Sobreangry-resort

Descrição

Getting to Cozumel was just as easy as I’d hoped.This would be the only leisure part of the entire day.Standing in line at the ferry terminal, staring out to sea, a few voices drifted up to stand behind me.I could hear a Texas drawl, among other clear distinctions, as well as a few Eastern European accents.Everyone was asking everyone else what to do when they arrived at the island.I couldn’t believe my ears.This is how tourist traps work as well as they do.I met those people when I was working at the Grand Canyon.I met them when I was tending bar in downtown New Orleans.They’re the ones that ask famously stupid questions, and occasionally disappear right off the map forever.This time I wasn’t working.I stared at the sea and tried my best to ignore them.The sea stretched away from me in a blissful haze, the shear blueness of it softening my heart.Mister. A voice cut into my peace, loud enough to override the music inside my headset.Excuse me, mister.I pried my eyes away from the sea, still smiling, and fixed them with what I imagine was a disarming pleasantness toward an undeserving target.His accent betrayed New York City, or possibly northern New Jersey, either one of the, respectively, ninth and eighth levels of hell.Yeah, so, I was wondering if maybe my daughter could get a chance to sit in a window seat for a little while.I looked back toward the sea and placed my hand up in front of me as though touching a windowpane when, in fact, there wasn’t even a wall there.I was sitting on the seaward side of a bench in an open seating area, completely uncovered, and the nearest windows were downstairs inside the cabin.I wiped my hand back and forth in the emptiness, pantomiming with increasing sarcasm the total lack of a window.My new companion didn’t get the joke.He merely stood there, stodgy but stolid, waiting for me to get up so his kid could have my seat.Sighing, I relented.I would sooner have thrown the fellow overboard than do anything to help or facilitate his happiness, but I felt for his daughter.One cannot help one’s lineage any more than one can help being struck by lightning.Ethnicity is a function of chance, and sometimes chance is a real bitch.If nothing else the child will remember that an American guy who clearly didn’t like her father still went out of his way to make her happy.Besides, I thought wryly, with any luck I was helping to spoil her, thus ensuring her awful dad’s life would be full of incident when she reached puberty.The city of San Miguel was about how I expected.More like Cancun than like Playa del Carmen, but still preferable.I didn’t spot a single Señor Frog’s.Turn left, then forward, then left again, then forward, and so on.After asking my fifteenth clerk I finally found the place, and was not at all disappointed.It was an open shop, with no front wall to speak of, and right in the center, just as I walked into the place, sat the mountain bike of my dreams.It was bright yellow, a great color for a bike when you’re afraid of being hit by a car.It had big, meaty tires, which looked like they could find purchase in anything but quicksand.And it had both front and rear shocks.I was probably drooling when the clerk came over to ask if I needed assistance.Cuánto alquilareste I asked in shaky Spanish, hoping that it meant how much is it to rent this?It’s seventeen bucks per day, the clerk responded in perfect English, chuckling a little as she did so.You’ll need to leave a credit card or a driver license, and it comes with a lock. The woman was charming, obviously used to dealing with Americans, and showed no signs of readying herself to begin the customary haggling process.My mind, as usual, wandered back to New Orleans, where I first encountered this same irony.Lots of gunshots.Meanwhile, many or most of the line cooks with whom I worked lived in places scary enough to deserve titles like the Bullet Hole District, places like the Ninth Ward and Calliope.They didn’t get phone calls from their siblings about gunshots going off because, honestly, a whole day without gunshots would have been much more startling to them.I shouldn’t have been surprised to find that same situation in Cozumel, and I wasn’t, exactly.Behind me lay a multitude of merchant outlets, most of which catered almost exclusively to soft, pink, cruise ship patrons who demanded their water in sealed bottles and wouldn’t even consider taking their obnoxious visors off when they entered a building.And here were the ones providing all their precious services, living in squalor.The fact that I recognized this song and dance did little to assuage the fact that it disgusted me.Most aggravating of all was the colonialistic element.Just outside of the city, where the traffic and the urban development both come to a collective stop, I encountered an elderly woman and her teenaged son walking along the street in the direction of San Miguel.I came to a stop right in front of them and offered them a drink from one of my water bottles.They both shrank away in fright.The woman whispered something into the lad’s ear, and he reached tentatively forward and took the bottle.He sniffed it, eyed me curiously, and took a deep swig before handing it to the woman.They were dirty from head to toe, could well have been homeless, and probably were not used to charity from strangers, let alone from American strangers riding bicycles along roads where tourists recklessly sped in rented cars and scooters.The boy handed the bottle back to me, looking a bit more relaxed but still wary.I took the bottle back without pausing to wipe the lid or anything insulting like that, and took a hearty quaff.Now they openly smiled.