The Nanny States

Winston Miera was born on the same day as his English namesake. He had the bald head and spoke English but the similarity ended there. This Winston had a neat beard and two gorgeous Harleys in his garage. We’d been collected at our hotel by a striking gentleman named Ambrosio who escorted us to the house Winston lived in with his parents. We were waiting nervously on the couch gazing at a little gold tinsel Christmas tree on the coffee table when the Dad came out and introduced himself. Considering how Winston was the only English speaker besides ourselves it took surprisingly little time for any awkwardness to melt away. We really have not been taking our lessons seriously but as the evening progressed our Spanish did get better, or maybe the charades just got more expansive. Either way, by the time Mr. Miera took off his apron and served his sour orange and lemon Yucatan chicken, we’d covered a multitude of topics and Fran was waxing poetically, albeit mostly in French. The fathers at Blackrock College must have been more effective than we thought.

We’d arrived in Campeche and it was so nice to see the sea again. Yellowing palms lined the gulf and green water lapped onto very white beaches. There wasn’t even the bump of an anthill on the horizon, just a few lonely palm roofed huts. Like dilapidated Irish thatched cottages.

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After Acayucan, we’d been passed onto our next moto-nanny, Yandri, in Villahermosa. We’d crossed into the state of Tabasco and before the ink was even dry on the hotel reservation, my phone was pinging. At one stage I looked and there were 27 new WhatsApp messages, most of them beginning with ‘Saludos Bro!’ We drove by a Moto Fest in the city park and got swarmed by a group of bikers who proceeded to inspect Pferdi to the Nth degree and then used him as a prop for their photo ops. And when they got bored with the bike, they posed with me. For about 30 minutes we had our 15 minutes of fame. Then, as fast as they’d appeared, everyone was gone.

I had high hopes for Ciudad del Carmen on an island in the Gulf of Mexcio. We drove over the causeway bridge which turned out to be one of the longest in Latin America. The malacon was not particularly pretty but the seafood was good and plentiful. This is the area where you begin hearing that the fish you are politely decapitating in your soup bowl was swimming just that very morning with his mates in the sea. Mutilating fish was about as energetic as it got. By 9 AM my head was pounding with the heat and the glare, my skin was slick with sweat and boy was Fran cranky.

We moved on to the city of Campeche, Winston and Ambrosio. Our old hotel was in the colorful historic center with a room on the ground floor. Unfortunately a squall blew in and the tall, shuttered windows onto the street were no match for the rain. It sounded like the end of the world and I was oblivious as the water crept over the tiles, flowed under the bed and across to the wardrobe. Not realizing I was now on an island, I got up and immediately went flying. The beautiful tile work was the gift that kept on giving. When we got back on the bike a couple of days later, I was still hurting.

Winston insisted we visit the Mayan ruins of Edzna and it was a lovely, though lonely drive through the back roads. A couple of closures resulted in an embarrassing reverse out of someone’s front yard while three old ladies watched with interest. Talk about feeling like an idiot, sitting there nodding and smiling like a toy dog in the back of a car. For God’s sakes Fran, hurry bloody up. Afterwards Ambrosio took us to a fish restaurant hanging over the sea. I got served the biggest fish I’ve ever seen on a plate and felt guilty again as he too had been swimming happily just that very morning. Afterwards my imagination ran wild at the mold-darkened walls of the old Spanish fort of San Miguel. This was true Pirates of the Caribbean stuff. Being an Errol Flynn fan for a good portion of my childhood, I had visions of the Spanish Main, men in tights and galleons of gold hijacked on the high seas.

After watching Ambrosio’s kids’ roller blading practice, we drove out to his weekend retreat. We were immediately transported to Samoa. The compound had a small, palm-fringed house in a garden of emerald lawns and fruit trees bursting with mangoes, oranges, avocados….After a diet of carne the taste buds fizzled to life again. The air was heavy and oppressive so we swam in the pool but of course before we had a chance to dry off, we got bitten everywhere. Afterwards we went downtown for a beer. Sitting in the shadow of the city wall, I thought of the buckled boots that had marched on this very ground……

By mid-June we reached the very top of the Yucatan peninsula and rented a white house in a grove of palms. Every morning the blinds opened to a turquoise green sea and a coconut-littered beach. Our first visitors arrived, from California, and for two weeks we were vacationers, leaving the beach only to visit small Mayan pyramids and swim in the Yucatan’s underground pools (cenotes). We went into the jungle on horse and cart, on the old rail system originally used to remove sisal from the tangle of undergrowth. The suspension was non-existent and the kids bounced up and down, sometimes having to be hauled from mid-air back onto the wooden bench. Flocks of butterflies raced alongside in clouds of yellow and green. They followed us all day, like a Disney heroine’s escort through an enchanted forest. The horses stopped at each cenote, some reached by rickety ladders, others by long, subterranean passageways and slippery steps. The pools at the bottom were lit by shafts of light from the jungle floor above, coloring the water an artificial blue. It was the same blue only ever seen circling icebergs, or in David Hockney swimming pools.

We never knew what day it was, only that each began with 3 kids quietly eating cornflakes and ended with 4 adults loudly drinking G&Ts, or sometimes Cuba Libres. I tried to move my butt by walking on the beach when the evenings cooled but Greta insisted on putting on her sparkly lilac sneakers and accompanying me. Oh joy, an excuse not to exert myself, because it does take a lot of time to gather shells, old string and hollow coconuts. And because paradise is never quite paradise, the squeals of discovery were sometimes replaced by a deep-throated growl “Don’t touch that, that’s trash”. There’s nothing like a 3 year-old to tell it like it is.