food and weather

We have amazingly good vacation luck - especially where weather is concerned. The weather report we'd been watching before we got here showed partly cloudy skies and some rain. We worried a little. But we've only had rain once, during the night, and except for those couple of extraordinarily windy days, it's been perfectly gorgeous. Like today. Blue skies, constant breeze, cadet blue skies, drifting white clouds here and there. Big horizons and blue patchwork water, with white sand. Kind of breathtaking.

Too bad my back is too sunburned to snorkel. Despite several slatherings of sunblock with the embarrassing number 40 attached, my back got burned yesterday. Marc's sunburn is turning, of course, to a beautiful deep tan. So he went out without me this morning to snorkel at the point, up the beach from our hotel. He saw a couple of new kinds of fish, and hoped that I'll be unburned enough to go with him tomorrow. Me too.

Lunch the last couple of days has been disappointing, but today marked a return to yumminess. We had empanadas, really crisp and flaky. One was filled with cheese and potato, one with beans and cheese, and one with little bits of chicken and red peppers. They were hot and crunchy on the outside and really luscious on the inside. The salad was shredded cabbage, tomato chunks and thinly sliced radishes, with some cilantro and lime juice, I'd bet. The starter was watermelon cubes with fresh lime for squeezing, and the standard pico de gallo and black bean bowls for dipping chips into.

YUM I love watermelon.

just beachy

At breakfast this morning (banana pancakes for Marc, yogurt and granola for me), we asked Marcia about the possibility of getting onto the beach from other locations along the shoreline. She drew us a little map of a place with big waves for body surfing, and a place with a sunken ship that is good for snorkeling. All within 30km or so....so off we went.

Most of the drive was on a paved road, but the last potholed bit (10 hard km!)
was on this sandy road:

There was a place to pull in and park, so we did.
This tree reminded me of Beckett for some reason:

And the beach looked like this:

AMAZING. Nice sand, gorgeous water. We swam. We floated. We walked.

Then we got back in the car to drive further, looking for the alleged ship.
We parked. We walked.

We saw coral and shells.

And watery grasses:

And in the distance? A mostly sunken ship.

With a big pelican in the foreground. Lots of pelicans around here.

It's at the end of a pseudo pier of sticks. Actually, the sticks have a net underneath,
to catch fish. Marcia said this is bad news. And illegal.

Tomorrow we're going back to snorkel all around the ship.

Today we just walked and swam, checking it out. We won't take the camera tomorrow, so we took all the photos today.

Back to home base for lunch. Every table has a nice collection of sauces:

And lunch always comes with fresh pico de gallo.

Yum.

Friday at Mayan Beach Gardens

So the pattern is true: good breakfast, great lunch, meh dinner. Tonight it was chicken fajitas, and not even good ones. The chicken wasn't seasoned at all, and they were accompanied by dry rice and black beans, refried. Green and red peppers, barely cooked, and a very few onions, nicely cooked. The small corn tortillas were wonderful, though - homemade and warm and gritty. Don't get me started on the whole communal dinner talking with our fellow guests thing. Yuck. We're just too shy.

But breakfast was nice - we love vacations in warm tropical places because the fruit is usually good. Vietnam had the best fruit so far, but this was nice....

I forgot to take a picture of the rest of breakfast. We took a little walk on the beach road and saw these cool things:

leaf
I thought this poor bare tree looked like a crayon or a pencil.
In the previous post I wrote about poor little Mahahual,

and how it looks like a ghost town. See?
They've got the beach party set up, but no people:


But look at this -

Beautiful, huh?

We got a bit too much sun; poor Marc has a touch of sun poisoning, surprisingly. Usually he just tans so nicely, but not this time. Even I have some color, which is always startling to me. So I don't know how much we'll lie in the sun tomorrow; maybe we'll poke around the Sian Ka'an Reserve, if we feel like it. I just hope it's not so windy.

weather

What you have to understand when you look at the scenery photos is that last year, Hurricane Dean came in and completely destroyed this whole part of the Yucatan coastline. Its eye passed over Mahuhual, which is 25km from here. The cabanas were destroyed, the trees were destroyed, everything, twisted wreckage or dead. It was the 2nd most powerful hurricane to hit the Yucatan since they've been keeping records, apparently.


It makes for some eerie landscapes. The sunset photo in the previous post looks like something from Apocalypse Now -- at least that's what I thought when I took the picture. It was devastating for the region; they'd just built a huge pier for cruise ships (destroyed). They'd just done a major renovation project on Mahuhual so it was cruise-ship-people friendly (i.e., mostly bars, restaurants, and tchotchke shops) - all destroyed.

This morning after breakfast we drove into Mahuhual to look for a new face mask to replace Marc's, since the strap was about to tear in half. It was like a ghost town, very very sad. They're rebuilding, and it is great looking for what it is. Photos to come. Still, it's very sad.

I'm feeling a little like Quasimodo, who went mad with the bells (the bells! the bells! the bells!), but for me it's the wind. It never stops blowing. Marcia said the winter has been very windy; today it's been ~23 miles per hour without stopping for even a second. It blows on my face all night, which makes my hair tickle my face and wakes me up. It blows in every corner of our cabana, when we're trying to get some sun on the beach, when we're doing any damn thing. Growing up in Texas, I'm used to the wind. But still. Good grief.

We went snorkeling again this afternoon, but the winds were so high the water was choppy with big waves so I came back to the shore after just 5 minutes or so. Marc continued on, snorkel trooper that he is, and had a nice look around. More starfish, more red and yellow and blue fish. I watched nervously from my chair on the beach, watching his red snorkel tip.

For lunch we had salbutes, which were amazingly wonderful. That's the pattern; breakfasts are very nice, lunches are amazingly wonderful (yesterday was chicken enchiladas in a homemade mole sauce that was so subtle and delicious), dinners are meh. Last night? Spaghetti with chicken or shrimp in the marinara sauce. Every day I forget to take my camera to lunch with me; tomorrow I hope I remember.

salbutes

Having a simply wonderful time. Sun and good food, relaxing and reading, wandering around together, walking on the beach. Really good times.