Inland, Dreaming of Waves: March 2007

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

You dig

Here's my latest gardening article from the Rocky Mountain News.

April chores key to a good season

Monday, March 26, 2007

Cautionary tales for rich white people

OK, catching up on the blog here.

I went to see Bill McKibben, who wrote The End of Nature and just published Deep Economy, speak in Boulder tonight. His audience was old white people from Boulder, not one of whom I recognized. That shocked me. I thought at least one person from Wildlands Restoration Volunteers would be there, or maybe the Nature Conservancy, but no. I felt almost young in this audience.

McKibben was the first to write about global warming (in The End of Nature) for laypeople. He says that in all the years he’s been studying the issue, he noticed that scientists have become increasingly panicked. Regular people are beginning to take notice, but they’re not panicked yet. I wonder what it will take?

At the end, I got up and asked him if anybody had been exploring options for keeping the Arctic and Greenland ice sheets from melting. He answered me as if I were crazy. But after he said that the Greenland ice sheet contains enough water to raise ocean levels several meters, should it melt, I thought it was an eminently practical question. Why NOT try to keep the Arctic ice from melting?

After all, the global warming we’re seeing now was caused by events decades ago. It’s going to take us decades to get emissions to zero. So we’re going to be warming the globe for a good many years. I think we should do something now to preserve the glaciers and ice sheets we have left.

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Ski shit and die

Do corporations live in the real world?

This news item made me wonder. And those of you who like to ski and snowboard should sit up and take notice. Where else in the country do you suppose they’re trying to make snow from effluent?

9th Circuit Court of Appeals Rules for Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe in San Francisco Peaks Case

The Arizona Snowbowl resort wanted to expand a ski area into an alpine ecosystem on the San Francisco Peaks—hence the lawsuit from the Indian tribes.

But what they also wanted to do was make snow from treated sewage that would be piped in 15 miles from the Rio de Flag wastewater treatment plant and stored in a 10 million gallon storage pond. Just what I want near my ski resort or sacred site—a big lake of treated shitwater! Hey, kids, let’s go skate on frozen shit lake!

Some of the language in the decision makes me wonder how the judges could have written it with a straight face: “We conclude that the [tribes] have shown that the use of treated sewage effluent on the Peaks would impose a substantial burden on their exercise of religion,” the court said. “This showing is particularly strong for the Navajo and the Hopi.”

And then there’s this little tidbit (pun intended): The court also found that the Forest Service “neither reasonably discusses the risks posed by the possibility of human ingestion of artificial snow made from treated sewage effluent nor articulates why such discussion is unnecessary.”

It's one thing to spray effluent onto a field, where it can sink into the soil, mix with it, maybe fertilize it. But who wants to ski through powder made from this stuff?

Monday, March 05, 2007

True love

Last night I had the best hot dog of my life.

I went to Steve’s Snappin’ Dogs on Colfax and fell in love with the California dog.

It has romaine lettuce, people! Romaine! And I loved it, the taste and the texture.

Oh, and cheese and tomatoes and grilled peppers. And spicy mustard, which is the only kind that should be allowed in the world.

Don’t get the fries, though. They were like bad McDonald’s fries, only three times as expensive.

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Akumal Journal

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

We get up early to heat to Akumal for some diving. Our plane is full and delayed. I sit next to Elmer and his wife, who is sensitive to perfume and the smell of some foods. I hope my beef sandwich doesn’t bother her. we got into Cancun and went through Customs, which didn’t take nearly as long as in November 2004, when we traveled to Akumal with Todd’s parents, Matt and Rachel and Elliot and Kristina, and Kent and his friend to spend Thanksgiving in Mexico.

We stepped out of the airport and there was a huge crowd of men holding signs with company names or names of people. It was a very male-dominated place—I’ve felt that other places in Mexico. As we walked through the airport, almost all the employees in the booths were male—there was the occasional woman. We got picked up by a guy from Akumal Vans, with whom Todd had previously made a reservation, and he drove us to the headquarters. Then a woman drove us to Akumal in a car. It took 1.5 hours from arrival to Akumal. I tipped her $20. I asked her about work, and she said she’d been working since 7 am—and she wouldn’t get back to Cancun from this trip until 6—a long day.

A work crew was widening the road at Akumal, and she had trouble finding the exit. Finally, we did.

We are in room 301 of the Vista Del Mar hotel in North Akumal, which is owned by a man who lives in New Mexico. It is near Akumal Dive Adventures, Mango Café, and La Buena Vida restaurant, which he also owns (those who stay at the hotel get a discount on dive rentals at ADA). It has a narrow road that is pitted with potholes in places and paved with pavers and cement in others (in front of really nice houses with “No Trespassing” signs). There are always short men working on the road (the Mayan/Mexican men I meet are almost all my height or shorter). The maids were white dresses with square, scalloped necklines and bright embroidery. They look Mayan. Todd and I were discussing the racial hierarchy here and where mestizos fit in. I told him that Mexico had much more of a mestizo culture than the United States. There is a even a monument in Akumal to a man who formed the first Euro-American family in 1511: Gonzalo Guerrero, from Palas de Noguer, Spain. He was shipwrecked near Akumal Beach and ending up marrying Xzazil, a Mayan princess.

The first night we walked into Akumal, about a mile, and stopped by the Centro Ecologico de Akumal. They had a silent auction in progress. It reminded me of the events Eco-Cycle used to throw, except CEA had Mexican vacations and stuff. Then we went to eat at La Cueva del Pescador, where we ate and had yummy shrimp tacos in November 2004. Both of us had shrimp: I had Camarones Tequilas and Todd had Camarones Diablos (a?). Then we walked home.

I slept pretty well the first night, but Todd had to get up and close the doors to the balcony because the sound of the surf kept him awake. I woke up Thursday morning at 6, which is 5 pm Denver time.

Our room is only about 10 by 10 feet. It has a white ceiling with a fan and a blue wash on the walls. Everything is tiled, which makes it easy to clean the floors. Bathroom: tile on floor, smaller, beige tile on wall, patterned tile as border. Warnings about the septic tank and the amount of time it takes hot water to reach the room. In reality: less than a minute. The showers were usually too hot.

Thursday, February 22, 2007

I was tired all day and a little nervous because I hadn’t been diving in 8 months. We set up our stuff and they hauled the heavy stuff out to the boat. José and Lupé would put on 1 BCD and throw another one up on their shoulders. It was impressive. The boat is a long, narrow motorboat—perhaps 20 feet long—not as long or as wide as the dive boats at Andros. It had 1 motor, not 2, like the Andros boats. Instead of climbing down from the dock onto the boat, we picked our way over the coral and rocks, which feel sharp through the booties, hook 1 leg up over the boat, and pull ourselves in. Then we find our stuff and sit down by it.

They motor slowly out of Half Moon Bay (Akumal Bay has the Akumal Dive Shop) and out into the ocean a little way. They never go very far. They slow ride out does tend to make me queasy, however.

Our first dive was to La Tortuga reef, and indeed we did see a turtle. The leader was Lupé. There was a couple—the woman had long, chestnut-colored hair—a man named Vinizio or something like that, and Todd and me.

They stopped the boat and briefed us on the dive—how we get in, how deep (80 feet), how long we’ll be under water, how to stay down until we reach 700 psi, and then to go up and do a 15-minute safety stop. We put on our masks and fins and they held our BCDs for us. Then we propped our butts up on the edge of the boat—I felt a strong jerk as the 40-pound tank dropped down my back—and then I leaned back and fell into the water. My left hand hit someone as I went in. Then I saw that the woman with chestnut hair had a free-flowing regulator. She kept hitting it with her hand and the DM finally told her to use the second stage instead. Then we descended.

Compared to Andros, Akumal reef has vast expanses of sand. I assume that if it were a sign of degradation, there would be more bleached and damaged coral. But I don’t see any bleaching—just lots of brown coral. Perhaps it looks less colorful because it’s a cloudy day. I saw a turtle and a ray. I see elkhorn coral.

Then the boat goes back to the bay (faster than it went out), we sit a while. I consider just doing the one dive, but Todd wants to dive again, so we go out to Yool Canal. Todd said he was a little bored, but I liked it well enough. I would have liked to spend more time hovering by cleaning stations, but this was a follow-the-leader dive. Saw flounder, plus a fish with the same coloring that rested on the bottom, about 8 inches long, with yellow/gold stripes.

Todd and I have been practicing our ascents and are doing rather well. We tend to go up and down a bit too much, but we were able to do our safety stop at 15 without (without hanging onto a line, as we did in Andros), without too much of a problem.

I felt queasy after this dive and had to rush to the bathroom to poo. I had eaten bread all day—chocolate muffin, cookies for a snack and for lunch, and watermelon juice. All day I burped watermelon juice. The word for watermelon in Spanish is “sandia.”

I was so tired after this dive I just wanted to lie down, so I did, and Todd went to La Buena Vida for lunch. About 3 or so I went to the dive shop to get my sunglasses, which had left in the boat. I hung around for a while and then went back to the room, waking up Todd in the process. Then I went to the dive shop and Lupé was there. He said the fishing was bad. They didn’t catch anything. He was kind enough to wade out to the boat and get my glasses. I had been afraid to earlier because my shoes weren’t stable enough to go to rocks and I didn’t want to go barefoot and I couldn’t get to my scuba booties because the dive shop was locked.

I took many pictures of a pelican sitting on the Akumal Dive Adventures boat. Then I went back to the room and we got ready to go to the CEA gala. We got there at 6:30. I became annoyed with Todd because he was leading me all over the place in my white sandals and my feet hurt. When we got to the gala at Lol-ha restaurant, the bidding was over. We were disappointed—we had wanted to bid on some photographs. I got a rum and pineapple juice and then we went to dinner at Lol-ha. There were paintings with a cubist flavor on the walls. I wasn’t sure if they were prints or originals. One was of a forbidding face streaked in paint (like war paint). There were long ribbons of cream-colored fabric hung from the rafters that formed billows and twists. It is an airy, breezy place.

I had carne tampiquena (what’s in that anyway?) and a green salad, which seems not to have bothered me. I had merlot and Todd had pinot grigio.

During dinner, a couple entertained us with Latin dances (I had no idea which dance they were doing—maybe the website for CEA says?). They were great. She did splits, cartwheels, etc. They were beautiful to watch. They were dancing on a stage, in front of a screen on which were projected pictures from CEA (turtles, staff, etc.), draped by the same kind of fabric hanging from the ceiling.

Then we paid the rest of the bill and went into the snack bar, which is outside by one of two bars and the beach (with its private property sign. I had chocolate mousse cake and Todd had tres leches cake. My cake tasted as if it had been brought in frozen. Then Bandikoro began to play—they’re an African percussion band with two women. It was the first band Todd had ever seen that had 2 marimbas. They played percussion for a while and then switched to more of a dance sound.

The pair who danced earlier got up to dance. By now it had become obvious that they were married because their son was with them. Their dancing to Bandikoro was equally impressive, though they didn’t have room to do things like splits. At one point, the woman’s hair extension fell off—she actually had only neck-length hair—and she shrieked and her friends shrieked almost as loud with laughter. Later the husband danced with one of her friends, who also seemed pretty good, and tried to teach a white girl to dance Latin-style. Todd and I got up to dance and I tried to do a cumbria box step of sorts. Mainly it made my calves hurt.

Friday, February 23, 2007

We skipped the morning dives and walked in Akumal. It was hot. We took our laundry to the lavanderia, where we’ll pick it up at 6 on Saturday. Then we went to Ixchel Boutique to spend the gift certificate we won at the CEA gala. It was a woman’s boutique, so I bought a pair of black silk shorts.

Then we sat on the sand in the shade of some palm trees, near the Akumal Dive Shop. Some men asked us if we want to go fishing or snorkeling. I didn’t remember people accosting us like that in 2004. I didn’t like it, but I simply said, “No, gracias.”

We had forgotten to bring a towel. We could have sat in a beach chair near Lol-ha, but we would have had to pay for it. There was a “Propriedad Privada” sign on the fence surrounding the snack bar. It made me angry that all this development for tourists like myself could cut off the locals’ access to the beach. They should be like Hawaii, which makes all beaches public beaches, whether there’s a resort on them or not.

We walked out on the pier, which was public, and took a picture of the cannons that once guarded Akumal from pirates. We couldn’t get to them because that would have required crossing private property.

Just when I was starting to get grumpy in a “Yeah, I’ll come here but I’m going to be disapproving anyway,” stupid sort of way, a group of disabled adults children and their caretakers came to the beach and sat under trees to our left. It was a small area, so they were really crowded in there. Some of them went down to the boats to go snorkeling, I think, or swim in the small swimming area. Beyond that perhaps 20 boats are anchored, more than were here in 2004. People snorkel among those boats, but that seems dangerous to me. I saw a man with 1½ legs in a wheelchair, a woman, her feet turned out severely, using a walker, some Down syndrome kids. They were like a breath of realism into the white tourist enclave that is Akumal.

As we walked to La Loncheria, a diner type of lunch place, we passed the white van those people must have arrived in, marked “DIF,” no doubt for the government agency that was taking them on this beach outing. La Loncheria is a little dive at the end of a Mexican-style strip mall (or, at least, the Maya Riviera type of strip mall) that serves great food. I had chicken tacos and Todd had chicken enchiladas with salsa verde and what passes for sour cream here, and we both had limonata (limeade).

Afterward, we went to the two grocery stores in Akumal, Chomak and Mercado de Akumal, which was much smaller. (Chomak is right next to La Loncheria.) Later in the week, the Mercado would mysteriously close for two days, and there was an official-looking “Clausurado” sign on the door, which must mean something like “closed by the authorities,” instead of the more usual “cerrado” (closed). There was also a sticker that I thought might have something to do with a union, since it had a name on it beginning with “Trabajadores” (workers). Then we took a taxi back to Vista Del Mar. I rested for a while and then went and found Todd near the dive shop.

The dive on Friday afternoon was to Las Redes (the nets), where we went on our first and third dives in Akumal. I was amazed by all the fish—I had remembered Akumal dive sites as being rather barren. We saw a huge black grouper, a turtle resting on coral, a lobster, 2 rays. The others saw a squid, but my mask was hard to see through—damn defog! It’s supposed to keep my mask from fogging up like a car windshield on a cold night, but it just makes my mask dirty. I had to keep letting water in my mask and clearing it so I could see things.

When we reached the surface, I had trouble getting into the boat. I got my weights up all right, but I couldn’t get out of my BCD. Plus I swallowed some seawater while switching from my regulator to my snorkel. We had to wait a while at the surface until the boat came around, and finally I starting floating face-down in the water instead of trying to keep my head above water because my inability to do so made me feel panicky.

When we got into shore, I asked José what to do. He said I should unhook one of my shoulder clips and then undo the waist clip and Velcro belt. Then it would be easier to slide out of it.

After the dive, I spoke with Shaleh, the instructor (that’s a higher level than dive master), if things had changed much in Akumal in the 9 years she’d been there. She said, yes, lots of development. She said the guy who ran the hotel had a hard time getting the dive shop permits. Akumal Dive Shop (in the main part of Akumal) didn’t want another dive shop nearby. They said Half Moon Bay was a protected area and that there shouldn’t be boats coming in and leaving oil and gas residue in the bay (tourists are asked to snorkel in shirts instead of using sunscreen because it damages the coral). But finally the owner got the permits.

We cleaned up after the dive and headed to La Buena Vida for a snack. We had avocados stuffed with ceviche, which is fish (or possibly meat, I’m not sure) “cooked” in lime juice. It was really good. I had a shot of 1800 tequila anejo, which I thought was a little harsh.

La Buena Vida is situated only a few feet from the water. There are long tables outside where groups can sit, or you can sit on stools in the cement or on a swing. There is also an upstairs dining room with high ceilings under a thatched roof and metal outline sculptures of a swordfish and a shark. There are metal sculptures at the door of horse skeletons with gas flames rising around them. It is almost always filled with white people and playing Bob Marley.

After spending some time in the room (I wrote in this journal and he surfed the web—the hotel has decent WiFi), we went to La Lunita for dinner. It’s farther down the North Akumal road toward Yal-ku Lagoon, which is a popular snorkeling place where fresh and saltwater mix. All the outside tables at La Lunita were taken, so we sat just inside the door, but it was still really windy. To my left was a small outdoor pool done in tile.

We had a spinach mushroom soup (50 pesos) and a Jicama, Beet, Carrot, and Cucumber Salad with Balsamic and Honey Reduction (50 pesos). They serve little crusty rolls of wheat bread that are hot and delicious. I had a shot of Centenario anejo, which I liked better than the 1800. I ordered Plantain and Walnut Stuffed Chicken Breast with Mole Poblano for my main course (135 pesos), and Todd had langostinos (langoustines; a type of shellfish between shrimp and lobster in size). I like the salad better than I liked the soup—there was something a little strange about all the spinach. Todd had a little trouble getting the meat out of the shells with his knife and fork. They didn’t give him anything to crack the shell. I liked the taste of the mole; it was smokier than I’ve ever had before because of the roasted chiles. We had a dessert that I wanted to have again—frozen bananas coated in chocolate ganache with chocolate ice cream.

La Lunita was the first truly upscale restaurant I’d been to in Mexico. But the waiters aren’t as solicitous there. They never come back and ask you how you like the food. I guess they figure if you don’t like it, you’ll complain.

Saturday, February 24, 2007

We did 2 dives this morning, to Horseshoe Reef and Motorcycle Reef. At Horseshoe, we saw 2 rays, a turtle in coral and a turtle at the surface, an eel that I barely glimpsed, and lots of other fish. One diver got stung by a small jellyfish and her neck got all red and swollen. She and her husband were the second couple we met from Montreal. The first Quebecois we met, Guy, spoke English, French, Spanish, and enough Italian to get around Italy without using any other language.

My computer kept beeping during this dive because apparently I was breathing too fast. I also had to make a deco stop (decompression stop) because we went to 84 feet for longer than my computer thought we should. Instead of hanging in the water like a barracuda, I flailed quite a bit and kept ascending and descending a few feet.

Our second dive was to Motorcycle Reef. We saw 2 barracuda—I thought they were eyeing me and kept glancing at them nervously. Most of the barracuda we’ve seen in Akumal are 1 to 2 feet long, but I did see one in 2004 that looked to be 3 or 4 feet in length. None of them has ever bothered me, but I’m not willing to approach one. I think that would be like approaching a cougar or a bear.

I saw a turtle eating coral—I wonder if it’s a regular part of their diet or they need the roughage?—with 2 small yellow remoras attached to its back. It swam up and the remoras eventually fell off. We saw another turtle in coral and so many other kinds of fish that I lost track.

The sun came out as we reached the dirt bike in a patch of sand that gives this reef its name. It shone down on it, making it into some ghostly presence that seemed about to take off into the distance. Apparently somebody dumped this bike into the reef, and when somebody diving down there sees that it has fallen down, they set it upright again.

On both dives I got out of my BCD more easily. I didn’t feel queasy at all after the first two dives—I guess I got used to the motion of the boat going up a wave and then falling down into the trough.

Diving is sometimes a pain in the ass, especially when I’m not excited about carrying a 40-pound tank on my back, but it’s also wonderful and a huge challenge. I’m always learning from it. I wonder when I’ll feel that I really know what I’m doing. I’ve done 28 dives so far, and I don’t feel that way, especially about buoyancy control. In any case, it isn’t at all what I expected. I think I thought it would be like some transcendent experiences I’ve had in nature in the past, but it’s much more demanding than going on a hike, mentally and physically.

There was a great wind today and a lot of whitecaps in Half Moon Bay as a write this. There are also many people snorkeling in the bay. A boy walked by with black curly hair like that of a Greek god and dark skin, except where and coated his feet. A great-tailed grackle perched on the thatched roof of a hut, sounding like a rusty hinge.

Sunday, February 25, 2007

Today we dove Hidden Worlds—the Bat Cave and Dos Ojos. I spent a lot of time tensing up my shoulders and worrying about buoyancy. I bumped the top of the caves in a couple of places and had a buoyancy issue for some reason. I think I was bothered a little by diving in an enclosed place. The stalactites (hanging from roof) and stalagmites (growing from the bottom) were amazing, including one that looked like a mother and child. On the second dive, we swam through a shallow place where people were snorkeling. In the light their bodies looked like quicksilver. I saw a swimmer who was missing part of a leg, just like the man I saw on the beach a few days before.

There was a rusty blue ladder down into the cenote, but that was only one of many openings. The dive masters hauled the tanks up and down on ropes. One of them, Matthew, was Shaleh’s son. Our dive master was Juan Carlos. He gave Todd and me and George and Christine (a British couple) a long lecture about not stirring up sediment or damaging the environment. I wonder how many times a day he can dive the caves.

There were strings everywhere (like some Mexican version of Tom Sawyer) tied to rocks to mark our routes. We often encountered other groups of divers (four was the maximum per group). We signaled each other by swimming our lights steadily up and down, up and down against a wall. If we were signaling “OK,” we would swing the lights in a circle. A light swung really fast meant an emergency.

I don’t know why I didn’t like it more. Todd said he felt very relaxed.

We went to La Buena Vida for dinner. I had Pollo Pibil, a Mayan dish in which chicken is coated with a red, rather smoky sauce, and Todd had the catch of the day, which was, of course, grouper. Even though I don’t eat grouper in the United States because it’s overfished, I’ll eat it in Akumal because I figure they’ve caught it there with a hook and line rather than some more destructive method of fishing.

There’s a nice breeze on our balcony tonight, unlike the gale last night. It seems to be windier in February than in November. The waves in Half Moon Bay seem to come in threes. The third is the biggest and most definitive.

Monday, February 26, 2007

Today it was too choppy to go diving. We snorkeled in the bay in the morning and afternoon, but it was hard to see because of all the sand in the water. I did swim in a school of smallish fish—possibly snapper. There were a lot of them, and the pelicans and the terns were feasting on them. I saw black urchins near the few rocks in the bay, a pufferfish, some black fish, and brain coral.

We rented two ancient 1-speed bikes and rode into Akumal and ate Lucy’s famous shrimp tacos for lunch. We also had two of her empanadas, which were good. They had a problem with their electricity, so we didn’t get to try her homemade ice cream. We tried to exchange money, but the exchange was closed, so we went to Turtle Bay Café and got chayagua/chayagra (a drink from a local plant that tastes green and sweet) and ice cream. Then we rode back home.

Pretty much all we did this entire week was dive, eat, sleep and get from one place to another.

We went back into town later to get our laundry and discovered that the Mercado de Akumal was closed. We went to pick up our laundry, and the woman joked, “No ticket, no ropas” (clothes). I asked her why the market had closed and she would only say, “Problemas.” I wonder if that meant, “None of your business!”

We took a taxi to Akumal Pueblo (across the highway, where many of the workers live). The car’s windows were dirty inside and out and the driver had Mexican music on really loud.

We went to El Ultimo Maya for dinner. The menu didn’t look very “Mayan” and the waitress didn’t speak English. She took our order, but then she came back and kept saying something about “veinte minutos” (twenty minutes) that we couldn’t quite understand. When I said to her, “Le entiendo” (I don’t understand you), she kept repeating herself. It didn’t occur to me until that I should have specified that I didn’t understand certain words she was saying because I don’t speak Spanish very well. This dinner really taught me how poor my Spanish is. Eventually we got our food—possibly even sooner than 20 minutes. The shrimp cocktail was good, the fajitas were average, and Todd’s rice milk with tamarind was good.

Afterward, we walked back down the hill to the taxi station. It was a very different atmosphere from the other side of the highway. Here I really felt like a foreigner. I’d like to have spent time there in the day, but I wouldn’t want to go there alone at night, with all the (rather short) men hanging out on street corners.

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

We rode our bikes to Yal-ku lagoon and snuck in the back way, by someone’s house. There were lots of fish—several silvery species, including one with black tails; fish with yellow fins all around, rainbow-colored fish that looked like there were wearing lipstick, a dark fish with orange side fins and purple one on top, a trumpet fish, a barracuda, and a big brown-black grouper just hangin’ on the bottom. there was a school of inch-long fish, perhaps the ones we swam through so long ago in Akumal on our first visit. There was another school of much larger fish, which were slender and long and had black tails. They kept swimming one way and then doubling back on each other.

The water sounded like it was crackling. Todd thought it might be the sound of water seeping into the lagoon from the groundwater. All I know is that it was different from the sound I hear while diving, which sounds like a boat engine going over but must be the sound of the waves on the surface, 60 or more feet above us.

We had a veggie burger and a smoothie for breakfast at Mango Café. Then we set out on the 11 o’clock dive.

It was my best dive ever in Akumal. We went to Sponge Reef and dove to 80 feet because the surf was so high. When the boat was going out, sometimes a lot of water slopped over the side. We dove with three other men—two Scotts and a Bob. One of the guys said he had been certified years ago but hardly ever dove. That turned out to be a bad thing for him because apparently he didn’t remember much of his training.

I was amazed by all the sponge coral (which look like vases) and all their sizes and colors. Other sites in Akumal had only the black sponge corals, and I wasn’t even sure if they were sponge coral because they were almost closed at the top. There were lavender ones and orange ones and more greenish ones. I even saw a patch of bright green coral. There wasn’t really any elkhorn coral at this site, though I did see staghorn. This coral was more the mounding type, at times 15 feet tall. We saw a small barracuda, which followed Todd for a bit, a porcupinefish, a small puffer, a green moray, and a turtle in coral. There were tons of other fish. As we went on, the coral became less varied and there were more patches of bleaching and more coral debris, probably caused by Hurricane Wilma in the 1990s. I liked this landscape—lots of coral canyons.

Two of the Scotts/Bobs blew through their air in about 20 or 30 minutes and had to go up. Then they sat in the waves for 10 minutes and got sick.

When I got back to the dive shop, I discovered I’d been diving with 14 pounds. I’ll have to add checking that the dive shop has given me the right amount of weight to my list of things to do before a dive.

After the dive, we rode our bikes into Akumal and ate at La Loncheria. Some man on a four-wheeler said something to me as I rode along, but I couldn’t understand him. Todd had choc-puc (Mayan pork) and I had res asado con mole (grilled beef with mole sauce). It was good, less smoky and more spicy than at La Lunita. Then we rode back to the hotel to have our massages. My masseuse was named Mirea and grew up in Mexico City. I didn’t realize it had a population of 22 million. She said the holidays were the best time to visit because there are fewer people then (maybe they leave the city to go home to their towns?). She lives in Playa del Carmen but works in Akumal and prefers Akumal to Mexico City. She learned massage at a spa in Playa del Carmen and then went to school in Tulum and took a five-month course.

I told Mirea I was a copyeditor and she said I had the “same energy” as a friend of hers who writers for newspapers in Mexico City.

Now I’m writing as I sit on the balcony, which faces east, so evening is a good time to sit here. The terns fly by, whistling royally. The pelicans dive, doing somersaults as they bills touch the water. I think they are all playing in the last rays of the setting sun.

We went to La Lunita again for dinner (lalunita@prodigy.net.mx). There is a sign on the street indicating the restaurant, but it’s across the street in a hotel. You follow the signs to the back and there it is, a small white room with a patio in back and a bar separating the main room from another room. There is an outdoor pool off to the right. It is always crowded—Todd and I decided that if we eat there again we’ll make reservations. It had beige imprinted tiles on the floors and 1 wall. The other walls are finished in a rough plaster, probably on some type of cement-block construction. There is Mayan-themed art on the walls.

I got Filete de Boquinete con Mantequilla and Almendras (140 pesos). The waiter said that was snapper. Todd had crusted salmon with tomato sauce. I asked the waiter where the salmon came from, and he said the Pacific. We had the chocolate-covered frozen banana with ice cream and pecans (45 pesos) again, but because they stuck us in a hot, dark corner (we had to use a flashlight to read the menu) and neglected us for a while, we weren’t as happy with dinner this time. I kept thinking how my legs in the too-tight pants were either like sausages or very similar to the bananas coated with chocolate, and also how it looked like there were two turds in raspberry sauce on the plate. Then I started thinking about how much weight I had gained on this trip and how all the tourists in Akumal and most of the workers are fat. Then I realized that everyone in this restaurant was white (except the staff) and that I’d seen only one black person on this trip.

So it's probably a good thing we're going home tomorrow.

Inland, Dreaming of Waves