Our house is a very, very, very fine house.
Trip Start
Jul 01, 2005
1
5
6
Trip End
Jul 28, 2005
Tulum,
Mexico
Tuesday, July 5, 2005
Evidently all the whacking the scorpion with the pointy stick last night killed it. Whee! I sprayed the area profusely with something meant for killing cockroaches, just in case, then we nearly suffocated on the perfumed bugspray, because I´d insisted on sealing off the room so the scorpion wouldn´t escape. My smart is intermittent.
Found the post office this morning. Or perhaps the drug dealing shop. I´m not sure. There were definitely PO boxes, but it was the seediest looking post office I´ve ever seen, and the guy who ran it had this teenage helper boy who was doing something that looked very unpostlike. And the guy showed me how to open the door. Dude. I´m American, not brain damaged. I can work the door. It also cost a buck per post card, so will not be doing that again. (Note from the future: Those postcards NEVER arrived, bolstering my opinion it wasn't a real post office.)
This afternoon we went back to the beach. I'm awful fond of the beach. I can even deal with the sand leaking out of all my possessions for days afterward. Some guy was there trying to teach his chihuahua to like the water. I thought it was going to get washed out to sea. It evidently thought so, too, from the scampering away.
A brief rundown on the house I've been talking about - it's quite nice (cost about four times as much as a dorm bed, less than some hotels). There's a bedroom right when you walk in the door (Sarah's room) that you walk through to get to the living room. The living room has high ceilings and fans, making it the best place for naps. The kitchen/dining area adjoin the living room, with the bathroom built onto the kitchen. The shower stall is made out of limestone block, and the bathroom is the only room with a roof made out of some sort of cement/stone. A tiny spiral staircase in the kitchen leads up to the loft, where I sleep, which looks out over the living room. It sounds like a lot of rooms, but it is still smaller than the average apartment in Phoenix.
All of the roofs are thatched with palm fronds, which shed a bit during storms. The mosquito netting stops it from getting on the furniture. Out back, there's a tub to wash clothes in and a clothesline. Out front, there's a pretty little courtyard with a wading pool and some stairs that lead to the ceynote under the house. (Not a safe one to swim in, more of a grotto to just peer into and say "huh.") There's a tiny guest cottage that shares the courtyard. So far, no one's in it. The entire courtyard is fenced in with some pretty serious looking walls topped with barbed wire and a wooden gate at least three inches thick. It obviously belongs to a foreigner who rents it out, what with the wading pool out front, but it's not outstandingly reeking of wealth. There are a few larger houses in the town, but I haven't seen another one with this type of landscaping yet.
The water gets delivered occasionally - from what I can tell, the town has no water supply. There´s no glass in our windows, which is typical. The mosquito netting over the windows is better than many of the other houses have. Valladolid was nicer in many ways, even though it had more of a city feel. Tulum was messed up, I think, by the tourism at the Tulum ruins and the building of the resorts out on the beach as an extension from Cancun. The influx of money and vehicles and tourists were too much and the growth was too rapid. Hence the lopsided price structure to all the food and clothes (flip-flops cost $12!) and tourist-like atmosphere of the strip, yet rampant obvious poverty in the town itself. About half of the houses in town would be considered "unfinished" by Western standards, with rebar sticking out and crumbling plaster.
