a question at the hotel’s front desk, I asked for the check in Spanish and was surprised that the waiter responded with a long, unintelligible speech and some gestures that looked like folding, unfolding, and writing. A few minutes later, I stole a glance at my Spanish phrase book and realized that, rather than asking the waiter for the check, I had asked him to bring me a map. He was probably wondering what kind of map. I put money on the table and left in a hurry.

After a pleasant night in a room draped with drying, previously whiskey-soaked, women’s clothing, we left the next morning for the colonial city of Izamal. On the way there, besides the usual whistling, singing, and automobile noises, we had to listen to Miguel complaining about how cold it was on his beloved peninsula. Yucatan was under the influence of a polar front, he said, repeating a phrase he had heard on a local weather report. From their daytime highs in the eighties, temperatures were plunging into the sixties at night. Miguel’s wife, calling him from Mérida, was worried about the health of their children. Miguel himself was having to dress in layers. It was an appalling situation. Perhaps he could make it better by beating himself and adding a brrrrrr sound to his repertory.

Arriving in Izamal, we proceeded to the sixteenth-century monastery of San Antonio de Padua, site of the biggest atrium in the western hemisphere. We determined that it was a really big atrium, then we went inside the adjoining church and met Luis, the monastery’s official guide. Luis was a hunchback, four feet tall, with assorted deformities all over his body. Naturally, I desperately wanted his picture. I also wanted a picture of the two old Mayan women who were guarding the church’s main entrance, because they looked like they were probably there in the sixteenth century and the church was just erected around them. I pretended I was taking a picture of a painting and took a picture of one of the women. Then we accompanied Luis to see memorabilia of the Pope’s visit to Izamal a few years back, including the chair the Pope sat in, the cushion on which he kneeled, and the banjo he played during High Mass (just kidding). Somewhere along the way, I got a not-very-good photo of Luis.

At a fine Izamal establishment, Miguel and I ate habaneros for lunch, while lesser mortals ate common fare. Then we were off to Mérida, the Yucatan’s great metropolis.

Mérida is a beautiful city. In the nineteenth century, a bunch of Yucatecans got very rich in the sisal trade (plant-derived fibers used to make rope, and essential to sea-going transport in the time of sails and stays), and used some of their profits to build mansions on the north side of Mérida. The mansions, of marble, wood, and glass, are still there, and still beautiful, although some of them have been turned into banks and museums. We stopped at one of the banks so Anne could change money, but a bank employee told her they didn’t change money after one o’clock in the afternoon, and she should go to the foreign-exchange place down the street. Anne and I told Miguel where we were going and set off at a trot, and trotted for two blocks without finding the foreign-exchange place. So we trotted for two more blocks and still came up empty. So we walked (no more trotting) for two more. Assuming, then, that we had been deceived, we shuffled back to the van, where Miguel asked us why we didn’t just go to the foreign-exchange place that was right next-door to the bank. Which was where we were supposed to have gone in the first place.

From the bank, Miguel drove us around some other ritzy neighborhoods, and I took a picture of the red, green, and gold House of the 500, a dragon-decorated, Chinese-style home allegedly built by an Asian hooker who got five hundred dollars a night for her services. The services had paid for the house, and then a variety of businesses, and then sufficient bribes to obtain, for the Chinese woman’s son, a beer concession at Cancún. She did very well for herself, said Miguel.

Proceeding to our hotel, the Casa del Balam (House of the Jaguar), we checked in and then Ralph, Rona, Anne and I followed the bellboy to the elevator. He put us aboard, closed the door, and sent us on our way, intending himself to come up on a different elevator with the baggage. The elevators in this hotel were very strange. They were like medium-size closets with wooden doors that opened outwards, with devices like doorknobs inside and out. Anyway, we were only going from the first floor to the second, but it took an inordinately long time. The four of us stood there, not speaking, waiting for the elevator to stop and the door to open. And we stood there. And stood there. Then I started feeling like I should say something. Then I did say something, because I had noticed a minute or two ago that the elevator wasn’t moving. I said, I think we have to open the door. So Ralph tentatively took hold of the doorknob thing and pushed, and there we were on the second floor. We walked silently toward our rooms, vowing that we would not use that elevator again.

Walking the streets of Mérida was an adventure. The streets were narrow, and clogged, much of the time, with trucks, bicycles, big American cars, little Mexican-manufactured cars, hundreds of diesel-belching busses, and horse-drawn carriages transporting tourists. There were traffic lights at every corner, and usually a policeman, too, but the lights were mainly to illuminate the pedestrians and make them easier to hit, and the policemen were only there to drag away the corpses. When crossing a street in Mérida, it was best to wait for a small opening, close your eyes, and sprint like Wilma Rudolph.

The city was alive. There were busy shops, aggressive street vendors, enticing bookstores, noisy nightspots, restaurants of all price ranges and manners of cuisine, and sidewalk cafés heavily patronized by world-weary university students. You also had your occasional Indian, looking like a recent arrival from another planet, sitting on the sidewalk and begging for coins.

Figuring the city had the most to offer of souvenirs and gifts, Anne and I went shopping in Mérida. We found one shop that had brilliantly colorful t-shirts, but we made the mistake of walking by and saying to ourselves that we would come back later. When we did come back later, not only could we not find the shop, we couldn’t even find the neighborhood. Then, when Miguel told us where to find the best handicrafts at the lowest prices, we followed his directions and ended up in a warehouse-sized store with no air-conditioning, the world’s most ineffective ceiling fans, and humidity like the Balankanché Caves. Fleeing there, we chose an upstairs shop where the humidity was lower but the temperature forty degrees higher. I looked very hot, said the clerk, as he surveyed my again-dripping brow and my shirt soaked with perspiration. He tried his best to sell me a tablecloth featuring a Victor Mature–like Aztec warrior; but I was too eager to get back to street level to appreciate Victor’s rugged beauty.

Anne and I also had a mission to find the best restaurant to celebrate my birthday, which was due to occur while we were in Mérida. (There were rumors that the Mexican President was thinking of coming.) Miguel had told us of a couple of places but, based on Miguel’s taste in handicraft shops, I was afraid his restaurants might turn out to be Turkish baths. We found one of the restaurants and it looked perfectly acceptable, and then Anne said she wanted to find the other. I had written down Miguel’s directions, which called for us to turn left from the entrance to our hotel, but Anne decided I had written down the directions wrong and we should actually turn right. We went right, found nothing, went right again, went left, went straight, went left, went right, and were lost. Anne asked me to use my proficiency in Spanish to ask a man where we might find the restaurant in question. I asked, and he politely pretended he knew—and understood my Spanish—and pointed us up the street and around the corner. We walked, walked some more, crossed the street, and ended up back at the hotel.

Later, we followed the directions I had written down, from Miguel, and found the restaurant without any problem at all. It occupied a grand old house and the tables were in the central courtyard, in the open air and under big trees and flowering shrubs. There, I had my birthday dinner of… I don’t remember.

What I do remember is that when we got back to the Casa del Balam, we found the hotel employees celebrating my birthday by pounding on the pipes. When we looked at the door next to our own, which seemed the entrance to some service area, we noticed water running from underneath the door, and we surmised there was some connection between the leaking water, which was flowing out into the hall, and the pounding on the pipes. The pounding went on until ten o’clock, then stopped long enough for us to get undressed and go to bed. Then it started again and continued for half the night.

Next morning, as we packed and prepared to leave Mérida, rust-colored water began dripping from our bathroom ceiling. We’re getting out just in time, I said to Anne.

We also had some day-trips from Mérida. We visited the Mayan site of Dzibilchaltún, which was most notable for the way Anne tried to pronounce it. We also drove to Progreso, the chief port for Mérida and the state of Yucatan, to do some birding along the shore. On that occasion, Miguel proved to us, once again, that he knew and could reproduce every sound a bird might make; and that, when it came to finding the identifying marks on a bird, he had clearer vision than the Hubble space telescope.

From Mérida, we went west to Celestún, where we boarded a flat-bottomed boat and headed out into the shallow estuary to look for storks, herons, egrets, flamingoes, cormorants, and other water-loving birds. We were not disappointed, although the boatman probably was when, near the flamingo colony, he ran aground and had to jump out and push. We helped by smiling benignly in the boatman’s direction. Once the boat floated free, we went up a narrow channel into a mangrove swamp, looking for snakes, kingfishers, and pygmy-owls. Again, we were not disappointed, although other people were because we pretty much blocked that channel to other bird-watchers wanting to get through.

Lunch time found us at a little seafood restaurant on the beach in the fishing village of Celestún. Previously, Miguel had told Anne and me that we would find Yucatan’s best seafood in Celestún, and that he would order a selection for us to prove his point. We were a little skeptical until the food began to come. First, there was a big platter of giant crab claws, steamed and cracked. We started eating gingerly, realizing that this introductory course would probably cost a hundred dollars back home in California. Then the waiter brought another platter, this one heaped with several pounds of ceviche: seafood salad of shrimp, conch, octopus, and freshly caught fish. We began to eat with less caution. As we chewed and gulped, the waiter brought a third dish, this one an enormous fish fillet that had been stuffed with various shellfish and then lightly breaded and deep-fried. As soon as one of us broke the breading, gobs of steaming shellfish began to leak out, and all of us dove to get our share. We began to eat with gusto. The beer flowed, the Coca-Cola made complement to the exquisite cuisine.

We were pretty much paralyzed in the aftermath of this meal, so stuffed and happy that we would have been content to sit and watch the fishing boats for the rest of the afternoon. But Miguel thought we should go look for additional birds, out at the salt ponds on the edge of town. We drove out there and were immediately lifted out of our stupefaction by mosquitoes, who were in more abundance than the birds. Not being a dedicated birder, and not being as stupid as some people think, I would have preferred to go elsewhere—like back to that restaurant with the shellfish and the beer. But Miguel insisted we pursue the songbirds singing sweetly in the scrub, even though we could all feel bumps rising on our ankles and blood beginning to flow. Ralph, in particular, was wearing a white shirt, and the blood on him stood out brilliantly against the milky cotton.

Eventually, Miguel was satisfied that we had paid a price for our earlier pleasures, so he agreed that we should head south toward the Puuc Hills. This chain of hills is little more than three hundred feet high, but it stands out like a mountain chain in the mostly flat, featureless terrain of Yucatan. During the period from about 700 to 1000 A.D., the Puuc Hills were very heavily populated, with at least a dozen major cities and scores of smaller communities. This is more remarkable in that there is no surface water in the Puuc Hills, and no underground cenotes, or natural limestone wells, as you find farther north. To sustain themselves and their crops, the Maya of the Puuc region had to dig hundreds of substantial cisterns, and seal the bottoms and sides with plaster, so they could catch enough rainfall in the rainy season to get them through the six-month dry season.

The Puuc Hills are almost uninhabited today, except for a few hotels servicing tourists. Our destination was the Hacienda Uxmal, which is just a few hundred yards from the stately ruins of Uxmal, largest of the Puuc cities. We got to the hotel after dark, found it nearly guestless, were content with this fact until the nightly sound-and-light show ended at the ruins and all the hotel guests suddenly returned in a mass, like the crowd from Dodger Stadium exiting into the parking lot. Anne and I chose this precise moment to go to the hotel dining room for dinner, and we found it awash in freshly liberated German tourists. They were all drinking Corona beer, eating the restaurant’s mediocre food, trying to talk over one another, and ignoring the three guitarists who were moving from table to table and playing the kinds of songs tourists expect to hear in Mexico.

I ordered Yucatecan chicken and got just that: a piece of chicken. A leg, to be precise. Anne ordered pork and did not like it. This place, said Anne, is like a cross between a truck stop and a beer hall, but without the ambiance. Although we had three nights planned at Uxmal, we vowed we would not eat again at this hotel.

We went to the ruins early next morning, stopping first at the site museum. It was a very good museum, filled with carefully lighted sculptures excavated from Uxmal and other Puuc cities: warriors, birds, felines, serpents, members of the nobility. I especially liked a two-foot-long, ten-inch-diameter, limestone phallus. Sneaking away from the rest of our group, I snapped a picture of this leviathan, so I could show it, when I got home, to the guy in my office who has always claimed his is the biggest.

Departing the museum, we walked up a nearby rise and found ourselves looking at the mass of the 130-foot Pyramid of the Magician. Miguel told us the story associated with this structure, of how it was built, supposedly, in a single night by a dwarf who was challenging an evil king for the throne of Uxmal. The dwarf challenged the king to a contest over who might have the harder skull. The dwarf won, the king—with his head split open—died, and the dwarf ruled over Uxmal until it became a great and wealthy city.

A great and wealthy city, it was. If the kings of Chichén Itzá had demanded size and power in their architecture, then the rulers of Uxmal demanded complex beauty. The Puuc region had its own distinctive architectural style, with plain, almost austere lower stories for the buildings, and upper stories where every square inch was adorned with geometric decoration. With Miguel leading us and pointing out details we would never have noticed on our own, we proceeded through the Nunnery Quadrangle, and along the path to the Palace of the Governors, the Great Pyramid, the House of the Pigeons, and other imposing edifices. From the top of the Great Pyramid, alone except for forty or fifty boisterous German tourists, I could look out over the nearby hills—each of them topped by a perfectly proportioned stone structure—and wonder again at the greatness of these people.

Late that afternoon, after a quick trip to the nearby site of Kabah (possibly a tributary state of Uxmal), Miguel gave us a special treat. He had a friend named Felix in the settlement of Santa Elena, and Felix was Mayan and lived with his wife, Maria, in the Mayan way in a Mayan house, with some of Felix and Maria’s grown children and their spouses and a variety of grandchildren and everybody’s dogs, cats, chickens, pigs, turkeys, and anybody else who had been able, over the years, to find a niche in the family compound. Felix, who must have been around seventy, still worked the corn fields nearby.

We went to Felix’s house and found that it was, indeed, a Mayan house: oblong, white, and made of poles, mud, plaster, and thatch. Felix had raised fourteen children in this house, and had their portraits hanging on his walls, next to the family hammocks and the flower-bedecked Catholic shrine and the picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Now, the master of the house was obviously Antonio, a grandson who was probably six and hopelessly spoiled. When we arrived, Antonio’s mother was shaping tortillas and cooking them on a metal sheet over an open fire, in preparation for dinner. Miguel started stealing tortillas immediately, and offered samples to all of us. They were better than you can get at any supermarket in my hometown in California.

With permission from all family members, we took a bunch of pictures, Anne assuring me that mine would not be any good because I didn’t have a flash but she did and hers would be good. Then, leaving Miguel to talk over old times with Felix, Anne and I wandered outside with Rona and Ralph to admire the farm animals, the cistern—still used in the Puuc Hills—and the decorative flowers and shrubs. After circling the compound, we noticed two neighborhood