The Lost Secrets of Maya Technology by James A. O'Kon - BOOK REVIEW

 

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

The Lost Secrets of Maya Technology by James A. O'Kon

The Lost Secrets of Maya Technology is an extensive compendium of the stand alone scientific knowledge base that impacts the world’s economic and health environment to this day handed down to us by the ancient Olmec/Mayan civilizations.

This was an excellent book except for the following that were important to development of the world’s economic health and overlooked in the book: 1. Nixtamalization of maize (Indian corn) and numerous medicines such as hypnotic drugs like morning glory blossom seeds. If you eat four seeds you will feel good, but if you ingested forty you will begin building pyramids.

2. The Chontal Maya and their extensive sea going trade network to North America, South America and the Caribbean Sea. Copper from upper Michigan, Inca produce and craftsmanship plus the sharing of sustaining agricultural technology...just a few of the multitude of acquired and innovated achievements that being the hemisphere’s largest exporter of sea salt. This sea salt trade was commandeered from the Maya by the conquistador Spanish and continues production in northern Yucatan to this day.

EXCERPTS:

At the height of their civilization, their scientific and technological achievements were more advanced than any other culture on the planet.

Maya created written almanacs of solar and lunar cycles of Venus, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, and Saturn with great precision.

Maya mathematical system used a base of 20, rather than a base of 10 (used in European mathematics), and enabled the calculation of massive numbers using only three symbols in addition to the basic functions. Their development of positional mathematics enabled the calculation of numbers in magnitudes of the hundreds of trillions.

These masters of the written word not only chronicled the history of the Maya and executed daily correspondence that managed the city-state, but they wrote thousands of books dealing with numerous and diverse subjects including history, royal lineage, matters of astronomy, mathematics, calendars, technology, medicine, law, ritual, music, and the natural history of plants and animals, among other subjects. During the Classic Period, from AD 250 to AD 900, the sophistication of Maya arts and sciences soared while Europe stumbled through the Dark Ages. When the Maya were enjoying the good life in their grand cities with populations of 100,000, London was a swampy river trading town with 9,000 inhabitants.

A popular part of American and world history books, the chronicles of the King under Spanish Colonial rule, and best-selling novels, all of which brought the romantic story of the Inca and their bridges to the attention of the world. This was not the case for the Maya, whose civilization had collapsed 600 years before the conquest and did not have Spanish chronicles describing examples of their lost technology.????? (only in the state of Yucatan)

Because of the records left by the Spanish chronicles, the Inca had a historic advantage over other pre-Columbian cultures, with the exception of the Aztecs. The Maya did not have this advantage. The Maya civilization and its technology had collapsed 600 years before the conquest. ???? (not so)

Maya society optimized their disposable time for advancing science and expanding ideas. This disposable time was made possible by the bountiful harvests that enabled city dwellers freedom from farm labor. Nixtamalization?

Maya cities were masterpieces of artistic and technological creativity brought to realization by the invention of cast-in-place concrete, tall structures, efficient infrastructure, and city planning. The urban city-states were a tour de force of Maya intellectualism. The Maya transportation systems with all-weather roads and seagoing vessels brought wealth to the city-states by enabling successful trade throughout Mesoamerica and across the seas. Chontal Maya?

Fortune turned against the Maya: between the fateful period of AD 790 to AD 910 the greatest drought in 7,000 years engulfed the Yucatan, brought about demographic devastation on a scale unparalleled in world history, and destroyed their exquisite scientific civilization. (only in the northwestern Yucatan)

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Canoeing with the Cree by Eric Sevareid - book review

 

BOOK REVIEW – FIVE STARS

Canoeing with the Cree by Eric Sevareid

A once in a life time epic adventure brought to fruition by a young high school graduate of Norwegian extraction. Meticulously planned and spurned on by youthful exuberance this escapade would prove to be a dangerous undertaking.

I originally read the book over thirty years ago. This trip had been in my mind my whole life and as adventuresome as I am I was very happy that Eric Sevareid made the trip and documented it so exquisitely to satisfy my dreams of wanderlust.

The book is a real thriller even on the second read.

Excerpts:

Two young men about to graduate from high school, begins as do many youthful dreams. On the cusp of adulthood, with nothing ostensible to lose, Eric Sevareid and his friend Walt Port decide to leave the comforts of their homes to seek adventure—in a secondhand, eighteen-foot, voyageur-style canoe. While Minneapolis was already a mature city in 1930, the wilderness of the great north woods was as close as a train stop, or two, away. Early in the boys’ trip, just a few hundred into the eventual 2,500 miles, they look out over the Minnesota River from a tower at Fort Ridgely. From this high vantage Sevareid muses that there is much more river ahead! Their long trek north along many rivers, passing early trading posts and eventually reaching the great Hudson Bay and sea beyond, would be the first documented canoe trip along this historic route.

I am sure there were tears in his eyes, and I know there were tears in mine, and in Walt’s. Half a mile away, at the first bend, we turned and saw his tall figure at the water’s edge. He was still watching us. The doctor’s parting words repeated themselves in my brain continually during the rest of the day: “Don’t let anyone, no matter who he is, convince you that your trip can’t be completed.

"You have youth and strength, and courage too, I hope, and with a little common sense you can do it.”

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Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire by Eric Berkowitz - book review

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire by Eric Berkowitz

Extraordinary documentary of the evolutionary progression of organized religion and governmental extremes that taxed, punished and tortured to build a power base while amassing ill-gotten wealth.

This tome is a collection of facts arranged chronologically as civilizations evolved.

Points proven; It is far better to be rich and guilty than poor and innocent.

EXCERPTS:

Jesus Christ said much about love, but precious little about sex. Although his own life was relatively chaste by local standards, the fine points of sexual behavior were not his main concerns. He made no statements on carnal relations between the unmarried or homosexuals, he was tolerant of prostitutes, and he was less harsh toward adulterers than the Jews had been. But Jesus the man did not last long in this world, and soon his word was taken up by others. His most influential followers were consumed with sex in all of its permutations and devoted much of their attention to questions of sexual morality. Jesus’s relative indifference never prevented the Christian fathers from devising a violent array of restrictions in the Savior’s name.

First generation of Christian sages was the Apostle Paul, who taught that sexual behavior could be nearly as bad as murder: Homosexuals, masturbators, adulterers, anyone who sought sexual satisfaction for its own sake were, he said, to be barred from the kingdom of God.

Paul was no great proponent of matrimony either.

Marriage was a crutch for those too weak in their faith to give up sex entirely. “It is better to marry than to burn,” so if they could stand it; those who were already married should stay with their husbands and wives. No more divorce, remarriage, prostitutes, or concubines were permitted. To keep a lid on adulterous desires, Paul instructed husbands and wives to submit to each other’s sexual demands

For the common Christian, sex was acceptable in limited quantities, at least until Judgment Day.

Polanski’s crime was an accident of history. It was only recently that encounters between men and girls that age became illegal at all. Had he been caught less than a century earlier, the law would have looked the other way. California’s legal age of consent during the nineteenth century was ten, as in most other states in the Union (in Delaware, it was seven). The state raised it to fourteen in 1889 after a tussle between Christian pressure groups and male legislators.

Depictions of male homosexuality were risky even though private homosexual sex was no longer strictly illegal. There were more prosecutions against homosexual pornographers than there were against homosexuals. “Sapphism” was particularly irksome to the police. Absent special certification, women were not even permitted publicly to wear men’s clothing in public.

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Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War by James Risen BOOK REVIEW FIVE STARS

 

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War by James Risen

Author James Risen took the courageous step to open a disgusting chapter in America's loathsome and disgraceful trip to the bottom of a cesspool.

A must read expose that reaffirms that the public can be sold anything...even a war.

EXCERPTS.

They have largely avoided the scrutiny and infamy that dragged down the post-9/11 operators who garnered too much attention, like Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater. The new quiet oligarchs just keep making money.

They are the beneficiaries of one of the largest transfers of wealth from public to private hands in American history.

Iraq and Afghanistan, American soldiers actually on the payroll of the U.S. Army were outnumbered by independent contractors working for private companies hired to provide services from meals to base security. From Pakistan to Yemen to Somalia, American counterterror operations have relied heavily on outside contractors to provide intelligence and logistics. As a result, the tenets of twenty-first-century American capitalism have become the bywords of twenty-first-century American combat. That includes the most infamous catch phrase of the global financial crisis—“too big to fail.”

They had to be bailed out by the government, no matter how execrable their past behavior or how badly they had been mismanaged. Letting them fail, refusing to bail them out, would only sink the American economy.

KBR was the company that allowed America to go to war without a draft. The United States did not have to send tens of thousands of soldiers to Iraq or Afghanistan to perform the traditional supply and rear echelon work of an army, like building bases, cooking food, or finding clean water. KBR contractors did all of that instead. Napoleon famously said that an army travels on its stomach. Well, then, the American army traveled on KBR. It was the company that made it possible to prosecute wars of choice. It was so big and so influential—so necessary to the Iraq enterprise—that KBR was repeatedly able to survive controversies and investigations and a lengthy series of allegations of wrongdoing in its operations in Iraq. (Its standing as a central player in the war on terror even survived a bribery scandal that ultimately led to a former KBR chief executive being jailed for his part in a plot to bribe Nigerian officials.)

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Paul Robeson: A Biography by Martin Duberman -Book Review-Five Stars

 Book Review - Five Stars

Paul Robeson: A Biography by Martin Duberman

Since early childhood Paul Robeson stood up for equal rights and constitutional law with liberty and justice for all.

Xenophobia was politically ingrained all the way to the top. J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy, and President Woodrow Wilson, too busy fighting to make the world “safe for democracy,” refused to speak out publicly against lynching. President Woodrow Wilson did, however, speak out against what he called “a social blunder of the worst kind”.

Recommended reading and mind boggling in the extreme.

“The only thing wrong with Robeson is in having too great a faith in human beings.”

EXCERPTS:

During the years of Roosevelt’s New Deal, Robeson remained reasonably hopeful that white America would itself recognize the worst aspects of institutionalized racism and work to expunge them. But as the democratic impulses of the New Deal drained off into the intolerance of postwar McCarthyism, his real hope fastened on the ultimate transforming power of international socialism. He never ceased being an American patriot—continuing to believe in the inspirational promise of the country’s principles, if not her practice—but the more white America failed, in the post-World War II years, to stand up for the rights of people of color, the more Robeson grew into a militant spokesman for the world’s oppressed. The country’s failure to set its house in order, to ransom its own promise, brought out in him not—as in so many others—weary acquiescence but, rather, uncompromising anger, a dogged refusal to bow. Robeson’s stand endeared him still further to those who shared his politics and his principles, but cost him dearly with the multitude of mainstream Americans who had once been among his admirers. By 1960 his career and health had been broken, his name vilified, his honor—even his good sense—assailed, his image converted by a now hostile establishment from public hero to public enemy. Branded a Soviet apologist, kept under close surveillance by the FBI, his right to travel abroad denied by the State Department and his opportunities to perform at home severely curtailed, deserted by most of the beholden black leadership, Robeson became an outcast, very nearly a nonperson. This extraordinary turnabout in what had been one of the great twentieth-century careers is a singularly American story, emblematic of its times yet transcending them, encompassing not merely Cold War hysteria during one moment in our history but racial symbolism and racial consciousness throughout our history. That a man so deeply loved all over the world could evoke in his own country such an outpouring of fear and anger may be the central tragedy—America’s tragedy—of Paul Robeson’s story.

Ask fifteen million American Negroes, if you please, ‘What is the greatest menace in your life?’ and they will answer in a thunderous voice, ‘Jim-Crow Justice! Mob Rule! Segregation! Job Discrimination!’—in short White Supremacy and all its vile works. Our enemies,” Robeson concluded, “are the lynchers, the profiteers, the men who give FEPC the run-around in the Senate, the atom-bomb maniacs and the war-makers,” those who sustain injustice at home while shipping arms—here Robeson was surely prescient—to “French imperialists to use against brave Vietnamese patriots.” His black audience gave him a prolonged ovation. Two weeks later the daily press blazoned in screaming headlines that “COMMUNIST IMPERIALISTS FROM NORTH KOREA” had invaded their “PEACE-LOVING BROTHERS” to the south. The victors of World War II had put an end to Japan’s colonial rule in Korea and split that country into two, the North, under Kim II Sung, claiming to build socialism, the South, under Washington’s puppet Syngman Rhee, proceeding to bolster capitalism. From the first there had been constant sniping across the border, each side threatening to “liberate” the other, but when Sung’s well-equipped army finally crossed into the South, Rhee’s troops were unprepared and ill-equipped. Though Truman had in the past shown contempt for Rhee, he felt he couldn’t risk—not so soon after the Communist victory in China and the sensational publicity surrounding the fall of Hiss and the rise of McCarthy—having the Republicans charge that he was soft on Communism.

The court’s own implementing decision rejected the notion of rapid desegregation in favor of a “go-slow” approach, which itself proved too radical a notion for President Eisenhower; initially he refused to endorse the Brown ruling, remarking,

“I don’t believe you can change the hearts of men with laws or decisions,” and calling his own appointment of Earl Warren to the Supreme Court “the biggest damn fool mistake I ever made.”

March 12, 1956, 101 Southern members of Congress issued a “Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” which called on their states to refuse implementation of the desegregation order. Defiance became the watchword in the white South, massive resistance the proof of regional loyalty. Every item in the white-supremacist bag of tricks—from “pupil-placement” laws to outright violence—was utilized to forestall integration of the schools. The Ku Klux Klan donned its masks and hoods; the respectable middle class enrolled in White Citizens’ Councils; the press and pulpit resounded with calls to protect the safety of the white race. A tide of hatred and vigilantism swept over the South. Some blacks knuckled under in fear; many more dug in, prepared once again to endure—and this time overcome. On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks, a forty-two-year-old black seamstress, stubbornly refused to give up her bus seat to a white man—thereby launching the Montgomery bus boycott..

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The Journeying Moon: Sailing into History by Ernle Bradford

 

Book Review: Five Stars

The Journeying Moon: Sailing into History by Ernle Bradford

A philosophic reflection on a dream fulfilled. This memoir is a success story of life as an adventurer and sailor in the Mediterranean by a noted naval historian. 

Recommended reading for those who dare to venture to live life to the fullest.

EXCERPTS:

We both know that running back before the gale means throwing away hard-won miles. It means retracing our steps and adding more days to the voyage. ‘Ah, well, what do the books say? “Patience is a virtue learned at sea.” All hands!’

Away on the western horizon, lit from beneath by the dying sun, a huge cumulo-nimbus cloud towers into the sky. A fantastic structure, like a baroque cathedral, the cloud soars in thousand-foot pinnacles and then sags at its base as though it cannot support its weight. Below it, descending from some two hundred foot above the sea, three dark pillars hang down into the ocean. ‘Waterspouts!’

The past two years I’ve not been living as I wanted to —how few of us ever do—but living according to the designs of my country. One day, though, if I survive the war, I’ll have my own life to live. At twenty-one the gift of a life seems the promise of endless freedom.

At six o’clock I went to the bar at Mary’s House and waited around for my friends to join me. It was a good bar at Mary’s; the drink was reasonable, the measures just; the food eatable—and upstairs there were a few rather tired girls for those whose simple appetites were not revolted by a communal dish.

Our palates had been spoiled for the softer nuances of contentment. The after-lunch doze with the Sunday paper, the clatter of the lawn-mower, and the distant scrape and fiddle of B.B.C. tea-time music seemed insipid after fevered nights in leave-time ports. Of those who failed to make the adjustment, some emigrated, some took to drink, and some climbed mountains. Others—and I was among them—attempted the return to post-war living, found it unsatisfying, and then cut out new paths for ourselves. The Welfare State was designed for the generation that followed us. London was strange and uneasy in those immediate post-war years. It had something of the same smell about it that conquered Naples had at the time when Naples was the leave center for our Anzio troops: a little dust; much decay; and the smell of corruption.

I remember the night-clubs thick with black-marketeers; the well-fleshed smiler who knew where you could get whisky, and whose new Bentley echoed nightly with the giggles of loose-legged girls. People never fight for the world they get. They fight for the world they remember.

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Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Destructive Impact on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy Book Review

 

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Destructive Impact on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy (Forbidden Bookshelf) Christopher Simpson

This book is about where America went in the 1950s under Eisenhower, Nixon, the Dulles brothers, Earl Butts, McCarthy, and their witch hunting cronies. It is also about overthrowing democratically elected governments and replacing them with puppets.

Amazingly the American public could be sold anything, even a war.

Recommended reading for those plugged into and propagandized the radical right wing news.

EXCERPTS:

According to U.S. Army intelligence records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the mainstream U.S. anti-Communist organization Common Cause—no relation to the present-day liberal organization of the same name—sponsored the NTS spokesman’s travel to the United States in 1948, then gave him a media campaign that enabled him to reach into millions of American homes during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Common Cause was a prototype of, and a sister organization to, the CIA-sponsored National Committee for a Free Europe. Its directors included many of the men—Adolf Berle, Arthur Bliss Lane, and Eugene Lyons, among others—who simultaneously led CIA-financed groups such as the NCFE and, later, the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism.

The CIC was well aware that the NTS was a totalitarian and pro-Fascist organization. Instead of making this fact clear, however, U.S. intelligence promoted Boldyreff’s propaganda work in this country. “A Common Cause spokesman said that Boldyreff is ‘well known to American intelligence,’” the Boston Herald reported in its coverage of one of the NTS man’s early news conferences. “‘[He] is vouched for by high American officials,’ and cooperated with the American military government in Germany.

Perhaps in some other decade John Grombach would have hired persons from other failed regimes as agents; the continuing intrigues among anti-Castro Cubans and the former South Vietnamese police suggest that a new generation of espionage entrepreneurs in the Grombach mold is still at work. But in the early 1950s it was former Nazis and collaborators who were in the most abundant supply for such affairs. It is they who formed much of the heart of Grombach’s overseas network and they who gave him much of the ammunition he needed to participate in McCarthy’s purges.

the United States was fully committed to a broad campaign of political war against the USSR. It again affirmed that “underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups”—obviously including the various surviving collaborationist organizations from Eastern Europe—were still at the center of U.S. covert paramilitary programs. In the meantime, however, the existing threads of clandestine operations, liberation politics, and the abandonment of war crimes investigations and prosecutions were woven together into a new and more disturbing tapestry. By 1953 the CIA was willing to finance and protect not simply former Nazis and Gestapo men but even senior officers of Adolf Eichmann’s SS section Amt IV B 4, the central administrative apparatus of the Holocaust.

The results of the clandestine policy have set back, not advanced, American efforts to win friends in Eastern Europe, lessen repression, and improve civil liberties in the region. The American sponsorship of Gehlen and other collaborators may have remained largely secret in the United States, but it became a long-running theme in pro-Soviet Eastern European publicity, precisely because such practices tended to discredit America. The hypocrisy of U.S. actions and the CIA’s not-so-secret encouragement of disgraced Axis collaborators tended to undermine Eastern European public understanding of Western-style norms and civil liberties, which had never been a strong tradition in the region in the first place. Furthermore, exposure of U.S.-backed campaigns of this type tended to provide satellite states with convenient and surprisingly credible outside scapegoats for the failures of their own governments, especially during the years of extreme economic problems in the immediate aftermath of the war. In many cases—Romania, Poland, and the Ukraine—clandestine campaigns by U.S. intelligence may have ended up actually strengthening the pro-Soviet regimes they were intended to subvert.

The present-day U.S. sponsorship of the Nicaraguan contras, including the well-publicized CIA training of contras in the assassination of medical workers, schoolteachers, and civilian officials, are in many respects a replay of tactics that were tested—and failed—in the Ukraine more than thirty years ago.

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2023 MAY CARIBBEAN GETAWAY

 

2023 MAY CARIBBEAN GETAWAY:

Jane carefully arranged all of our bookings, Platinum Plus bus to Playa del Carmen- four hours, two nights in an eight star city center hotel. Then one month in a ground floor new condo complex near to our daughter Grisel.

Departing home with our bicycles fully loaded on a quiet Sunday morning there was no traffic, in thirty minutes we reached a lovely park where we had our breakfast that Jane had packed, a sustaining energy meal.

The sky darkened and the wind piped up as we took departure.

I shoved off, and just as I was about to put my foot on the pedal a forceful gust of wind sent me sprawling...Jane had to help me up .I walked with my bike two blocks to the bus.The only thing in need of repair on the bicycle was the shift cable. My battered and bruised leg muscles and tendons would need time to recover.

When we arrived at Playa del Carmen our luxury hotel where we had a reservation was boarded up.* The ADO bus station taxi drivers were helpful, kind, and accommodating when we explained our situation with the hotel. They found us a ground floor apartment where we could luxuriate in our hammocks and eat pizza with cold beer. The neighborhood abounded in great eateries.

We next moved to our AirBnB ground floor apartment in a gated condo complex. We had no air conditioning, just the natural briny breezes from the Caribbean Sea...it was lovely, and we were happy. A woman who sold fresh baked pizza was our neighbor. Bien cocido, dorado pero no quemado! We were frequent satisfied customers.

Moto-taxis frequented the new streets for pocket change taking us anywhere we wanted to go. Two new well-stocked convenience stores were less than two blocks away. Taxi service was also great to the city center and bus terminal. There was absolutely no reason for owning an automobile here.

The apartment had good internet and most importantly many places to hang hammocks. We used our commodious micro fiber hammocks and dampened micro fiber towels to keep cool, a trick we learned living in our ecological friendly home in Mérida to survive the 40ºC. Link to our Merida house.

Our daughter Grisel and her husband lived near by and were frequent visitors. We shared many feasts with them including pizza parties.

When we first visited Playa del Carmen 35 years ago it was almost total jungle and beach wilderness. Now the wilderness has been replaced by a concrete jungle of beachfront all-inclusive hotels, all night discos, and condos as far as the eye can see. It is too late to come and see it before it is gone.

* The hotel reservation: Jane did some investigating. A cartel had taken over the property where we had a reservation as well as two other hotels belonging to the same group. They were taking reservations and collecting the nonrefundable payments through online sites and delivering nothing. Crime and corruption is well ingrained here but governmental collusion that goes all the way to the top perpetuates it.

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Quiet Yucatan

 

I have often been asked where to find quiet places in Yucatan.

I always find this question amusing: “You have got to be kidding. Have you ever been to Yucatan before?”

I love Yucatan, but after forty plus years here quiet is something that has nearly eluded us. The locals love their lifestyle, and if you have a good positive attitude you will too.

At times it seems to me that the Yucatecan mentality holds two things sacred above all else: smoke and noise. Their ultimate success in life is an ear-splitting motorcycle emitting a cloud of impenetrable smoke. Do they possess a genetic predisposition to racket and an aversion to silence?

Vehicles rattle, clatter, squeak, and incessantly honk their horns while mufflers seem to be a superfluous annoyance.

Petite vehicles marauding city streets sporting enormous megaphones powered by mammoth amplifiers relentlessly blast deafening clatter that will vibrate the fillings out of your teeth.

Ear-splitting fireworks are incessantly detonated for festivals or business promotions, day and night. Dogs desperately try to cover their ears and escape.

In most places in the world this sonic trash would be prohibited…not so here; the government happens to be the major delinquent.

If ultra high decibel racket drives you to distraction beware of the salon de fiestas, also known as party palaces. I swear these all night establishments are capable of shaking you out of bed even from several blocks away.  Many times they magically materialize in hotel lobbies around midnight.

You may locate an upscale restaurant to enjoy a special occasion in tranquility. The waiters are sure to turn on a giant screen TV even if you are the only clients. A Mariachi band is liable to trumpet their way through and an industrial strength blender will be revved up that cannot be screamed above. Coffee grinders are sure to pick up when noise generating is slack. 

One day I went to the neighborhood grocery “tienda” and had to scream in the owner’s ear. A large bank of mighty speakers left from a previous night’s fiesta was terrorizing the neighborhood. I asked if they had requested the volume to be turned down. The owner replied yes and was told he was too nervous and if he listened to the music he would like it. The next retort was “if you don’t like it, you don’t have to listen.”

Looking for tranquility we have stayed in a typical Mayan hut down a dirt road located far out in the jungle and with no electrical service. Before the first glimmer of dawn crowing rosters broke the relative silence. They were joined by squealing pigs, barking dogs, trucks honking and screaming with bullhorns selling bottled gas and coconuts. We didn’t know if we should laugh or scream.

If you can hear dogs barking it is considered quiet.

We travel with 33 db foam ear plugs. Dampen them, roll tightly, and press into your ears. Allow them to expand slowly and their effectiveness is increased.

We happen to live in a relatively quiet neighborhood with a canopy jungle ecologically friendly home where we can actually hear birds singing in our fruit filled trees and crickets chirping.

This is the real Yucatan. Arm yourself with a positive attitude, be happy and if you don’t like the noise, don’t listen!

Mayapan

The ruins of Mayapan.  A quiet place in Yucatan. 

Comment from Jim Grafsgaurd

Right on Bing! You might miss all this racket if you didn't have it around.

Here is a note I posted on FB:

SOUNDS of Merida we will miss..

On leaving Merida for Minneapolis, these are some of the SOUNDS we will miss:

the loud playfully varied chirps whistles and responses of the Quiscal Mexicano (Great-tailed Grackle), the dog-choirs yapping and barking in all ranges of voice thru-out the neighborhood at night, los gallos (roosters) crowing at all hours, the particular calls and identifying signals of the many street vendors who pass by the house on motos or triciclos or horse-drawn carts (!TIERRRRAAA! (selling bags of soil for rocky Yucatan gardens) !ORQUETAAAAS! (selling long forked sticks to support clotheslines) or the panflute arpeggios of the afilidores (knife sharpeners) and the rubber honky horn of the panaderos (bread vendors) just to mention a few, and finally the karaoke, cumbia, salsa, mariachi, banda, danzon, current latin pop and classic rock Mexicano amplified on the cool late-night breezes from outdoor parties around town

Mayan temple ruins near Mérida - seldom visited - quiet Yuc

HOW WE CAME TO LIVE IN MEXICO - Stories April 2023

 

HOW WE CAME TO LIVE IN MEXICO

My first look at Mexico 1967

My father and I took the train from Superior, Wisconsin to Las Vegas to attend the American Pharmaceutical convention.

We saw all we wanted the first day and took a $13.00 flight to San Francisco, rented a car and headed south to San Diego, spent the night, and the next day entered the Mexican state of Baja California, sightseeing, shopping, and sampling food and drink. Dad and I had a glorious fun-filled two week trip and returned home by train.

1970

My next trip to Mexico was with my wife Jane. I won a two week all-inclusive trip to Europe, the Caribbean Sea islands or Mexico. Our choice was Mexico because we thought that was one place we would never return to. We didn’t speak a word of Spanish, but all went well and our fun-filled honeymoon adventure was wonderful.

Three years later

We were in St. Augustine, Florida, aboard our dream boat Dursmirg having completed our maiden voyage and our five year plan of building our boat and sailing south to where there was no snow.

I saw an opportunity to put my newly acquired navigation skills to work. It so happened that St. Augustine was the world’s trawler building capital, and across the river from our docked boat were hundreds of newly launched trawlers awaiting captains to take them to distant destinations worldwide.

I soon found myself headed to Yucatan in Mexico captaining a brand new 128 ton trawler, one of many I would deliver to Campeche, Progreso, and even to La Paz, Baja California, on the Pacific Ocean, a twenty eight day voyage. My deliveries to Campeche were five days at sea followed by numerous logistical bureaucratic paper signings and stamping that made it a two week turnaround trip. As one of my crew members said; “The Mexicans nail one of your feet to the deck, and for three days you run around in circles signing papers.”

When my deliveries were to Campeche or Progreso, I had to go to Mérida, Yucatan, to fly home. Often there was a several days before my flight. I along with my crew had time to explore the interesting streets, markets, and cantinas.

Ten years later

After selling our apartment business in St. Augustine, Florida, and then making an excursion in our shrimp boat Secotan to Tampa for the winter something happened that changed the course of our lives. The fishing was bad, and we discovered we could take a freighter from Pinellas Seafood dock, a division of Red Lobster, to the Bay Islands of Honduras for one hundred dollars each, round trip. We talked to the captain, and he agreed to take us with him on his next trip in two weeks. It seemed too good to be true and it was. When the freighter returned two weeks later, our bags were packed, and we were ready to go, but somethings happened to change our minds. The captain and crew and even the dockside personal were all changed. The new employees were surly with an unfriendly attitude, but what totally convinced us not to make the trip was what we witnessed when the freighter returned. It arrived after dark and hastily began unloading for over two hours before the customs inspectors arrived. They rapidly unloaded freight that was not refrigerated lobster. We weren’t going to be passengers on a clandestine smuggler’s vessel. The next morning we were on our bicycles headed for a travel agent. We were still going on a trip and would implement plan B, which was possibly flying to the Bay Islands of Honduras. The price of air fare was going to make that option out of the question. Surprise! There hanging on the wall at the travel agent was a large travel poster featuring Mérida, Yucatan, Mexico. This was a place I had visited on boat deliveries from St. Augustine and loved, perfect! We purchased two tickets to Mérida and were on our way. Ironically, Jane and I, thinking that a visit to Mexico was a once in a lifetime event, we chose Mexico as the place for our honeymoon, never expecting that we would return. Somehow Mexico had cast its magical magnetic spell over us.

Here I was headed back to Mexico once more, this time with my wife at my side. I was drawn like a magnet back to Yucatan.

Yucatan, Mexico

We planned to make our Yucatan excursion an economical no frills adventure; staying until we ran out of cash. On our previous trips to other parts of Mexico we had gone first class, or on an expense account. This trip would be a totally different experience giving us a somewhat magical prospective.

As our plane approached Mérida, Luis, a fellow passenger, told us that he was a friend of the pilot, Armando Troyo. He said that Captain Armando loved to joke with the passengers using a subtle play-on-words. Sure enough, Captain Armando announced on the PA system, “We hope that you enjoyed your flight with us today, and that we will see you again soon. Before landing put your seats in the upright position, stow your trays, fasten your seat belts, and, of course, be sure to take all of your personal defects with you.” This place was going to be fun!

This was Jane’s first visit to Mérida, and she became nearly overwhelmed by the hustle and bustle of street commotion.

The next day, after a fascinating morning sightseeing, Jane and I arrived at the Mexicana Airlines office ready for our surprise lunch to which Luis had invited us when we met him on the airplane. As we were soon to discover, Luis Rosado was not known for his punctuality or reliability regarding appointments. Leaving his office precisely at one o’clock for his lunch break was, however, one of the rare exceptions to this. Take charge Luis was like a secret agent. His main job at Mexicana was to pamper the first class clients. Luis told us to just follow him. Out the door and down the street we went, and less than a block away we entered a dilapidated old building that by all outward appearances looked completely abandoned. We stepped through tall neglected doors, which were well

-weathered by age and each hanging by a single hinge, and into a spooky courtyard that spoke of another time. Seedlings were sprouting from cracks and crevasses around the terraced second story balcony, and even from the rooftop above. In the bygone glory days of this once elegant edifice, formerly known as La Union Social Club, lavish parties and elegant banquets were held at this very spot. Surprise! In this weed tangled, dusty, and neglected courtyard sat some tables, and a waiter in a starched uniform was waiting these tables. This was our end destination. This was the La Union Cantina! Luis was a regular here. We proceeded to a table where several of his friends were seated. The attentive waiter, known to all as “Pedro, El Bueno” immediately brought Luis a Superior beer, his customary brand. The introductions were made, and lo and behold, there was someone we already knew; the famous Mexicana airplane pilot, Armando Troyo. After we were seated, Jane and I couldn’t help but noticing the young fellow that we had just seen pull up outside with his rickety little donkey cart and unload a block of ice from under a shaggy burlap cover and then proceed to drag it away tethered by a rope. To our surprise this young chap followed us into the cantina still dragging his by now rather discolored block of ice across the nasty patio floor. His final destination was the kitchen from which our lunch was being prepared. So, the tourist guides that cautioned us against using the ice in Mexico had some merit.

There was no shortage of beer or food, and nobody had to ask for service. Our waiter kept the table full of freshly made dishes from the kitchen and lots of beer. Everyone there loved to drink lots of beer. To go with all this we also had numerous homemade sauces that ranged from easy and delicate to hellishly hot and fiery scorching. There was no shortage of laughter at our table. Captain Armando kept us entertained with joke after joke. Here are two jokes that Captain Armando told; “What do you use those big guns for?” Cuban, “I shoot cans.” Reporter, “But, they are such big guns, what kind of cans do you shoot?” Cuban, “I shoot Puerto Ri-cans, Mexi-cans, and Ameri-cans.”

Another joke by Captain Armando: A trans-Atlantic flight is having motor troubles and losing altitude. To keep the aircraft aloft the flight crew is pitching everything overboard. Still losing altitude, they are down to just four passengers; a Frenchman, an Englishman, an American and a Mexican. The Frenchman is first to volunteer and hollers out, “Viva la France,” and jumps. Next the Englishman valiantly steps to the door and hollers out, “God Save the Queen” and jumps. Next the American steps up and hollers, “Remember the Alamo” and pitches out the Mexican!

We were now in a world apart and our destiny would be forever altered by this encounter. Over time we were going to have unbelievable adventures with all of these amazing people we were now celebrating lunch with.

The hook was set; Jane and I had found our next dimension in life here in Mexico, the one country we had thought just ten years earlier that we would never revisit.

These were fun people that had definitely unlocked the secret to joyous pleasures of easy going self-indulgence, and we fit right in. When it was time for all of us to depart, Captain Armando, practicing his English, said, “Drink, drank, drunk, sink, sank, sunk.”? Then by blowing into his empty beer bottle he made the sound of “toot, toot, toot.” He then exclaimed as he was leaving, “This ship is sinking!”

Before we left for an afternoon siesta, the bill had to be settled. We now discovered another ingenious Yucatecan trick for keeping the bar tab. Our diligent waiter came around to each of us with his pad of paper and pencil. Then we saw what he was doing. Standing behind our chairs were the empty beer bottles that Pedro counted and tallied our tab, there could be no argument of padding the bill with this simple procedure. Our new found friend, Luis Rosado, craftily did not reach for his billfold, and so I picked up his tab. Luis proved to be a good first contact, but we soon discovered that he never ever reached for his billfold, but then we were actually paying for his entertaining jokes, lively sing-a-longs, contacts, and guide service, and we were having fun.

Our cantina experience left us totally stuffed with food, contented with the hilarious laughter, and sufficiently primed with beer to make our trip back to our hotel a sweltering struggle in the afternoon sun. The afternoon siesta in the land of take it easy was soon to become a blessed daily ritual for us. Here in Yucatan, this was the only natural thing to do until the heat of the day subsided. At this time in Mérida there were only two places with air conditioning, Mexicana airlines office and Plaza Oriente.

The next morning we packed our few belongings, and we headed by bus to the small quiet port town and fishing village of Progreso. Progreso is one of the ports where I had landed several times previously on my boat delivery trips from St. Augustine nearly ten years earlier. These trips consisted of five days at sea followed by dealing with the Mexican bureaucratic paper mill once in port.

The uncertain logistics of a return flight home made these trips into two week turnaround affairs. Points of interest back in the early 1980’s in Progreso were in short supply and the concept of tourism had not yet come to this former pirate ravaged coast that only saw an influx of beach goers from Mérida during Easter Week and for summer vacations in July and August. El Cordobes restaurant, located across the street from the main plaza in Progreso, was the only place to go for coffee. We were about to discover that the exchange rate was going to kill our expense account.

This was indeed a wonderful time to be in Yucatan. Horse drawn carriage taxis clip-clopped the streets of Mérida while hoards of Volkswagen Beetles straddled two lanes jockeying to be mucho-macho as noisy, coughing, and smoking two cycle motorcycles wove their way down the narrow city streets. VW Beetle’s made up the majority of vehicles and few drivers had a license. Auto insurance was nearly unheard of, and the license plates were rarely current. The philosophy back then being that it was better to break the law and beg forgiveness than to first ask permission.

Every day was a new adventure, and three weeks passed quickly.

Unlike Don Pedro de Mendez de Aviles, the founder of St. Augustine in 1565, who told the citizens of the colony upon his departure for Spain that he would return but never did, we found ourselves drawn back to Yucatan again and again. It certainly wasn’t the coffee!

Every day was an adventure, and three weeks passed quickly.

As our flight from Mérida to Miami rattled down the runway for take off, Jane and I looked at each other, and we both said emphatically, “We are coming back.”

For more read Sailing to St. Augustine: Travels of Dursmirg by John M. Grimsrud.

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