MEXICO
– INCIDENTS AND COINCIDENCES 2020
This
amazing and interesting story unfolds and intertwines with one of our
adopted girls and some engrossing books set in Mexico.
 |
| Lupita and her daughter May 2020 |
We
read the book The Lost World of Quintana Roo on the advice of
a friend, Mark Callaghan, whose mother took her two young sons to
Yucatán to escape the carnage of the Vietnam War. Mark’s mother
was a journalist and adventurer.
We
often ran into Mark at Caffe Latte where we heard many of Mark’s
stories of adventures in Tulum, a wild outpost in the Federal
Territory of Quintana Roo on the Caribbean coast, long before any
paved roads pierced the jungle.
At
one chance meeting at Caffe Latte Jane
and I exuberantly told Mark
the
story of our recent trip to the Caribbean Sea coast at Akumal where
we paid $20.00
for a
book
we definitely wanted to read entitled, Under
the Waters of Mexico
by Pablo
Bush Romero, owner and operator of Mexico City's
largest Ford dealership,
a big game trophy hunter, treasure
seeker, Caribbean
resort owner,
and
very manipulative businessman.*
Mark
replied that we must read the book, The Lost World of Quintana Roo
by Michel Peissel for the true story of Quintana Roo before the
advent of tourism.
Without
going off target here let me tell you Mark’s piece of advice opened
up a most intriguing part of our lives. The book was out of print,
scarce and hard to find.
Long
story short: The Mérida English Library had a copy and a friend
checked it out for us. The print was too small for Jane to read. Jane
was not going to be foiled. Jane made a digital copy of the entire
book. This was time consuming but the result was that it could be read on a Kindle reader where the user friendly features made font size
and other modifications easy.
Back
to this amazing book that ultimately led us to more intriguing
reading and out of the way adventures.
A
quick synopsis of young Michel Peissel. Michel (1937-2011) was the
son of a French diplomat and raised in England. He attended Harvard
Business School. After business school he had six months free before
starting work on Wall Street in NYC. Looking for an adventure, he
headed to Mexico. It was 1957.
In
Mexico he fell in with a group of expatriate German intellectuals and
artists who had fled the regimes of Russia, Germany, Spain, and other
war torn hot spots. Michel told the group he was looking for an
exceptional adventure to a place without roads. Their unanimous
advice was to head to the jungle territory of Quintana Roo on the
Yucatan Peninsula’s Caribbean sea coast.
The
result was one of the most harrowing stories of exploring and
discovery of the century.
We
have several friends besides Mark Callaghan who can collaborate
Michel Peissel’s stories related in his book The Lost World of
Quintana Roo.
Michel’s
recounting of the trip from Tepoztlan to Mérida, Yucatan, contains
enough adventure to be a book of its own. The trip from Mérida to
the Caribbean coast through the jungle was more adventure than could
be endured by most people. The trek along the Caribbean south from
Cozumel all the way to the British Honduras, now known as Belize, got
him acquainted with the local population in their isolated cocoteros
or coconut plantations that extended along the entire Caribbean coast
of Mexico. On this trek Michel was befriended, helped, guided,
transported, and hunted like an animal. Hunger, thirst, fatigue, and
insect attacks were just a few of his hardships he endured before
being jailed in Belize. Along his way he made some extremely
important geological discoveries that included the Mayan temple ruins
of Muyil, a jungle seaport connected by extensive canal system still
operable to this day and a series of Mayan signalizing stations
dispersed along the coast.
A
few interesting revelations and discoveries excerpted from The
Lost World of Quintana Roo:
Seagoing
sailing freight canoes of the Chontal Maya from Tabasco plied these
waters ranging from distant Vera Cruz, Cuba, Florida and Central
America. The cumbersome sea salt from northern Yucatan could have
only been transported by seagoing vessel. Other cargo items included
cotton, cocoa, copper, dyes, fish, honey, jade, and more.
I
learned that the peninsula of Yucatan has always considered itself
independent from Mexico, and the Yucatecans, as they are called, had
often tried to gain their freedom, even attempting to join the
short-lived Texas republic. In April 1958, when I set out, there were
no roads connecting Yucatan with central Mexico, and apart from
planes the only means of communication was by the Ferrocarriles del
Sur Este, a small, prehistoric railroad line that wound through the
dense jungle of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec to the state of Campeche.
Unfortunately,
Quintana Roo is changing rapidly and civilization will soon
precipitate the extinction of the last rebellious Indians, thus
hastening the end of the long history of the Mayas, who for such
countless centuries have reigned as masters over the jungles of
Yucatan. And the day will come when only the chachalaka will remain
to call up the gods of the East, the North, the West, and the South
who rule the windswept lagoons, the endless jungles, and the
sun-scorched beaches of Quintana Roo.
Our
Lupita’s connection to the story: In Lupita’s inquisitive life of
travels she settled in the mountains south of Mexico City at
Tepoztlán, the city of eternal spring, where she became acquainted
with Don Ruge, one of the last to remember the group of German
expatriates Michel Peissel met in 1957. Gustav Regler whom Michel
met in Tepoztlán where his adventure began was part of the
group.Lupita met Don Ruge and they became friends. Lupita was easy
to like.
Don
Ruge, a philosopher, peace advocate, and author, launched Lupita into
the five-star world of travels across Europe and even as far off as
Kazakhstan where Lupita started her counseling career and was the
guest of the president of Kazakhstan.
One
of the group of expatriate Germans that Michel Peissel met in 1957
was Gustav Regler, author of Owl of Minerva, an
autobiography, and
A Land Bewitched about his experiences in Mexico. Gustav
Regler is one the finest authors we have ever read. His books are
hard to find, but we now own a copy of A Land Bewitched,
thanks to our German friend Karin
Humbert who found it in a rare book store in England and gave it to
us as a gift.
Excerpted
from Michel Piessel’s book, The Lost World of
Quintana Roo. He
describes a
meeting Gustav Regler:
A
man quite so fascinating I had never met, and Gustav Regler had no
trouble firing my imagination about Mexico and setting alight in me a
small fire for exploration and adventure that had almost been
extinguished by the rigors of student life and docile resignation.
In
this sense Gustav Regler was responsible for what was to happen to me
during what I had planned to be a peaceful stay in Mexico. The narrow
window of the small gray car had not been so narrow after all, and
had led by way of the four-lane highway to Gustav Regler and onto a
path that was going to cost me all but my life.
A
note about Gustav Regler, he was an activist with exceptional
intellect and a brilliant mind. He was a compassionate humanitarian,
politically just and publicly empathetic. Many events impacted this
man’s life beginning with his mother introducing the Bible into her
bed-time stories. He wanted to trust and came away with memories of
his foolish heroism in WWI. He wished he could talk to one of the
dead and was conscious of the utter finality of their end. He was
imprisoned because he would no longer endure the war. Hitler’s
fascism of the 1930s which he found frighteningly lethal drove him
and his social conscience to communism.
Joe
Stalin’s twisted and oppressive degradation of the Soviet people
drove him away from communism to fight Franco’s fascism in Spain,
and ultimately he was imprisoned in a concentration camp in France
for being anti-fascist.
He
and a shipload of anti-fascist refugees from the camps in France were
shipped off to the U.S. and refused entry…Mexico took them in.
The
following are quotes from The Owl of Minerva:
Regler
to his wife: “We could each think our own thoughts, and we would
not let this mad, merciless century drive us apart.”
Regler
about his wife: “It is the only temple that has any link with the
cosmos." She loved the Mexican pyramids because they were not
graves but altars speaking to Heaven.”
In
The Owl of Minerva Regler relates how the Russian
Communists went to absurd extremes to destroy Regler, his wife, and
their adopted home in Mexico.
This
is a powerful book of an extraordinary man’s struggle through the
tribulations of the 20th century. I have read it twice.
Experience
Mexico through the words of Michel Peissel and Gustav Regler:
The
Lost World of Quintana Roo by Michel Peissel
The
Owl of Minerva by Gustav Reglar
A
Land Bewitched: Mexico in the Shadow of the Centuries
by Gustav Regler
*Akumal
is
a small beachfront tourist resort community in Mexico, 100 km (62 mi)
south of Cancun
popular
with
scuba divers and
owned by
Pablo
Bush Romero.
Pablo Bush's family still controls a portion of Akumal.
