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6
August 2002 - Starfish Trek Episode 1:
Houston,
We Have Landed!
Hi everyone!
Greetings
from Portillas, Quintana Roo, Mexico (population 2)! We’re
not on any map I’ve seen except one a new friend
in Mahajual drew for me. Casa Azul is in Portillas about
5Km south of Xcalak (shkalak’). This is the southern
most occupied house on the east coast of Mexico. This
place makes me think I’ve died and gone to heaven.
Just about then, a tabano (big green deer fly) takes a
chunk out of me just to remind me it is not quite heaven.
I’ve
lived in the Houston Metro area all my life except for
college in Austin. This is an absolute culture shock for
me. The nearest town with any sort of real stores is Chetumal.
It is a little over 4½ hours away. Not so much
due to distance but, they are rebuilding the highway and
it is mostly dirt road all the way. The road from Xcalak
to Portillas is dirt also and almost as wide as my truck.
Palm fronds take out any outside mirror adjustments made
prior to leaving within the first 100 meters. (Yes, I’m
converting to metric rapidly.) Anyway, it is a good thing
I’ve always been the MacGyver type. If I need something,
it is much easier to fabricate it than to run to the store
and buy one. Not to mention cheaper. It costs about $80US
to drive to Chetumal in fuel. Try preparing a grocery,
etc. shopping list of things you aren’t familiar
with for the entire trip. If you run out there will be
no more for thirty days. (I don’t smoke anymore
because I couldn’t find a tobacco shop.) So the
next time a Middle Eastern guy asks, in broken English,
“May I help you?” just look around and be
thankful you have a Stop N Go.
The local
people here are super. They are more Maya than Mexican.
Honest, simple, honorable people who will quickly go out
of their way to help a total stranger. Very few speak
much more than a couple words of English so my Spanish
is improving rapido. I am beginning to think in Spanish
now and the right words seem to come from nowhere rather
than having to clear the cobwebs from my poor little old
brain and sort through everything to find just one word.
Margarita, a little old lady in Xcalak who the gringos
call “the veggie lady” (she owns one of the
tiny grocery stores and sells the best fruits & vegetables)
has been helping me learn the Maya/Mexican dialect in
exchange for English pronunciation assistance. She’ll
be sounding like a Texan in no time. I am now her coconut
supplier. It seems there are more bearing coconut trees
here than anywhere else around. I just bring her ten or
so when I go to Xcalak and she either cooks me lunch or
gives me some veggies or fruit. She’s fairly typical
of most of the local people I’ve met.
I could
write a book about the trip down and my first couple weeks
here. I’ll save it for another day. I’ve traveled
the world by boat and plane with only a couple difficulties.
I’ve driven millions of miles (most on the way to
work in Houston) Nothing prepared me for the drive down
here. The highway signs have no numbers; they are named
where they go. Often, you have to take a road you’re
not going to just to get to the road that takes you where
you want to go. I realize it isn’t exactly manly
and especially not macho Texan to ask directions but I’ll
have to admit I swallowed my pride a lot. Once I bruised
my ego, there arose the problem with my inability to speak
or understand Spanish, kilometers and as far as that goes,
right or left either. If it wasn’t a right turn,
I was screwed because the Spanish word for left flew right
over my head along with the other 85% of the conversation
sending me back to my truck to stare at my GPS and maps
in dismay. To borrow a quote from Mr. Gump, “Ahm
nooot a smart maaun!” God must have had a little
hand in our safe arrival.
Upon arrival,
we unloaded the heavily laden truck. Ole’ Blue rode
all the way with his ass 8” off the ground. There
are many grooves in the road down from the trailer hitch.
I had packed the truck so tight; there was absolutely
no air in that camper shell. I heard Ole Blue’s
shocks go “WHEW!” when I took the last box
out. A few things didn’t survive the trip but not
many. As soon as the truck was unloaded, we were on the
road again to Cancun to pick up the rest of the furniture
for the main house. I’ll have to give Ole Blue an
“A” for his performance. In 5 days, he had
gone 2669 miles over a lot of bad roads in high 90 degree
heat at speeds around 95MPH most of the way with more
than he should carry running the air conditioner on max
all the way in spite of one tank of bad fuel and a fuel
pump eaten by the Pemex crap. He wouldn’t run hardly
at all on their regular, “Magna” so I had
to feed him “Premium” crap at 6.2 pesos per
liter right after the first fill outside Matamoros. That’s
about $2.50US per gallon and at his 9.46 average MPG on
the trip, he drank a little over 278 gallons. So the gas
here alone was almost $800 not counting duty, tolls and
bribes to not have to unload the truck. I gave him an
oil and filter change and almost three days rest once
we finally settled in.
That Tan
dog is certainly in the place of his dreams also. I can’t
keep him out of the water. He swims out a hundred yards
just to bark at the pelicans at the end of the hurricane
destroyed pier. There are also huge royal blue and some
lime green land crabs that make their home at the base
of leaning coconut palms. It is the funniest thing I’ve
ever seen him do. When he finds one, he first tries to
bark them out of their hole for about 15 minutes. When
he can barely bark, he bounces in for a scrape of the
sand with both front paws until the crab is fully exposed
bearing its pincers. Slowly, he works up enough courage
to let the crab grab his nose and he pulls the crab out
and shakes his head violently so as to toss this massive
crab over twenty feet in the air. The crab either dies
from the fall or is stunned enough for Tan to eat him.
I feed him well but he still eats a couple big crabs every
day. I think he has just about run all the iguanas back
to the jungle. There are no more signs of them around
the house (They leave a pile as big as Tan does!). I’ve
never seen him so happy. Oh, and he has a new girlfriend
named Tasha. She’s an 80 pound Rottweiler mix that
belongs to some real nice folks from Canada that own one
of the local dive shops.
This place
is totally self sufficient. There are no electric power
lines, telephone lines, sewer or water lines. A real life
Sim City waiting to be built. There are solar panels on
the concrete roof with a propane generator for backup
(if the sun quits) for electricity. I've been told I have
enough capacity to run 32 amps at 120 volts in all three
buildings. There is no A/C. None is needed. The average
temperature here is 86 degrees 24/7/365 but there is a
gentle cool breeze from the Caribbe almost all the time.
At night, the wind causes the palm tree fronds to rustle
sounding a lot like rain. The combined sound with the
distant waves breaking over the reef is incredibly soothing.
If you lie down and shut your eyes, the next thing you
are aware of is, it is another morning of a beautiful
day.
The concrete
roofs double as a catch for rainwater. The rainwater drains
to a huge cistern under the house. We pump the water back
up to a large poly tank on the roof that supplies running
water in the house. Though there is not a lot of water
pressure, there is a propane water heater in each nearly
completed building. A hot rainwater shower is the most
refreshing shower I’ve ever had. It only takes a
drop of shampoo to clean my hair squeaky clean. Cooking
and drinking water is totally from 20 liter bottled water
jugs like the Ozarka water back in Houston.
The beach
is a white crushed coral sand; easy on the feet. I’ve
read it described as talcum powder but, it is a little
more coarse in my opinion. You can wade for about 75 yards
getting only to maybe 4 feet deep and another 75 yards
to 6 feet deep, tops. No waves, ever. And the water is
crystal clear. When you are in water to your shoulders,
you can see every detail on the bottom. The only time
it clouds at all, is when you move your feet in the sandy
bottom. The water is a constant 87 degrees, day and night.
The night
sky reveals more stars than is shown at a planetarium.
A big telescope here would probably put an end to my sleeping.
Yes, heaven indeed.
Upon getting
set up here, something happened and fried my computer.
I had to buy a new motherboard and Pentium 4 processor
(1.7GHz) in Chetumal. Raphael, the satellite internet
service provider spent the day last Sunday with me helping
set up my internet connection. Another test of my Espanol
as the only English words he knows are “hello”,
“yes”, and “thank you.” I’ve
spent most of my spare time in the past couple days, reconfiguring
this computer and downloading driver updates for the new
hardware. Nonetheless, finally, I am back online and able
to communicate with the outside world. Somehow, it doesn’t
seem to be so urgent or important anymore. I do want to
be able to identify the plants and animals in the jungle
out back and I’ll need either the internet or a
Maya bruho to do so.
This e-mail
turned out to be a lot longer than I originally intended.
I hope I haven’t bored any of you to tears. If so,
I apologize. All of you who receive this hold a special
place in my heart. I wanted to share as much of this adventure
with each of you as you can stand. Also, I wanted to let
you know I am OK and miss you all. I’ll eventually
get around to writing each of you individually and responding
to your e-mails. Even without television, there is an
abundance of things to do. For a retired old fart, I seem
to be busy every waking hour. The commute is great. I
don’t need to go anywhere. I just haven’t
figured out when I’ll get a day off.
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A Special Note: While the following
links are the best I have found, they are commercial sites
outside my domain. Some do put spyware on your computer.
It is how they are paid for what they do. As a rule, it
is generally harmless but, those who are concerned should
do a scan after visiting. Search for AdAware from Lavasoft
on the internet, it is free.
Click
For Weather Underground's Satellite Weather Image Of This
Area
Click
Here To View GOES - East Visible Caribbean Satellite
Animated Loop
Click
Here To View METEOSAT 7 Satellite Loop Of The Eastern
Atlantic (Where Tropical Activity Begins)
Click
Here To Visit Stormcarib.com
Click
Here To Visit The National Hurricane Center's Atlantic
Information Web
Click
Here To Visit AccuWeather's Xcalak 15 Day Forecast
Click
Here To View Detailed Current Weather Conditions in
Mahahual
For
The Following Links If You Want To Use Portillas (3
miles south of Xcalak) As Your Location, My Location
Is: 18.2285 ° N By 87.84166 ° W
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Here To See How Close A Hurricane IsClick
Here To See How Close A Hurricane Can Get According
To Current Forecasts
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Here To Pick The Center Of Your Satellite View
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