You Say Flamingo, I Say Flamenco

A hot day, another excursion, and more stories. This time, off to Celestun, a small coastal village set within a biological reserve known for it’s vast flocks of flamingoes. We arrived at the dock just in time to group up with two young couples and boarded a small lancha out to the breeding and feeding areas of the flamingoes. At first, you chug along a beautiful mangrove shoreline populated by blue herons, white herons, ospreys, as well as gray and white pelicans.

After a while longer you begin to see, in the distance, a pink blanket covering the reddish water. Closer, you start to see the flocks of stately pink birds with long snaky heads, spindly legs and gorgeous plumage – a stir of pink shades, dappled with white, with black borders along the wings. By the time the boat stops, you are the regulation distance from the flock and it is a swirl of sheer beauty. Flamingoes  are there in every position, landing, flying, and walking across the shallow water. They walk, they do not paddle, despite every appearance to the contrary. For all of their gangly features, they are graceful dancers spinning about in all manner of configurations, one, two, three, ten, a hundred. All together, the guide estimates that there are 3,000 flamingoes mas o menos there on that day.

The total number in the flock, he says, is around 40,000. Much of what we learn is at the behest of Marco, one of the young Mexican people, who more or less volunteered to be our interpreter. He is a handsome fellow and his companion, Celine, is a blonde, Swedish sunburst of smiles and warmth. We take to them immediately. We continue silently watching the birds with only the “click” of cameras punctuating, now and then, the cries of the birds. The trip continued with a high speed entry into a narrow slotted waterway at the beginning of a mangrove forest that was nothing less than thrilling. After a short hike, we boarded the lancha and headed toward home. 

Entering the Mangrove

Our new friend, Celine

In the interim, we got to know Marco and Celine a little better, discovering that they had met on a grueling Machu Pichu hike awhile back and struck up a serious relationship – as in having met both sets of in-laws. We decide to have lunch together at the beach at Celestun and over fried fish and shrimp cocktails we learned that Celine is just about to start a new job as a HR person (she will be a huge success) and Marco is a part owner of a startup energy management consultancy, who, though he attended and graduated from law school, decided that he could make more of a contribution to the fledgling energy management sector of the Mexican economy than as a lawyer. He is thoughtful, fair-minded, realistic, and now, as the result of our political carnival up north, very concerned about the future. He is mindful of the corruptive backdrop that seems to be ever-present in his country and worried about the damage that it, coupled with our current and nearly complete misunderstanding of his country, may cause. Our conversation continues all the way back to Merida, as they kindly afforded us a luxurious ride in their rental car, sparing our tired butts the caramba ride we had expected on the return bus. We parted with an invitation for them to join us at some point in Oregon. As they are both rabid outdoor types, we think they may actually follow through.

We have a temperate day for a change and elect to take an inner city walk around the main zocalo with a city-sponsored guide who is the fastest speaking individual, in both English and Spanish that we have ever encountered. He is full of fascinating facts about the main buildings in the colonial center of Merida i.e. that they are constructed almost entirely of stones purloined and repurposed for churches and other nearby buildings, from five Mayan temples that once stood in the city center. He guides us through the buildings rattling like a machine gun.

Yucatan Governor's Office with Pacheco paintings

We are particularly taken by the artwork in the governor’s building by an artist named Pacheco. His mural-sized images are actually paintings that create a harrowing pictorial history of the exploitation of the Mayans from the beginning of the Spanish Conquest to the present day. Unlike the expansive murals of Rivera, Orozco, and Sequieros, these are personal, tightly focused studies of pain and heroism, hung on walls that were once the pride of Mayan kings.

Eric doing his best to smile

A hot day comes next. We are off on a voyage to find and swim in cenotes. Eric is not at his best but soldiers on through the usual folding into bus seats in a hot, claustrophic collectivo, out to two small villages about two hours south of Merida. Once there, we undergo a quick ritual of locating a motorcycle-like contraption with a bench seat on the front that will be our chariot of sorts for the rest of the day. It is quite something to be seated about where an engine ought to be while observing the rather large buses heading right at you. You quickly realize that you are, essentially, functioning as the tricycle driver’s airbag. That is just a tad disconcerting, along with the sobering fact that the combined weight of the two of us seems to be just a tick or two over the carrying capacity of the engine which is howling like a coyote. Just behind us Eric, ever the optimist, pictures a sudden detonation in which we are separated from the driver and sent headlong into something coming the other way. It’s a bit like being Ben Hur - had he been sitting backwards and in front of the horses with no way to steer them.

Surreal cenote San Antonio

Cenote swimmers

Eric descending

In any case, our driver, Benito conducts us through changing into bathing suits, obtaining lifejackets, and carrying us to the cenotes. From there, we are directed to climb down a rickety stairway inside a manhole-sized opening in the rocks. 
This, we are thinking, is just getting better and better. We begin to wonder when the flint knife will come out as we are slaughtered and cast into the underworld. But no, not even close. Instead, at the bottom, there is a huge room and a clear, beautiful pool of comfortable water lapping at the bottom of stalagtites, while overhead is a blast of sunlight shining down through the hole we just entered illuminating the pool with an eerie, alien, and astonishingly beautiful light. We swim, we climb out, eat with our driver Benito and, after practicing still more Mayan, part company and catch a collectivo back to our welcome hotel room and its A/C.

Benito stays cool