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.