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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.

saving daylight

Mystery solved with the whole time thing: Mexico changes the clocks today, spring forward and all that. I've been so confused, since all maps show us in the Central time zone but we were 2 hours behind NY. Now the world is right again, one hour behind.

I could've titled this post wildlife day, because it's been great that way. After breakfast we loaded our gear in the car and went back to the shipwreck spot we found yesterday. On the way, as we passed a huge mangrove field, an enormous flock of birds flew up in response to our car and we saw roseate spoonbills among them. White versions and white herons, plus the gorgeous pink ones. We'd heard about them at dinner last night but we weren't expecting to see them. It was very cool. Of all the days NOT to have our camera!! I tracked down this picture on the web:


On the way back, guess what was crossing the road? A tapir. An honest to goodness tapir. They look like they're surely related to pigs, right? Their closest relatives are horses and rhinoceroses. I know. You'd never guess that. Again, no camera (and thanks, wikipedia, for the photo):

And in between, we snorkeled. The weather was absolutely, positively perfect. Warm but not scorching, a small breeze but not a wind, and relatively clear water in so many shades of blue. Turquoise, and aqua, and teal, and pale pale blue, and navy, and greenish. We saw more than a dozen kinds of fish, orange ones and blue ones with yellow tails and plate-shaped blue ones, and a black one that looked like a big angel fish and striped ones and a big red one with a bug eye. A sargeant major. Little brilliant yellow ones with a black dot, and some soft yellow orange ones with no decoration. Fish that looked like gravel. A reddish-brown one with a weirdly shaped belly. A wide variety of striped fish, vertical and horizontal versions. We saw a large ray with a big head, and we saw it swim away, flapping its wings. A passle of pelicans - big ones - sitting on the wrecked ship, looking all shy with their big old beaks lowered against their chests. Little sand lizards on the beach. Needle fish in the shallows, swimming fast in formation.

Since we don't have an underwater camera, we quickly found images of a few of the fish we saw today:


It was so much fun, snorkeling side by side, seeing the beautiful fish and spending this lovely day together. At the water's edge, the water was sometimes in these little pools. Some were cold and some were really warm, so we spent some time just playing in a warm one before we left.

We're both bright (and hot) pink, but I know how this will turn out. Marc will develop a deep tan, and I'll peel and return to my whiteness. The white girl's burden, I suppose.

Here are a few more photos Marc took on his walk this morning.

Keep away - is that a little devil?
And oh the irony. No tirar basura means no littering.
SO Mexico.
Hurricane sale, you could probably buy this pretty cheaply.
Frigate birds flying overhead like the Nazgul.

Really, so much fun. The days are long and relaxing, who could ask for more of a vacation....

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.