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 otherness.

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 boat ride 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 “grand slam.”

Insane clouds and water.

Rudy 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 worn adobe town. Maya there, many of the families generations old. Most 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 furthter along water’s edge to an abandoned lighthouse. The older men didn’t want to drive there. The car sank into  axle-deep sand by lighthouse and got stuck. An older man had warned Barb and me about a very large crocodile living in the mangroves by the lighthouse. A man-eater.

Barb and I paid off our suffering driver and walked back through the jungle the village, a couple of miles. Utterly primitive houses along the way. Ate some local shrimp in Punta Alan,  then walked the final bit up the beach to our vast, empty Grand Slam Fishing Lodge.

Wonderful day. Glad the crocodile didn’t get us.

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 catch one, and you buy a reserved seat. Not especially expensive. If the bus is all booked, you sit around for an hour for the next one. Time means nothing anymore.

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 “zocalo” square. The Mesón del Marqués.

The Mexicans revel in making images of skulls and skeletons. This one is especially fabulous.

Most of the walls are painted in wonderful warm colors. And the low evening sun casts entrancing shadows.

We got a taxi from Valladolid to Chichen Itza. It wasn’t especially expensive, and a lot simpler that getting a bus or *ack* jointing a tour to herded around. The site made a profound impression on me. So alien, ancient, and strange.

The pyramid with tourists, for a sense of scale. But is wasn’t super crowded.

The old-time Maya had, of course, a snake god. Love this guy.

There’s a lot of talk about the Maya being into human sacrifices. Supposedly when they had a tournament in a game something like lacrosse, they’d sacrifice the best player on the winning team! Offering a really good soul up to the gods. Chichen Itza contains a huge (hundred meter long) ball court with glyphs carved into the walls. This one shows a star athlete who’d just had his head lopped off. And snakes of blood are leaping from his severed neck. Takes a little study to properly see this.

So here’s Barb pretending to be a sacrificial victim about to get her head cut off. Seeing her do this made me like her a lot. I myself did exactly the same thing for daughter Isabel’s benefit on a trip to Quintana Roo many years ago. I wrote a big Maya sacrifice scene into my second novel White Light — basing my research on an Uncle Scrooge comic book. Donald gets his heart cut out, to be held aloft in the rays of the setting sun, and Donald’s last thought is that he should have been nicer to Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

A monument at Chichen Itza with a hundred or two hundred skulls carved into the wall. I like how each one is different.

We spent most of the day at Chichen Itza—with its wealthy of strange and uncanny history. Some great hawkers too, Maya with authentic-seeming goods.

Hot from the sun and the walking, we stopped at an unexpectedly great cafe on the Chichen Itza grounds.
Barb and I began idly quarreling over nothing, who knows what, and the Mexican waiters were enjoying the show, laughing in a friendly way, and, I’d like to think, admiring our chic looks. I tend to get this feeling that I get when squiring the attractive Barb.

I felt cosmopolitan, as if living in a Federico Fellini movie, which is of course where I’d most like to be. Marcello Mastoriani and Claudia Cardinale in a Via Veneto nightclub in 8 ½ or La Dolce Vita.

After Chichen Itza we caught a bus to Merida, a larger town in the Yucatan. Given that the prices were so reasonable, we went and got a room in a hotel that’s a former palace, the Mansión Mérida. The ceilings in the rooms were about thirty feet high, and everything was made of amazing old stone.

As a mathematician I was delighted to see dodecahedral stone newel post on the entrance bannisters.

A little museum in Merida had some inspiring pieces from the Maya days. Especially this incredible stone Maya lad. So modern, in a way, like a Picasso. In a way, the word “modern” doesn’t’ mean all that much in art. Each creator and each era finds their own idiosyncratic way of representing things.

The people we encountered were friendly and relaxed. Nobody, but nobody, mentioned US politics—it seems they’re not interested in our national obsessions. The Mexicans have their own world, their own culture and history, their own lives. Viva Mexico!

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