thoughts after the trip.....

i waited til after i returned home from vacation to write this about my trip ... it's a much different tone than the fun mentioned below....

jorge, our tour guide on the way to tulum, stands in front of about 30 vacationers on the bus. some passengers, in their white linen, super-star sunglasses and wide-brimmed straw hats doze while he speaks. others chat with their neighbors. others genuinely listen. but before he speaks about the mayan ruins we're about to visit, and before he shares the history of the mayans who are still very much a live today, jorge thanks us all. he thanks us for allowing he and his fellow mayans and mexicans to serve us on our vacation because our trips, our visiting the palace resorts, is sending his children to school and putting food on his and many other mayan families' tables.

i think this was a genuine expression of appreciation, and i imagine it made some of that buses' passengers feel good on the inside, but all i kept wondering was whether jorge, and raul (who brought us drink after drink at the bar) and christina (who greeted us by name when we entered the restaurant) were ever waited on. did they ever kick back by the crystal blue water of the pool, have a cerveza and watch their children ply gleefully in the water? i don't think that happened for them, yet here they were greeting us happily (or seemingly so) each day, sharing with us and providing us something they were never able to obtain.

i took a few photos on our taxi ride back to the aeropuerto, but as you can imagine they didn't come out well, so hopefully i can explain the vast difference i witnessed in passing the beautiful resorts and small mexican towns.

as you can see in the photos below, the resorts of riveria maya are beautiful. the beaches are white, the water is teal, and the pools and resorts' grounds are so well manicured, you'd never be able to tell the difference between a florida resort and one in mexico. it have been in any resort town -- from Florida to Spain. it really just had the generic feel of being at a classy vacation destination. i feel i missed out a bit, not experiencing the real mexico.

but while i didn't experience it, i did witness it. driving between resorts, i saw one of two things. i saw either amazing archways of other resorts and the construction of another future amazing archway ... or i saw the real towns, where the residents lived while they weren't working at the resorts.

just outside the gates of a resort, the "forest" was unkept and wild. cement blocks, downed trees, cast-away stones and more were piled just outside the view of those visitors who choose only to focus on the resorts' large archways. it was easy to ignore the mess as you drove through those immense gates into a heavenly paradise.

but beyond that mess was more -- there were forest and trees, broken up by little towns of huts and occasionally larger, bustling towns with old, broken down bodegas and other shops that were interspersed with large chains including -- and i'm not even joking -- Office Depot and Sam's Club (with their signs in English!). small cars and bikes carried the residents to their destinations, and i saw many sitting in the back of pick up trucks -- i was shocked at the stereotype played out before my eyes.

we also drove past two or three military wagons with camo-uniformed soldiers carrying very large guns on their laps -- something you'd never see in america today, and something that shocked me but seemed the norm to the residents of these towns which the militia drove through.

the world outside the resorts -- the real mexico -- was entirely different from that of inside the resorts, and i felt myself wishing i could have a cerveza at the local bar rather than the "exotic" pool side. and it amazed me that the only way we could help these people is by vacationing in the extravagant resorts situated next to their run-down homes -- it reminded me of charities that host expensive galas to raise money for a good cause -- when the entire expense of the party could have been donated to the cause.

i understand that's life, but something about it just didn't seem right.....