Bethesda, Maryland

It feels good to be back. In the States, that is. Hung in San Fran for a few days, but was way too excited with flush toilets and feather mattresses to blog to you right away. And in short order, I was scooped up by Peter Donohue himself to go on a truly luxurious East Coast foray to visit Grandma and Aunt Sara.

We flew Virgin Airlines cross country, in the first class cabin. The sensuous pleasure of this experience is beyond my powers of articulation. Let it be known that there were free Bloody Mary’s consumed and extreme levels of reclination.

I woke up in my own hotel room in Bethesda, the embodiment of “New Urban,” a place where corporate America can walk from office to lunch hour jewelry shopping and after-work drinks. All the architecture is post 9/11- downtown is a little like a mall turned inside out. On my rambles through this be-suited, tastefully highlighted reimagination of a city, I get asked a lot if I’m on my way to the beach. Barely free of the load of my backpack, I have little in the way of “polished outfits.” I feel clumsily subversive.

Maryland, or at least the Maryland immediately adjacent to our nation’s capital, is a upper class suburban sprawl of the highest order. Towns like Bethesda run into Chevy Chase runs into Rockville runs into inappropriately clogged highways and monolithically remote office parks. We drive from Grandma’s senior home, where we witness odd series of conversational fragments between stroke victims to my Aunt Sara’s lovely three story house, where my seven year old triplet cousins rule the roost with their Bermese mountain dog. Kisses are exchanged in on intergenerational cheeks and there is much catching up to be done.

Every once in awhile I sneak out to hang with my peer group- Jess and Jay, dear friends from the college years that are making a go of it in Washington, DC proper. Jay works for Bill Clinton and Jess is a defense contractor. They both live in wonderful apartments, easily affording tickets to baseball games and rounds at the bar. I am a hobo. We booze heavily and reflect wisely on the different paths that life can take you. They pay, mostly, for the drinks. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank them.

I’m back in the country, sure, but there’s still plenty of journey to be had. Planning on continuing ‘Pura Caitlin’ until that settles down a little so no worries, my pet, because at least for the next few weeks I am

Yours!

CD

Cancun

Cancun, Burning Man called and it wants it´s noise pollution back. Man, you should really let people know when they check into your overpriced hostel that their kickin´ air conditioning system will be augmented by a non-stop stream of ¨DOOF DOOF DOOF¨ into the wee and then the not-so wee hours of the morn.

But that´s neither here nor there.

So the last stop of the trip! I cannot believe that this is where seven months of mayhem has brought us... Cancun, the Señor Frogged, high-risen, underaged pina colada center ring of the ugly tourist universe. I suppose it serves as a kind of decompression chamber for us on our re-entry into the States, although this is nothing like any America I´d want to live in.

But I can´t say we haven´t had a blast. The last week has seen some serious budgetary concerns on the part of Team Erik and Caitlin- some haphazard math left us with about 189 pesos per day between the two of us. A little disconcerting when your tent spot alone runs you 125. But we lived lightly, discovered the utility of red dresses and blonde hair when hitch hiking the Yucatan, sold our loyal tent to an interested Mexico Cityite, and came up on a few extra bucks for celebration on our last night in Latin America, hell, even enough for the bus ride to the airport.

Cancun gets a whole lot more fun with a six-pack of Sol. My only regret is missing the Lucha Libre fight that went down across the street from our hostel. Big, burly men grappling in superhero masks? Si hombre, los mejicanos son locos.

Mark my words, I´ll be back in Mexico before long. I´ve fallen in love with Oaxacan cheese and the phrase puta madre, yelled at a shrill pitch and high volume.

Sigh. But onward and upward! Thus concludes my last missive from abroad.

Over and out,
La Catalina

Fish Tacos in Paradise

The laguna our buddy Pete took us to on our epic Yucatan road trip. Glory be...

Last camp of the trip. Please note our cinderblock table and improvised tree-shelf in the upper- right hand corner.

He´s a man of many talents...

If you´re going to quit eating all animals for a few months, a Mexican fish taco is a great way to break the fast. Eat them at your campsite´s thatched hut beach joint, where the staff is always sleeping and everything, but everything comes with a lime. Delicious little cubes of fried fish and corn tortilla and salsa and FOUR alternative condiments on the table to speed your way... now this, this is living. Thank you Tulum, your grub is awesome.

I wish I could say the same about the Yucatan Peninsula in general.

This being the bell lap of the Latin American adventure, I am more broke with more miles between me and gainful employment than ere before in the life of Caitlin. We had carefully crafted a budget a few weeks ago that would get us to that June 19th flight outta Cancun without resorting to illegal vending or straying too far south of that line between backpacker and hobo.

And then we got out here, to the ¨Maya Riviera.¨ And we realized our backpacking trip had ended earlier than we anticipated. Cuz there´s no ¨budget travel¨ here.

An old man who called himself ¨Tasso Picasso¨ and sold his dubious oil pastel portraits of jungle lesbians on the beach told me the saga of Tulum. How once, long, long ago, hippies ruled this land and there was free camping on the beach and ¨lots of grass and naked girls.¨ Oh, the glory. And then the landowners got wise to the scene, and realized that while hippies had very little disposable income, yuppies had bunches. So they razed the camp grounds, put in concrete cabanas at prices the poi set could not afford and generally deprioritized public transportation.

And Tulum is still considered ¨earthy¨ by Yucatan Peninsula standards. Venture north and you hit Playa del Carmen, where Lacoste stores and your overweight uncle from upstate New York have taken the place of taquerias and fishermen. The beach is parceled out into ownerships by massive, all inclusive resorts who seem to be in a competition for who can build the most monolithic security gate. Venture further north and you hit Cancun. ´Nuff said. ¿Donde estas, Mexico? Sooo a bit of an odd place to spend the last weeks of a trip characterized for the most part by places where the McDonalds´arches don´t shine.

But don´t feel too bad for me. We went swimming in one of the cenotes that dot the Peninsula other day, the natural sinkholes that one person told me were the result of a meteroid impact on the area. We´ve managed to snag a pay-to-camp spot under some mangrove trees a few meters from the beach, where on most days the most taxing activity is stringing my hammock between the right palm trees. Yesterday we went snorkeling off a reef in our front yard and I communed with purple, orange and green parrot fish.

Oh, and did I mention that the real Tulum is right down the beach? The Mayan city, built from white stone on a sea cliff where craaaazy happenings are rumored to go down at night? Did I mention we snuck in for a midnight commune with the cosmological ancestors themselves? How did it go you ask?

I mean, I have to save some stories to tell for when I get back, guys. Buy me a beer in a few weeks and I´ll weave you the tale. ´Cause God knows I won´t be able to afford my own.

Love,
CD

Palenque

Chiapas, once you descend from the mountains where San Cristobol sits in it´s chic urbane sachet, is hot. Very hot. And humidity that likes to melt ladies of Celtic-Euro ancestry like yours truly.

But it´s a pretty, if moist, descent into the jungles. Your colectivo passes you through the heart of tierra zapatista, past the community-run schools and the caracoles, the seats of pueblo power that strike fear into the heart of Mexico City bureaucrats. There are homemade signs that tell you not to litter and federal government erected signs that tell you not to make your own speed bumps (why haven´t US neighborhood activists just done and made their own speed bumps?). We changed vans in Ocosingo, a tiny town where bloody shoot-outs went down between campesinos and their government´s army, all over the right to use the land their ancestors are from as they saw fit. From the road, I saw nary a plaque in commemeration. I was silently impressed.

And then we swam through the heat waves to the ruins of the Mayan city Palenque.

Like the lands of the Zapatista struggle, I was struck surprised by how much awe Palenque generated in me. It was like standing and looking at the Parthenon, so epic were it´s proportions. There are some sites that strike a chord somewhere deep in your soul, like touching on a treasured human archetype. This is one.

I liked the Temples of the Cross the best, which were constructed by some long-ago Mayan king each to honor a god, the glyphs on the walls designed to bridge god-time and Maya-time, looping them into the same continuum with the temple at it´s focus. I stared at one elaborate stelae for a long time in the blessed shade of one of the smaller temples and suddenly it´s meaning of sun worship became clear to me, sans explicatory map, sans bi-lingual sign. These Mayans, man, masters of disseminating information.

Plus, it´s deep in the jungle. The buggy, sweaty jungle. We emerged after our day at the ruins exhausted and gratified and ready for our jungle cabana.

Oh yeah, those. So Mom says I think everywhere I stay is ´super great!´ and I guess up to this point that´s been true but El Panchan, the hostel-jungle path-campout where the backpackers hang, was by far the most depressing place I´ve hung my hat in awhile. There was this elaborate hippie camp, Rakshita, that we´d heard about all the way down in Guatemala and when we got there it was deserted and run down and under construction and rainy and unloved... a jungle palace gone from it´s glory days.

I think I see a theme here. On to the Yucatan!

Love,

CD

San Cristobol de las Casas

Hey, do you like lychees? They are spikey, but you don´t eat the spikes, and inside you find a taut little white fruit that measures up within an inch of it´s spectacular outwardly appearance.

Also, we are in San Cristobol de las Casas. It was here that the Zapatistas, the Chiapan-Mexican rebel group (popularily referred to as the ¨first postmodern revolutionaries¨) took over from the national government in the mid 1990´s. They took over the city in the name of democracy at all levels of Mexican government, land rights for the indigenous and social justice in general. They are awesome. Nowadays they sell little black-masked figurines affixed to earring posts and on silk-screened T- shirts, which I find infinitely preferable to the ¨I Heart Tacos¨ t-shirts and it´s souvenier market ilk.

I could live here.

Love,

Sub-Commandante Donohue

Semuc Champeyons

"Semuc! Semuc!" Not knowing how the hell we'd make it out to the Semuc Champey National Park, Erik, Carrie, Chris and I had wandered out to the driveway of our hostal looking for... something. And something we most certainly found. A camioneta, the small trucks that serve as mass transit for Guatemala's rural (are there any other kind?) regions, was revving it's motor right out in front. Like it was looking for us, like it was destined to take us to the park and it's famous crystal waters. We made ourselves comfortable on the bags of concrete in the truckbed and settled in for the "difficult" ten kilometer dirt roads out to paradise.

About five minutes later we rolled into "downtown" Lanquin during prime time on market day. We were joined by about twenty five men, women and children in our once roomy pickup bed. One child wrapped his arms around Chris' leg for stability against the more unrestful jars on the road and a tired man rested his cheek on the hand I was using to desperately grip the guardrail, possibly to feel closer in spirit to his fellow traveler that day. There is a different notion of "personal space" here, inasmuch as it relates to the daily commute.

But the vehicular sardine can did the job and got us to where we needed to go.

Now being from Oregon, and the rest of my gang from simarily blessed geographic regions, we were used to messing around with rivers and pools. But a collective release of breath we didn't know we held swept the group when we emerged from the jungle for our first glimpse of Semuc. It was like a vast, terraced network of small Carribean seas, so blue were it's happy waters. We stripped and joined the heady blue, slipping down chutes of water or jumping off limestone ledges into yet another level of water and green grasses and hidden caves.

I have absolutly no confirmation on this, but somewhere in the thousands of conversations that seep into your head backpacking I've heard that "Semuc Champey" is Q’eqchi’, the local Mayan dialect, for "land of the hidden waters." Which is wierd because I just told you all about waters and didn't really make them seem hard to find, because they weren't and those waters are hardly hidden. But after further exploration of the new coolest locale I've ever been turned up confirmation of the Mayas nomenclature. The whole chain of pools, it turns out, is one massive land bridge. We followed them up to their far end and found, to our surprise that a beast of a river beat it's way into the limestone underneath the pools, a massive churning network of semi underwater caves. We sat at the mouth of these and considered the import of hydro power in our modern age. Water, man.

And then we tramped up the sweatiest thirty minutes of my life to the mirador and gorged ourselves on a view that encapsulated it all into one cohesive picture, river and tree and pool and cave. And then we played with a hot pink and black butterfly that wanted nothing more than a friendship with an option to lead to more with my camera. And then we swam some more and I kept my eyes open underwater (a new, dearly beloved skill). And my giardia (I have giardia) barely bothered me because how can amoebas compete with a whole ecosystem for your attention?

They can't. And neither can much anything else, apparently, because we missed the last public camioneta and had to pay an exorbitant amount that very nearly approached the price of a two block taxi ride Stateside for somebody's buddy to drive out from Lanquin and save the silly, naturedrunk gringos. And we drank dark Moza, my Latin American pick for brew, in the dusk of a hostal bar with little electricity and zero phone service to it's name and basically felt very good about the whole situation indeed.

Guatemala rocks. I've bought a palm frond fan we use for our nightly bonfires for about 13 cents, two bowls made out of large seeds and a woven plant fiber bag that a couple of fetchingly old Mayan woman convinced Erik would be perfect for his market days. Thus outfitted, we can conquer the world.

Can't wait,
CD