Lost in the Jungle
The writer Chris Wallace checks in from the Yucatán Peninsula.
I blame the movies, obviously, and books, for sending me down this path. Down the Mayan trail, in fact. In breezy linens. In search of treasure.
I blame the stories I read and watched as a kid for creating in me this romantic image of an adventurer in flap-pocket safari jackets, uncovering lost wisdom, forgotten civilizations. Wonder. Astonishment.
The last time I was in this part of the world, I had come for front row seats to the Mayan apocalypse, in December 2012 (and if nothing extraordinary happened then, I guess none of us realized how slowly the world would end, in tiny increments). Much has changed in the time since. Tulum, which was still then a spit of beach with a dozen-odd hotels, ranging from beachy to boutique, now looks a bit like a burnout who has been hitting spring break as hard as a hurricane ever since. The new railway, intended to make easier the visits to the magical Mayan archeological sites, is indeed open. But the new airport, deep in the jungle, felt, on my arrival, like a bizarre civic works stunt, massive infrastructure for an Olympics or something that will never come.
When I arrived, in late February of this year, the Hertz desk at the airport was overrun, and I was told I’d have to wait some hour and a half for a car to be washed. I said that a wash was wholly unnecessary and managed to get out of there, not with a charming old Land Rover as I had imagined, but a kind of apple-red Kia utility vehicle in an hour and twenty-five minutes flat. If you want to make Itzamná laugh, tell him about your plans, etc.
And I had been planning this visit for ages, gone through myriad drafts of itineraries, with various partners in crime signing on to join, before cancelling. But I normally travel alone. I’m probably more accustomed to going solo. And I love a road trip—I can stop whenever, wherever, and change plans on a whim without having to worry about someone else’s schedule.
Except of course the ticket offices of the ruins themselves. Because of the crazy delay in securing my car at the airport I had to fight my way into the Tulum archeological site, to join the very last group of tourists admitted to the compound of ruins sitting atop the blazing turquoise sea. By the time I’d caught up with the group, having sprinted through the humid tropical heat, I was drenched, and blinking in the sun.
I am very hard on my gear and my clothes when I travel, often bundling together one batch of things for three, four, six, ten months on the road. Crumpled into a suitcase, battered around on safari and assaulted with the salty heat near the sea. So the notion of linen is not entirely incidental. If I look, in my wandering through airports, a bit like I’ve been on the run from Belloq and the Iquitos, I love the versatility of a linen capsule wardrobe. And in the books and tales that I love, it seems as though the explorers in the jungle are always having to be ready to weather the worst and then pop into the embassy or some institution to raise money, to attend a gala or whatever. So when Mack Weldon told me they had a new line to tough-wearing, easy-care linen, I thought what better place in the world to take it for a spin.
When I left the Tulum ruins, I got a note from my hotel that their power was out. The whole city grid was down. The charms of the jungle, they’d said, and offered me an exchange, with a stay at their property in the colonial town of Valladolid. Which was sort of perfect. After a couple hours’ drive, I arrived at this old stone town, beginning to soften in the purpley dusk light, its walls painted in mustard and watermelon beginning to glow orange with the last rays of the sun, and checked into the hotel, their only guest.
From Valladolid, I would make my little daily sorties, to Chichén Itzá and the nearby cenotes, rambling around, taking pictures, rereading Charles Portis’s Gringos—looking for, what, exactly? Adventure, surely. And a connection to a romantic ideal of my childhood, perhaps. Looking for the me I had always hoped to be.
Because maybe the thing is just to set out. Maybe the paths themselves, and even their end points, are incidental. All the gold is gone, carted off to the (wrong) museums. What treasure there is, we bring with us. And maybe that's the point of it all, not to travel in pursuit of the souvenir, to extract meaning or worldly wisdom, but to sprinkle what good we carry, what good we see, wherever we may be. Not to become more whole, but more diffuse, as we leave bits of ourselves with the people and places we encounter on the road.
After a couple of days, the city lights came back on and I returned to Coba, thinking about ghosts. About the ghosts of the gods and the ghosts of those who prayed to them at these wonderful pyramids. About the ghosts of our former selves, and the selves we never quite got to be. At the hotel where I’d original planned to base myself, I set my camera on a tripod and pulled out my linens’n things to play out some of the various characters I keep in my suitcase, to see if I could capture some of those ghosts on film.
Be careful what books you get into when you are young, is all I’m saying. If you are like me, you may end up blissfully lost, deep in the Yucatán jungle, in search, less, of treasure, than of yourself. And you would absolutely love it.
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