[As of Sunday, April 26, I’m still putting this post together…the end part might be done by Monday.]

In January, 2025, my girlfriend Barb Ash and I took a two-week trip to Quintana Roo and the Yucatan in Mexico.

The hand of the woman sitting in front of me on the plane looked like an alien flesh-crab. Those nails! What if it hopped loose and scuttled around? The spacetime of air travel is othernes.

We landed in a Quintana Roo jungle, a new airstrip hacked out from the trees.  About thirty miles from Tulum, a popular tourist site known for its ruins. We toured the ruins, quite awesome.

Barb’s Hollywood nephew was getting married in a casual resort nearby, it was fun. Met an interesting woman Taffy Brodesser-Akner, and ended up reading her recent novel Long Island Compromise.  The title has three meanings. Very funny and jaded, maybe a bit like Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint.

Barg and I wanted to get away from it all, and we headed south along the coast for an ecological preserve that contains a tiny village called Punta Allen.  Caution is the better part of wisdom, and I had not rented a car. We took a cab down to the edge of the preserve, where we found a boat among the mangroves.

It was small launch, sent by the resort where we’d be staying, Grand Slam Fishing Lodge. The transfer took about an hour, winding past completely deserted salt keys with amazing birds.

The lodge was almost completely empty, the beach was unbelievable.

This seemed not to be the best fishing season for bonefish, permit, and tarpon — a trio which makes up a fisherman’s “triples slam.”

Insane clouds and water.

Rud alone on the beach in front of our room..

Barb and I walked down the beach a couple of times, reaching little Punta Allen itself. Tiny well-lived-in adobe town. Mostly Mayans there; many of the families generations old. Most of them spoke no English at all, but a lady at a sort of travel agency spoke English. Not that it was a “travel agency” as you’d imagine.

We wanted to go on a boat ride and do some snorkeling. The lady phoned around and found a local man with a boat, and he took us out. Amazing day.

On a second outing, we got young Punta Alan local to drive us down to an abandoned lighthouse. The older guys didn’t want to go there.  The car sank into the axle-deep by the lighthouse and got stuck. There was talk of very large caymans or crocodiles living in the ubiquitoud mangroves.

Barb and I walked back though the jungle, reaching Punta Alan, and then walking the final bit up the beach to our vast, empty Grand Slam Fishing Lodge.

Wonderful adventures.

We moved on, catching a local bus to Valladolid in the Yucatan. In the past, I’d ignorantly imagined that a Mexican bus might be sketchy, but far from it. They’re quite luxurious, with large, comfortable velour seats. No piled-up crates of live chickens, no waving bottles of tequila! You go to a local bus station to catchone, and you buy a reserved seat. Not especially expensive.

Valladolid  is a charming, other-worldly town, completely off the grid, save for the fact that it’s near the famed square-topped pyramid Chichen Itza. Prices very low; we got an extremely posh room on the top floor of a top hotel, in an old building with a large private patio overlooking the cathedral and the “zocolo” square.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 20th, 2025 at 11:06 am and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.