A Mad Dog in Mexico

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Once on Isla Mujeres, you quickly find that it’s laid back, relaxing, languid, and slow moving, operating on island time. It’s reminiscent of Bali. Or St. Maarten. Or Cuba. Okay, it’s like most any island with the notable exception of Long Island.		I’m on Isla Mujeres, the Island of Women, and so far there seems to be just as many hombres as mujeres. Not that I really thought it would be otherwise, but when I told the guy at the airport shuttle stand where I was going he said, “Ooh, Isla Mujeres! Lots of women with big bare melones!” He loves saying that to gringos, especially those who are male and don’t know any better so they start to drool like one of Pedro Pavlov’s perros. You can spot them on the island because they stand out like a sore thumb—they’re the ones walking around with a big straw sticking out of a piña colada-filled coconut. Obviously not their first, either. I have to say though, that during the week I was there I only saw two people like that, and they were a couple. And no, the girl didn’t have big bare melones. If the guy at the shuttle stand knew his attempt to raise masculine expectations was in vain maybe he’d freshen his routine. You know, change it to something about there being an Isle of Man in England so in the name of equal rights Mexico has one for women. On second thought, maybe he should stick with the tried and true. Henny Youngman did and he managed to do okay. Isla Mujeres is an island a mere eight miles from Cancun. It’s everything Cancun isn’t—small, very few cars, no hotels over about eight stories, no A/C that I came across, no chain restaurants other than a McDonald’s at the ferry landing, and real. Cancun, you see, isn’t real, it was manufactured. It was dreamed up by the Mexican government in the 1970’s and built from scratch on a deserted stretch of land for the express purpose of extracting cash from tourists. Isla Mujeres, on the other hand, has been around a lot longer, having had Mayan temples on it when Francisco Hernández de Córdoba popped by in 1517 looking for slaves. Had he been looking for fancy high-rise hotel resorts with Bubba Gump Shrimp and the Hard Rock Café across the street he would have gone to Cancun, though even then he would have had to wait 463 years for them to arrive. En masse. Forrest Gump or no Forrest Gump, the shrimp isn’t worth that kind of wait. You get to see all this when you take the shuttle from the Cancun airport to the Isla Mujeres ferry, riding through what they blatantly and honestly call the Zona Hotelera, or Living Hell, whether there are passengers getting off there or not. Apparently the Isla Mujeres Chamber of Commerce pays the shuttle drivers to take that route in order to make Isla Mujeres look that much better.
If you need to tell a cab driver where to go, you give him the name of the business or a landmark nearby. My friends’ house, where I was house and dog sitting, is “En la calle para Maestro Rivera,” or on the street where a retired professor who apparently every cabbie knows lives. It’s an unusual system but it works.		Once on Isla Mujeres, you quickly find that it’s laid back, relaxing, languid, and slow moving, operating on island time. It’s reminiscent of Bali. Or St. Maarten. Or Cuba. Okay, it’s like most any island with the notable exception of Long Island. The first thing you notice is that there are very few cars aside from taxis, though there are a lot of motorbikes, motor scooters, and golf carts. Yes, people ride around the island in golf carts, and not just tourists either. But before you think they’ve gotten lost and are searching for the 14th green, you need to understand that there isn’t a golf course to be found. It’s kind of like going through Compton and noticing that a lot of people walk around with baseball bats but there’s no baseball field around, only much safer. Finding things on the island can be a challenge. The streets have names and the buildings have numbers, but only in concept. It doesn’t help if you see an ad for a restaurant or someone tells you their home address because there aren’t any numbers on the buildings. This would be a big problem except there aren’t any street signs either, so it’s not like you’d get close and couldn’t find the specific place. I did see a couple of street names painted on corner buildings in the Centro, but for all I know they were a cruel joke and those weren’t the street names at all. So getting around becomes all about landmarks. It’s “the purple bakery on the curve near the baseball field right before the roast chicken stand” or “if you reach the gas station you’ve gone too far.” Speaking of which, there are only two gas stations and one bank on the island, which may not always be convenient but it does make directions easier to follow if either a bank or gas station is involved. If you need to tell a cab driver where to go, you give him the name of the business or a landmark nearby. My friends’ house, where I was house and dog sitting, is “En la calle para Maestro Rivera,” or on the street where a retired professor who apparently every cabbie knows lives. It’s an unusual system but it works. And since you’re in a languid, relaxing, laid back place that’s on island time, who cares? Isla Mujeres is part tropical island and part Mexico. There are hammock hooks built into the walls of the houses, you put your trash out on the sidewalk (in a bag or barrel, please) and it’s picked up daily—yes, five-day-a-week trash pickup!—and there are dogs everywhere. Mostly mangy, half-starved looking ones that bark but are too weak to run after you so you don’t need to worry. I only saw one Chihuahua, though considering the state of Chihuahua is 2,123 km away—which for those in the U.S. who think the metric system is a music program to teach rhythm, is 20 gallons—it’s not surprising. Then again, the other dogs are so much bigger and so look so hungry that a tiny Chihuahua wouldn’t stand a chance around here. Mmmmm....tacos de perro!
Next, a young girl showed us how she was doing in her Contortions 101 class, the comedy duo came back for another endless routine, we heard “Ooh ee ooh ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang, ooh ee ooh ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang” for the fourteenth time, and before you knew it, it was intermission.		Speaking of which, the food is definitely Mexican. Okay, definitely island Yucatan. I was spoiled the last time I was in Mexico because I was in Mexico City, where there are people from every part of the country, thus you find a wide range of food from all over. In Isla Mujeres, most restaurants offer pretty much the same menu: tacos, chilies rellenos, poc chuc (Mayan pork), sopa de lima, sopa de frijoles, and fish done the same four ways—whole fried, in garlic, breaded, and Veracruzano. What I wouldn’t have given for pescado hecho diferente, fish made differently. There’s surprisingly little street food, and at least half of that is hot dogs. As in Bali, the best food was in the grossest places, like the great huaraches—now there’s something different!—and empanadas at a literal hole-in-the-wall called, of all things, Huaraches, where the daughter took my order, the mother cooked it, and the father sent the son down the block to get my soda, then watched TV until the check was paid so he could pocket the money. Now that’s a family business. The island is mostly about relaxing. There’s snorkeling, diving, a turtle farm, a dolphin swim, and a house that looks like a conch shell, though it could just as easily be the Stay Puft man’s head poking out of the ground. Houses, like clouds, make great Rorschach tests. For day trips, you can go to Cancun and remind yourself why you’re staying on Isla Mujeres, Playa Carmen so you can be beautiful—in your mind, anyway, or Tulum, the Mayan ruins that overlook the Caribbean Ocean where more people take photos of the iguanas than the ruins. True the iguanas are larger, but that’s because the ruins are about 497 years older and have been through a zillion hurricanes. Let’s see if the big fat iguanas can stand up to that test of time. I was lucky enough to see a Mexican circus while I was on Isla Mujeres. The first night—in fact, barely an hour after I set foot on the island—the friends who I would be housesitting for and I went to Circo Alegría, a one-ring anti-Cirque de Soleil. To be fair, it did have some things in common with Cirque du Soleil. Each has a tent, each has performers, and neither uses animals, unless you count the goats which were grazing by Circo Alegria’s trailers, though I suspect they’re kept around for food, not the audience’s enjoyment. We sat on wooden planks that were lashed together with fraying rope and munched popcorn doused with picante sauce alongside the neighborhood kids who had insisted we join them. Suddenly, a loud, distorted dance version of The Witch Doctor erupted over the loudspeaker, alerting everyone that the circus was about to begin. “Ooh ee ooh ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang, ooh ee ooh ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang.” It was the recurring theme of the circus, not to mention a recurring nightmare—I mean, theme—throughout the rest of the week, as a truck blasting the song in an even louder and more distorted form wended its way around the island all hours of the day and night trying to lure people to the circus. I have to admit I have no clue what the recorded announcer was saying to attract people, but I suspect it was “Come to the circus tonight and we promise not to play this song again!” If it wasn’t, it should have been. It would work.
“Pull over there and empty the car, please,” he said, renewing my faith in customs inspectors’ ability to detect a lie even when it’s the truth.		Meanwhile, back at the circus, the two strings of bare light bulbs that lit the tent went out, plunging us into pitch darkness. When they came back on, two of the ticket takers were standing in the center of the ring twirling batons. Badly. Luckily it was the women. They were followed by a man who did handstands on a chair while his seven-year-old daughter stood next to him shuffling her feet in a robotic, vaguely dance-like Rainman-esque movement. Then two clown/comedians came out in a valiant attempt to resurrect vaudeville, Barney the Kinda Sorta Dinosaur ran around the tent making the kids squeal with delight, and one of the baton twirlers returned to do a little salsa dance while the tent lights rapidly flashed on and off and a young boy used an electrical cord to rotate a light pole so it would follow her like a spotlight. Next, a young girl showed us how she was doing in her Contortions 101 class, the comedy duo came back for another endless routine, we heard “Ooh ee ooh ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang, ooh ee ooh ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang” for the fourteenth time, and before you knew it, it was intermission. We were starving. Popcorn and picante can only hold you so long. Obviously the performers were starving too, but since we’d paid our admission we felt like we’d done our part to help out. Besides, they always had the goats. We left to get dinner. I sure hope we didn’t miss the trained goat act. Though this was my first Mexican circus, it wasn’t my first time in Mexico. A year or so before I’d been in Mexico City, Taxco, and the old part of Acapulco, as far around the other side of the bay from the big hotels and resorts as you can get. But even that wasn’t the first time. The first time was when I stopped by for lunch. Honestly. I was driving across the country and found myself at El Paso around lunch time. I’d mentioned to friends several days before that I might go to Mexico for lunch and they recommended I park and take a bus across. As I approached the border I didn’t see any parking lots and before I knew it I was on the bridge and heading into Mexico. I took a quick tour of Ciudad Juárez, enjoyed seeing all the dentists’ shingles, found an authentic Mexican restaurant, and had a typical combo platter that wasn’t any better than what you’d get in a mediocre Mexican restaurant in Paducah. As if there’s another kind there. I walked around for a few minutes, then got my care and headed back to the U.S. “What were you doing in Mexico?” the customs agent asked. “I went there for lunch,” I replied truthfully, knowing as it came out of my mouth that if I were him I wouldn’t believe me either. “Pull over there and empty the car, please,” he said, renewing my faith in customs inspectors’ ability to detect a lie even when it’s the truth. After pulling everything from the trunk—remember, I was on a cross-country road trip—I stood by as the dog sniffed around the car, tried to fit everything back in the trunk, and drove off with the memory of how much trouble it can be to eat a mediocre meal. But hey, at least I’d been to Mexico. Read more Mad Dog on the Road ©2008 Mad Dog Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved. These columns appear in better newspapers across the country. Read them, but there's no rush.

©2008 Mad Dog Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved. These columns appear in better newspapers across the country. Read them, but there's no rush.

©2008 Mad Dog Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
These columns appear in better newspapers across the country. Read them, but there's no rush.