Real coffee and scorpions
Trip Start
Jul 01, 2005
1
4
6
Trip End
Jul 28, 2005
Valladolid,
Mexico
Tuesday, July 5, 2005
a ladder.
Ran into some German tourists this morning about our age who were traveling through Mexico and staying in hostels. The boy seemed reasonably normal, the girl was barking mad. They were walking three hours to the beach every day from the hostel in town (about ten minutes from our house) which is insanity. Just get a cabana on the beach! The boy looked like heīd had it up to his eyeballs. But we've found as fellow foreigners, you always talk to the people you run into. Itīs very strange.
Back in Tulum
Since we got up early to catch the bus to Valladolid, we're both cranky from the lack of sleep and rainy bus ride. Mayab is not as nice as ADO and the windows leaked incessantly. My leg is still hurting from pulling it Friday, too, which is an unrelated whine. We wandered the cobblestone streets for awhile, saw several cathedrals, had quite decent coffee, ate from our first street vendor and ended up going back, via ADO. I wish I could remember the name of the hotel where we had the coffee - it was the first place that hasn't served Nescafe so far, and it was really quite lovely and airy with a good view. It was one of the hotels in the central area - maybe Catedral Hotel?
Am actually having a pretty good time overall - Valladolid is pretty much what you'd expect a city in Spain to be like. Cobblestone streets and a big old plaza and a monastery and old women selling embroidery on the street corners. Lots and lots of foliage and gorgeous flowers ranging from the tiny to as big as plates. The women selling embroidery did get a little pushy - we stopped on a bench in the parque to catch our breath (we overpack even for a daytrip) and the same two women and a child harassed us until we left. There's also eight different cathedrals, but we didn't get around to seeing them all.
The cathedral at the Monastery of Saint Bernadine of Siena (called Sisal by the locals), had a separate chapel for the Mayans built on one side, so the Catholics and Mayans could worship at the same time without seeing each other.
Post siesta
Sleep made us both feel much better, but Sarah had a scorpion in her bed so we got to have an adventure getting rid of it. The cat proved useless. We went out for bug spray, as the thing just wouldn't die (the scorpion, not the cat) and we were running out of options. Using a combination of a frying pan, the increasingly annoyed Coquetta, a plastic bag, and a mosquito netting pole, we trapped it in a limestone hole, but did not managed to kill it. (We attempted to whack it with the pan, the cat scared it into a hole in the limestone of the wall, we tried to stab it with a mosquito netting pole, and ended up trapping it in the wall with the wadded up plastic bag stuffed into a hole and braced by the pole. We're like Macguyer! Only utterly inept!)
After we got into town, we realized that neither of us knew how to say "scorpion." Sarah drew the most pathetic picture ever, (not that I would do better) and the lady seemed to understand. However, what she gave us seems to be for roaches and not scorpions.
We didn't set off any explosives for the fourth - still don't want to experiment with Mexican prison, though am not sure they'd care. It seems awfully hard to get the police to notice you here. They drive like maniacs.
People here continue to be very nice. Much nicer than people in the states are to confused Mexicans, that's for sure. I did have one lady at the bus station today foist off all her small change on me, rather than making change properly from big bills down, but that's about the worst that's happened.
