Nochoc Mul pyramid, Coba

Coba

About 40km inland from Tulum is the Mayan city of Coba. Now a series of stone pyramids and nobles' houses dotted around the jungle (only a tiny fraction of them uncovered), Coba was for centuries one of the most important Mayan sites in the Yucatán, controlling not only vast swathes of farmland and water but also the trade routes to the ports on the Caribbean coast. It flourished around 600-800 and at its peak would have had 50,000 inhabitants.

Agustin, Simba, Benjamin and Aesa

Coba is a big tourist attraction here, not least because, unlike at Chichén Itzá, further north, you can still walk up to the top of the biggest (uncovered) pyramid, Nochoc Mul. We went early in the morning with an Argentinian friend who has become the unofficial champion of the Mayan people who live in the area. Agustin is a ceramicist and an anthropologist, who moved here seven or eight years ago with the hope of studying Mayan pottery. But, although he visited hundreds of villages in the region, he found that almost no one knew how to make pottery in the Mayan way. 

A Mayan plate from 600-800. She is apparently grinding cocoa

He set up a school near Coba which now teaches Mayan music and theatre as well as pottery and has become an activist for the local Mayans, earning money by guiding people round the site and helping locals make money from craft rather than from chopping trees down to make charcoal.

Coba is a lovely site to visit. You rent bikes and cycle through the trees to see its great square, the pyramid, various steles with inscriptions (including one of the ones that allegedly - ie didn't - predict the end of the world last December) and two ball courts where the Mayans played their famous game. 

Two teams faced each other in a narrow paved area between stone walls that slope upwards at about 30°. They start by bouncing a heavy (3-4kg) solid-rubber ball on to a skull embedded in the centre of the floor. Like one of those balls we had as kids, only about a thousand times bigger, this then bounces everywhere and the teams volley it back and forth, hitting it with their hips or elbows (it's too heavy to kick or punch without breaking bones). The captains of each team spend most of their time up on the sloping walls waiting to be passed the ball for a chance to shoot it through a stone ring at the top. The first goal wins, but it's not easy. Game sometimes went on for three days. 

In a video game you would have to strike this skull with your sword to open a hidden portal

The ball game was ritualistic, perhaps to do with overcoming death, and in some MesoAmerican cultures the winner was sacrificed. The Mayans were less warlike (and a lot shorter) than the Aztecs (one reason they were defeated so quickly by the Spanish) and didn't take to human sacrifice, but the winning captain had to cut himself and drop blood on to the floor. As Agustin was telling us this, I banged my toe (I was wearing flip-flops and do this about once a day) and reopened a cut in a rather spectacular way, so I guess I had a chance too of conquering death, though if I had been around in Mayan times I would definitely be the guy who brought the oranges out at half-time.

Pain...

... and relief

The site is also interesting for its flora, a phrase I never thought I would have the occasion to type. One tree exudes a sticky black sap that is corrosive and burns the skin. Near to it grows another whose flaky bark is the antidote. You have to soak it water and lie in the bath for six hours before the pain goes. In Mayan tradition these trees were originally two warrior brothers, Tizic and Kinich, one who drew his strength from hatred, the other from kindness. They fell in love with the beautiful Nicte-Ha (lots of cenotes are called XXXX-Ha, so I am guessing there's something watery going on here) and fought a duel over her, eventually dying in each other's arms. In the afterlife they begged for the chance to return to earth to see their beloved again and were turned into the two trees Chechen (poison) and Chacha (antidote), which is why they are always found together (and, I am guessing, near water). The Chacha also has a more prosaic name. Because of its peeling bark it is known by the locals as "the tourist tree".

As we left the site we came across a group of kids, dressed up and playing Mayan music. To Agustin's surprise they were his students fundraising for the school. We stayed to watch for a bit and it was then that I realised what a hero he is to the Mayan community who live there. Agustin is in his early 30s and came to learn pottery. He makes great pottery, but in that small part of the Yucatán he has also transformed the lives - and the environment - and 1,500 people. It was a nice lesson in travel: you may not end up doing what you intended to do, but what you do end up doing may well be even more significant.

It's my last morning on the balcony and this has been a great adventure. I came as an experiment, with three aims: to learn to be a divemaster and overcome my fears of being underwater; to see if I could keep up my London work from abroad; and to avoid the English winter and come back when it was spring. The first two have more than worked out. I have been challenged and, I hope, transformed by my time in the sea and the cenotes, and, very-early-morning Skype calls aside, it turned out to be fine to write for Wired from here. Along the way I have had some great conversations, seen fascinating things and have met some amazing people, different from me and inspiring. As for the third aim, well... I'm on my way home now, and that's nice.

Two divers and, in the middle, a great instructor

Winding down
It's six in the morning and I'm back out on my balcony watching the sun come up over the town. In three days I'll be coming home, and obviously I have bittersweet feelings. It will be great to see everyone again, but my plan was for the trees to be in bud by the time I got back, baby moorhens to be paddling around Highgate Ponds and everyone breathing in that fresh, spring air that cleans the city. Apparently, that's not going to be the case, and I won't pretend that it hasn't been lovely to be 5,092 miles away from the snow. 

My friends Benjamin and Simba are here at the moment, having come from London and Rio/Sao Paulo*/San Francisco/Goa/wherever respectively to hang out and do some diving. [*New laptop frustration continued: even though I can type ñ with one finger on my Spanish keyboard, and ¬ with two, whatever it is, I can't find any way of typing the letter "a" with a tilde over the top of it, as in Sao Paulo. It's probably incredibly easy, but bear in mind that my keyboard also has a button that says 

                                                         Imp Pant
                                                          Pet Sis

that I haven't dared press yet. We're a long way from Cupertino, Dorothy.] Ben, although he won't know it until he reads this, became my first ever real customer as a divemaster on Wednesday, when I took him out in the sea all by myself for a refresher dive. Luckily (a) he is a very good diver and happy to pootle along and (b) the sea was pretty and calm that day. I was aiming to take him to the little garden of plants, fish and lobsters, that Tullio and I found when we were "making" the famous "map" but my navigation skills are still rudimentary so, despite having a compass, I couldn't find it anywhere. I had given up and was taking us on a broad arc through the water that would land us on the beach in front of Papaya Playa when suddenly we were in middle of it, surrounded by lovely, undulating plants and brightly coloured playful fish (though no lobsters that I could see). It was like a Disney finale to the dive. Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow - which is a very good read, by the way - gives a lot of evidence to show the huge role luck has in almost everything we do. (He is particularly scathing about fund managers and their claims to skill.) When the garden appeared in front of me (about 200 metres and 180 degrees on the compass away from where I thought it was) I couldn't have agreed more.

Simba is an accomplished diver but did his certification when we were all at university and they still had those rubber suits with brass helmets. So he took the opportunity to do take his PADI Open Water certificate with Tullio. I will leave him, if he sees this, to comment himself on Tullio's teaching but I was really proud to have introduced them and it was great to see one of my oldest friends and one of my newest getting on so well and working together. At the start of all of this, I wrote about how Tullio and I were developing more of a mentor-like relationship than simply teacher-student. It has been that and much more. I will miss him and I have been changed and energised by his teaching, friendship and company. Tullio is not someone to pass up a party. But he is also serious, empathic and thoughtful, and a loyal friend - a fine man it has been an unexpected pleasure to meet. I hope we see each other again many times.

Today we are renting a car and driving to the Mayan ruins at Coba, then to Valladolid for lunch and then taking SImba to the airport. The toot-toot man who sells bread from his tricycle is just passing, so I'll run downstairs, by a bun and cycle up to Hertz. Pics from the roadtrip later.

My bike: weighs a ton, could withstand a nuclear attack and has a very handy basket

Some things I pass on my bike ride to "work"

Home

Tullio (not every morning)

View from the office

Success

At 5pm today I finally drew a map of the reef off our beach. It was not the best piece of cartography the world has ever seen but it showed that I could use a compass. And, so, I am now officially a divemaster. Tomorrow we go out to celebrate. It's been a fascinating thing to do, often tough but always enjoyable. Nicely pleased.

My map is of under the blue bit

Now I can relax a while. Simba and Ben are coming next week to do some diving and we may go on some day trips. I'd like to see Valladolid before I leave Mexico and, also, Bacalar, which is further down the coast from here and apparently stunning. Will make a nice couple of outings if we can tear ourselves away from the beach.

Frida Kahlo in Mexico City

I could live in Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul. Well I couldn't, because it's a museum, but the moment I stepped in off the street I knew it was going to be the sort of house I love. The place is painted in my favourite kind of colours (blue, obviously, electric and vivid, but also rusty terracottas and deep greens) and it has that sort of inside-outside layout - little buildings and rooms around a tropical garden - that really works in hot climates.

I also like Frida Kahlo - herself and her paintings - and, to be honest, this was why I went to Mexico City, to see where she and Diego Rivera had all those dinners, fights, reconciliations, friends, parties and times of intense creativity. I suspect they were often unpleasant to be around but I think they were also incredibly loyal to their friends - especially Trotsky, who, under constant threat of assassination by Stalin's agents, must have been hard work to have as a guest - and I would have loved to have been part of their world.

An ex-voto from Kahlo's collection. This man fell from
 his horse, which had been frightened by a snake. But, as the caption says,
he was up and about 60 days later

Inside, the house is chock-full of paintings and objects that Kahlo made or collected during her life. There's a nice randomness about what goes next to what and I really liked the pre-Colombian ceramics throughout the place and her collection of ex-votos, pieces of "peasant" art that are way more sincere and "art"like than some of the stuff we celebrate today in London. 

The kitchen

Upstairs in the "night bedroom" is her collection of dolls (childlike) and butterflies (a little freaky). Next door is the "day bedroom" and the bed on which she spent most of her waking hours. (The place is, apparently, pretty much as she left it when she died in 1954. She was 47, which shocked me. I need to get on with things.)

Self-portrait

Off one courtyard was a temporary exhibition of some of her dresses, organised by Vogue (you can take the boy out of Condé Nast...). Dresses on mannequins in cabinets don't really do it for me, but I'm glad I gave it a try. Kahlo had polio at the age of six, which left one of her legs shorter than the other, and was in a very bad traffic accident at 18, which resulted in multiple fractures, especially in her spine, pelvis and right leg. As a result, she spent most of her life in pain and was unable, though she was pregnant a number of times, to have children. In the cabinets were dresses, skirts and plaster corsets that she had to wear to support what she called her "broken" body. They are all beautifully decorated (by her) but cleverly decorated too - the long skirts, plainer than the tops she wore, drawing your eye up and away from her disabilities.

When I was studying (well, "studying") English at university, we were snooty about knowing anything about the author of a work of art - the "text" was all. But I think we were denying ourselves something there. To be in the house of a painter whose history, marriage, injuries and pain can be seen in so many of her works was a very special experience. 

Almost a divemaster

My friend and colleague at The School of Life, Gaylene Gould, recently wrote an interesting blog post about writers' difficulties finishing things. Sometimes you can get too attached to the process of producing something that you don't want it to end. I am going through a similar thing with my training here. 

For a week or so, we have been almost done, with just two or three things left on the check list before I qualify. For a combination of reasons - not having the right equipment, the sea being too rough, general faffing around (mine and others') - we never quite had a chance to make a map or locate and recover a lost object from the seabed. (This latter task feels a bit melodramatic until you realise that people are always dropping things like cameras off the side of boats and expect the divemaster to go and get them for them.) So, with a calm sea a couple of days a go, Tullio and I went out to kill two birds with one stone: make a map of part of the reef and drop something, find it and bring it back.

We noticed the dark clouds amassing inland but they seemed to be far away when we went in the water. But, almost immediately after we had gone down, a storm struck and what had been crystal-clear, calm water turned into a washing machine. Mapping was out of the question as it requires swimming in a straight line, taking a compass bearing, writing neatly on your slate and so on. We couldn't do the first and sometimes there was so much sand being churned up from the sea bed that I couldn't even see the compass on my wrist. We weren't in any danger. The reef is about three metres deep at the most, and every so often we popped our heads out the water to see what was going on (big waves, hard rain, black sky). In fact, it was incredibly good fun. The surge of the waves above you toss everything back and forth in unison, so Tullio, I and a lot of fish spend half an hour in each other's company waiting for things to calm down.

We had taken with us one of those big, plastic water-cooler drums to use as a lifting bag. The idea is, when you find your lost object, you can raise it to the surface by attaching it to something you can fill with air - like a hot-air balloon but underwater. (A camera you can pick up yourself, of course, but an outboard motor needs some help.) There are proper floats made for this, but ours had a hole in it so we had decided to improvise, attached some ropes to an empty drum and took in in the sea. You can tow something like this along the surface for a bit but in the end you have to fill it with water and bring it down with you. A 25-litre drum of water weighs 25kg and, when the surge got stronger, it was like towing a recalcitrant child. Wherever we wanted to go, it wanted to go somewhere else, often straight into someone´s head.

At this point we really lost something. We had taken along a weight belt to "lose" and then find and recover when a particularly strong surge knocked it out of Tullio's hand. We looked around but we could only see about two metres around us and it wasn't there. It's interesting how hard it is to see things underwater even when the visibility isn't poor. It's not like glancing over a beach to see where you dropped your towel. You have to divide the seabed up and systematically scour it about four square metres at a time. (The PADI manuals are full of different shaped search patterns to make sure you don't miss a bit.) So our fake search and recovery become a real one. This would be a better story if the thing we dropped had been valuable, the storm was steadily increasing and our air was running low. But in fact (diver nerd alert) we used a circular search pattern ("suitable for recovering a small object on a flat bottom") and found it after about a minute.

When we came out of the sea the storm had passed but you could see its effects. The sun was out again but everything was glistening with rain water and all the people who were on the beach when we went in were having lunch in the restaurant instead. It wasn't the dive we had planned but I was pleased it had turned out that way. On my first day, I swam 800 metres in waves much less strong than that and had almost given up with fear and exhaustion. Since then, I have been in the sea every day, trying to make it more of a friend, and the fact that the two of us came out of that dive grinning says to me that that has worked. We still have to make a map - and Pablo, the owner, is making threatening noises about delaying my actual "graduation" until the end of my trip - but for all intents and purposes I am there. What a journey it's been. I'm even grinning now thinking about it.

He lived on the left, she on the right

I am now in Mexico City for a couple of days. Ever since I watched a programme about it, I have always wanted to see Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera's house, where they lived in separate buildings with a bridge connecting them at roof-level. (Psychoanalysts, you can start now...). So I am going to Coyoacán, which I am hoping is a short metro ride from where I am staying, to see that, her Casa Azul, his other house and the house where Trotsky lived and was murdered. (All of this is brilliantly brought to life, by the way, in Barbara Kinglsolver's book Lacuna.) I like Mexico City but I am already longing for clean air and the sea. I know I will return here many times, so tomorrow I am going to visit the Museum of Anthropology and then, maybe the next day, I´ll go back to Tulum.

My MacBook has finally died after eight years of heavy use, regular dropping and other assorted moments of disrespect. The final straw was a day of incredible heat and humidity combined with the electricity supply at the beach, which fluctuates wildly. (You could feel it longing for a better life in a Shoreditch design studio.) I am going to take it home to repair and but I can't do that here, so some photos I was hoping to post will have to wait.

In the meantime, I have bought a little Asus Eee PC netbook, which runs, gasp, Windows. It's nice to use and very compact. But after Apple it just feels second-best. (It was, of course, also a quarter of the price.) We'll grow to love each other, but right now we have constant little arguments about things like Windows' infuriating "notifications" and the weird trackpad. I am also tripping up over the Spanish keyboard. Things like ñ and ¿ are easy, of course, but how many times am I going to type "¿" ? But other characters are in weird places. Yesterday I spent literally an hour trying to work out how to type @. Mexico City is also south-east-Asia-like in the availability of pirated software. The guy who sold me the laptop also installed Microsoft Office "with compliments" while I was there. It's a dreadful set of programs, of course (apart from, maybe, PowerPoint), but the fact that all the menus are now in Spanish gives them an exotic feel and makes even using Word almost bearable. 

Click to enlarge – then X in the top right corner to close

The halfway point

Si, hablo Español (kind of)

One of the great things about travel, of course, is speaking other languages. To be honest I have a kind of bull-in-a-china-shop approach to this. If I can, I'll swot up on "I don't speak X very well", "Please speak more slowly" and any phrase that means something like "The thing you use to..." for when I don't know a word. And then I will blunder forward, shooting out mismatched nouns and adjectives, hopelessly wrong tenses and vague phrases I think ought to make sense, hoping people will have the patience to engage me in conversation and that, bit by bit, I'll get better. This works, of course, pretty much everywhere except France, where, to me at any rate, it feels like every waiter is a member of the Academie Française on Neighbourhood Watch duty.

I once spoke Spanish fairly confidently, by which I mean I could hold a conversation as long as didn't require the subjunctive (what does?) or words beyond a fairly basic vocabulary. Then I was lucky enough to learn Brazilian Portuguese with Pedro and my Spanish had to take a siesta. There's not room in my head for two languages that are so close together. All the words get mixed up. 

Tulum is a melting pot of nationalities but most of my friends here seem to be either Argentinian or Italian and, more and more, we have been speaking together in Spanish. They all speak English perfectly, of course, but it's become a bit of project to help David practicar su Español. And what is really nice is that they are not slowing down for me. Tullio is useful. He is one of those natural linguists and happily translates when there's something I don't understand. And he is very handy in a group when we have had a few beers and I have drifted off for a moment only to tune in again to find myself facing a wall of syllables that make no sense whatsoever.

I brought with me a wonderfully out-of-date and useless phrase book that seems to have been printed before they had to put the year under the copyright notice. The YALE English-Spanish Conversation Guide (2nd edition revised) begins:

Here you have a Yale Guide, a booklet which wants to make itself useful and be a handy travelling companion.

a sentence that doesn't feel as though it has been written by someone from Yale, or indeed an English speaker, or indeed, to be honest, a human. Then you are straight into one of those daunting sections on grammar, including tips such as:

The relative superlative is rendered by prefixing the definite article to the Spanish comparative.

and

In Spanish, as in English, there are seven kinds of adverb.

(Really?)

But it's the phrases themselves that make it a great read. I like the casual imperiousness of:

Bring towels, soap. 

Traígame toallas, jabón.

and, under "In The Plane":

Can I have some cotton wool for my ears?

Deme un poco de algodón para los oídos, por favor.

I hope to use both of these before I get back to the UK.

Fast-forwarding to the modern world, I am learning a lot of new vocabulary from a brilliant website called Memrise, created by a guy called Ed Cooke who is a bit of a memory genius. (I interviewed him for Wired last year, though, rereading my piece, I realise that it is so overpacked with data that it too doesn't feel as if it was written by a human.) Memrise uses the metaphor of new words as seeds. You "plant" them, "water" them and eventually "harvest" them at steadily increasing intervals, which helps lock them into your brain. It's a very neat site, and I am finally working out what words are Spanish and what, to be put out to pasture for the time being, are Portuguese. The subjunctive, though, I think can still wait awhile.

The sun coming through the roof of the Papaya Playa bar

Nearly there

Sunday was a big day for wannabe divemaster Baker, as I was my turn to organise, prepare, brief and lead two dives with real customers. It's a lot more complicated than I had imagined. In the morning we took four divers to Casa Cenote, a nice calm pool, about ten minutes north of here, that has a big area where you can help people practise their diving skills (it's about two metres deep, with a flat, sandy floor you can kneel on). Then you get a nice half-hour dive with no scary caverns. Casa Cenote is where we take all the divers for their first dive if they haven't been diving for a while and if the sea at Papaya Playa is choppy.

Casa Cenote

Casa Cenote is about 20 metres from the sea and you get both fresh- and saltwater marine life there. My favourite are big shiny sea fish, about 50cm long, that are covered in silver scales and glisten as they swim past you in packs of three or four. I'm not sure what they are called (learning the fish-identification chart is still to come) and I'm not sure if Tullio does either, but I will look them up. [In fact, whether it's swimming past them underwater or eating them off the grill, I always find fish names a problem abroad. But, now I think of it, I don't think I could identify fish at the fishmongers in Britain either.] 

There's a lot to do when you manage a dive and the idea is that you exude a calm confidence that the other divers can draw upon. I probably managed that most of the time on land and about half of the time we were underwater. Luckily they knew I was in training, were very indulgent (at least to my face) and didn't ask for their money back. 

Safety Sausage??

First up, you have to get everyone to sign various disclaimers and health-check forms that, to be honest, are pretty badly photocopied and seem to be printed in 4pt. When the divemaster has to get his reading glasses out to explain something on them, you know it's not Daniel Craig who is going to be leading you underwater. Then there's all the equipment: air tanks, BCDs (the inflatable jackets that keep you buoyant), weights (that keep you down), wetsuits (that have to be the right size and have short or long legs according to the customer's preference), masks and fins (ditto about size). Then there's towels, water, oxygen (in case of an emergency), money to get into the cenote, sandwiches, your dive computer, your own equipment (which in my case is a collection of the random sizes left over when the customers have got theirs), and almost certainly something else that proves crucial only when you realise you have forgotten it.

Once that's sorted, you get in the car and give everyone the briefing: where we are going, what we are going to do, how we are going to communicate underwater etc etc. (I was quite good at this bit.) At the site, you scramble for a free bench to put all your stuff on while the customers admire the azure-blue water. Then you help them assemble everything, reiterate the briefing and everyone gets in the water, bobbing around on the surface until we are all ready to descend.

At this point everyone spends about a minute spitting noisily into their masks trying to clean them. For some reason no mask I have every worn diving hasn't (A) steamed up in various parts and (B) leaked water. (B) is because I have a moustache (vaseline is the answer apparently). (A) is something to do with the silicone seal over the lens and/or people using sun cream. No one seems to have invented a good defogger, or, if they have, it's toxic to fish or hurts your eyes or something else useless. The trick, apparently, is to buy your own mask and not let anyone else use it, but in the meantime, everyone, just before they dive, gobs into their mask, rubs their finger around the inside in a squeaky back-and-forth movement, dunks it quickly in the water, and puts it on, hoping for the best. My mask usually starts steaming up and/or leaking about five seconds later.

Underwater at Casa Cenote. Those are mangrove
roots coming down from the surface

On Sunday, the fours divers hadn't been diving for a while, so we practised three important underwater skills:
• how to relocate your air supply if it comes out of your mouth
• how to clear water out of your mask
• how to share your second air supply (the yellow one, called, oddly, the "octopus") if your buddy runs out of air.
These are three of the mimes I have been practising. The divers kneel in front of you and you demonstrate each one in turn – slowly, clearly, with total confidence etc etc – and they repeat it to your satisfaction. There's an art to this and I haven't totally got it yet. I knelt a bit far away from the divers, like a teacher in a classroom, and as a result had to squint like an underwater Mr Magoo to see if they had really got the water out of their masks. I was also a little underweighted (or, Diving 201, breathing a bit hard, which inflates your lungs more and makes you more buoyant) and so I did the whole thing bobbing up and down about 2cm off the cenote floor, which is weird and strangely disorienting. Luckily they were pretty good and so soon we could set off on the dive.

The other day I discovered, with Tullio in the sea, how strange is was to be at the front of a dive, and this dive started with a fairly strong current against us. My automatic response was the start kicking hard and apparently I just shot off, leaving everyone behind. (I thought I was barely moving at all.) Two things were going on in my head: that the current was so strong that we were not going anywhere, and that I was actually leading them in totally the wrong direction. I only realised what was happening when I felt Tullio's hand grab my ankle and saw his eyes, like saucers, glaring at me through his mask. I looked back and found my customers about 25 metres behind, struggling to keep up. Diving is slow and calm and I had turned it into a an Olympic sprint. After that, we slowed down and had a nice dive but I learnt a lot about how I speed up when I have too much to think about. Luckily the cenote is so beautiful that everyone forgives you things like that, but I need to write the word "Slow" on the inside of my mask. Maybe that's what I could use the steaming up for.

The second dive was easier in the water but, dumbly, I had forgotten to pack two wetsuits. They were drying from the first dive and I forgot to put them in the car. We managed to borrow one from someone there but I had to dive in my shorts, which was chilly. Wetsuits also make you more buoyant and, as I was also carrying extra weights in my pocket (in case any customers need them), I spent most of that dive bumping along the cenote floor and getting cold. Oh, and my regulator (air source) had a hole in it, so I had to do the whole dive using my emergency mouthpiece. As Tullio put it afterwards, I will never forget to check the equipment again.

El Camello and a very welcome margarita

In the evening we went to our favourite fish restaurant El Camello ("the camel") – plastic tables, weird desert-themed pictures on the wall (no one knows why), unbelievably fresh fish (it's owned by fishermen) and very cheap. The portions are nonsensically huge and the ceviche is the best I have eaten since Lima. 

The rabbit comes up the hole, round the tree and
down the hole again  - if you're lucky

I am almost done with the training. Still to go are various mapping and search skills, knots, and my 24 underwater mimes, and I have to watch an (apparently agonisingly saccharine) PADI video about the joys and responsibilities of being a divemaster. I also have to do what's called a stress test: exchanging all your equipment, including mask and fins, with your instructor while the two of you share a single air source. We have started to practise this. It's actually quite good fun, if difficult. But, all being well, I should be a divemaster by the end of this week. After that, like a newly qualified driver, it's all a matter of practice.

Topes

The main street that runs through the centre of Tulum is also the federal highway that stretches about 400km from Cancun in the north to the border with Belize. As a result, if you sit with a margarita in one of the many bars and restaurants that line the strip, you get a good range of passing traffic, from triple-articulated lorries (mostly, by the look of it, carrying beer) through shady-looking 4x4s with blacked-out windows to guys on little rickshaws selling selling fruit, bread and cakes. The other night, crossing the road, I came face to face with a bored-looking tiger in a cage being towed around to advertise the arrival of the circus in town. Behind him, on a second trailer, was an equally disdainful giraffe.

To slow everyone down, the authorities have dotted speed bumps, here called topes, around the town, which make UK sleeping policemen looks like gentle ripples in a duvet. There doesn't seem to be much logic behind how a tope is designed, except that it needs to be high, steep and unexpected. And, as you see whenever it rains here, slippery when wet.

Topes come in two forms. The first is a hump of raised cement, about a metre across and stretching from one side of the road to another. To drive across it, as Charles, Neil and I discovered when we were here in November, you have to reduce your speed to about 0.1 mph. Anything faster and you risk an unpleasant crunching sound on the bottom of your car or two or more of your wheels actually leaving the ground. The other is a series of very large metal studs, about 10cm - 15cm high and the same wide, that look as though they might burst your tyres. 

Apart from obvious places, like the entrances and exits to towns, topes tend to crop up in random positions. There's one, for example, in a road near my house that never seems to see any traffic at all. They're supposedly signed (and the signs, as you can imagine, are a magnet for teenage-boy graffiti artists) but often are not, and if you are unfamiliar with the area and driving at nighttime, most of your energy is directed towards peering into the gloom for an upcoming concrete barrier. 

Drivers being drivers, people will do anything they can to avoid them. Some of them have crumbled in odd places and cars use that to zig-zag around them, crossing into the other lane to avoid damaging their undercarriage. The second type often have one or two studs missing and taxi drives especially like to do a little dressage dance through the gaps as a matter of professional pride, even though that means they can end up on the wrong side of the road. Luckily, the pace of life here is so slow that that never causes much more than an annoyed glance from a passing dog.

I first saw, well drove horribly over, a tope like this in north-east Brazil (I think there they are called lombadas). A village, also on the main highway from one place to another, had put a line of bricks in the road and poured tarmac over the top of it. Its sides were almost vertical and the car shot jarringly into the air. Both there and here, though, they do work, though it's hard to imagine London taxi drivers accepting them with equanimity.

My house is a big multi-coloured block that looks as though the architect popped into a Frieda Kahlo exhibition on the way back from Istanbul. There are 12 studio apartments that rent by the month and a nicely quiet atmosphere. My favourite time of day here is sitting on the balcony first thing in the morning with a coffee watching the sun rise over the town. I've tried listening to Radio 4 on the internet as I wake up but it's weird hearing You and Yours at 6.30am (well, at any time, really) so I've decided to enjoy being slightly disconnected from the news, or even what day it is.

Yesterday, under Tullio's watchful eye, I took a customer out on a Discover Scuba Diving dive (ie she hadn't done it before) which was an eye-opener. It took a while for us to get under the water but, once there, she was swimming around with abandon (slightly too much abandon, to be honest). When I used to teach English as foreign language, I used to love taking beginners' classes. You get so much enthusiasm and excitement that it's like being irradiated with joy. But it also teaches you infinite patience. New skills come in fits and starts, however old and experienced we are, and good teachers - of which Tullio is certainly one - will give you the time and space to let things fall into place in your brain. I only wish managers understood this more.

I got my speakers: a little set from China that cost about £20 and sound it, but they're better than the speakers in my MacBook, even for You and Yours. But I discovered a Mexican love for the kind of sound system that I didn't realise existed beyond those cars that have purple light shining out the bottom and make the road vibrate. These (bad iPhone video below, but you have to imagine the sound) were briefly tempting, though I am not sure what my neighbours would have thought.

Moka Express coffee pots don't exist here, so that's a packing item for next time. And, sadly, I didn't catch the end of Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2. I took the collectivo minibus instead and the inflight entertainment is limited to mariachi music on the radio and people bellowing down their mobile phones.

It's raining now, though warm of course, which has given the town a strangely maudlin feel. I am going down to the beach to swim (on Tullio's instructions, I have to spend a solid hour in the sea each day "to make it your environment" and it's working). And then I will practise my little mimes - though somewhere the cool surf dudes who hang out at our beach bar can't see me.

This picture has nothing to do with this post but who could resist imitation
liquid cheese (next to the yoghurts in my local supermarket)?

Rough seas, important lessons, feuding dogs

For the last couple of days, the sea here has been rough, which makes diving there difficult. The reef is only about four metres deep and, when there are waves on the surface, the water underneath churns back and forth, throwing you all over the place, kicking up the sand and making visibility poor. This means that, for Tullio my instructor, we have the perfect conditions to go for a dive and learn some new skills. ("If you can do it in this," is his mantra, "you can do it in anything.")

First up, I have had to learn 24 little underwater mimes that are used to teach people diving skills – such as how to clear water out of your mask, how to adjust the air in your inflatable jacket to make yourself perfectly buoyant, how to relocate your air supply when your buddy kicks it of your mouth, and so on. Underwater, obviously, you can't use words, so each lesson is a series of slow gestures that you show them and that they then repeat. It's harder than it sounds and kind of absurd, especially when it is something like take-all-your-equipment-off-in-a-special-sequence-hold-it-in-front-of-you-and-put-it-on-again-while breathing-normally, a skill whose purpose, to be honest, I have never really understood.

I also, today, led my first dive, with Tullio pretending to be a customer. This was a strange and not altogether successful experience. As soon as we set off, I realised I had never been at the front of a dive before. I usually pootle along behind someone, taking in the fish and stuff and letting them worry about where we are going. Now, the whole of the sea was in front of me and I had to navigate us around, looking for interesting marine life, and making sure we didn't end up in Cuba. If you are familiar with a dive site, this isn't so bad, there are landmarks and things, but this afternoon felt like the underwater equivalent of getting lost on Dartmoor. Every corally/planty thing looked the same. Bits of rock seemed to come round again and again, and most of the time, with the visibility so poor, I thought I had lost my "customer". We did manage to end up back at the beach after 30 minutes but Tullio's opinion was that if he had paid for this dive he might want his money back.

To be serious, it was, obviously, a good learning experience. Presented with a new situation, I forgot almost everything I knew, swam too fast, breathed too much air, bounced up and down (rather than gliding elegantly from one place to the next) and came out exhausted. Oh, and my tank nearly fell off. But, of course, that's the point. We came back safe, if a bit dissatisfied, and next time will be better. And I learnt, again, the golden rule of scuba (and, really, of anything): if you find yourself getting worked up by something difficult, stop, take a few breaths, ground yourself again and carry on.

Tomorrow is my day off and I think I will go up the coast to Playa del Carmen. I need to buy two things to make my home life a bit more comfortable: one of those Italian metal coffee pots, which seem to be non-existent in Tulum, and some little speakers to play music out of my laptop. On the big bus between here and Cancun (Playa del Carmen is halfway) they show DVD movies, dubbed into Spanish and played at ear-splitting volume. When I came here from the airport, the bill was Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2. Having somehow missed out on Beverly Hills Chihuahua 1, and with my Spanish pretty rusty, it took me a while to get the hang of what was going on. Worse, we arrived at Tulum just as the final scene (some sort of dog-talent-show stand-off between a snooty poodle and our working-class chihuahua hero) was coming to its climax. I imagine chihuahua power triumphs in the end but maybe this time I'll find out for sure.

Cenote Cristal

Two quiet cenotes for snorkeling

This morning, two customers wanted to go somewhere quiet for some snorkeling. We went to two cenotes near here, called Cristal and Escondido, which I think Charles and Neil visited when we were last here. They're both tucked away in the jungle and for most of the time we were the only people there. 

Escondido – like Hampstead Ponds, only tropical

These are not really suitable for diving so there is none of the clanking of tanks and hissing of air that often accompanies scuba people wherever they go. Instead we spent a couple of hours paddling around and being meditative. This is proper undeveloped jungle and on the way out of Escondido we caught a glimpse of a coati, a racoon-like animal that is common here and looks as if it has been designed by a committee for cuteness. Around the popular cenotes they are bold and come over and beg for bits of your sandwich. Ours today was shyer but here's a picture of one that was hanging around yesterday at Tajma Ha.