Hugh Morgan

We had several days on the beach with Lexie and Liam in a hotel near Tulum, about an hour South of Playa del Carmen.  They went snorkeling, kayaking and paddle boarding, and because Liam wanted to stay on brand, he took Lexie jet skiing.

Tulum is a town of 45,000 people which feels a step down in intensity from Playa del Carmen and has a peculiar and somehow attractive mix of standard small town Mexican street life and shops and restaurants catering to tourists, much of it spread on either side of the main highway.  There are some beachside Mayan ruins just North of the town and the spot is a popular place for Instagram Influencers to visit so as to be able to document the perfect (and completely unreal) lives they are pursuing. You can see that this area appeals to a somewhat younger crowd, folks who want something local and a little scrappier but still having access to good coffee and Wi-Fi (that pretty much describes us, except for the younger part.)

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We were told by a restaurateur that Tulum is about as far south as Americans and Canadians come and, as he predicted, we didn’t see or hear many of them in our travels closer to the border with Belize.

Our hotel was right on the beach so that we could access the water and go for walks with ease. There were some Russian guests at the hotel, looking swarthy and prosperous – I immediately assumed they were oligarchs and when not suntanning on the beach were laundering money made in illicit arms, oil and gas or human trafficking operations, probably converting it into crypto currency on the dark web. In actual fact they were polite and reserved and we exchanged respectful greetings.

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A crew of hotel folks raking the beach and looking for stones to remove – we need our beaches clear and pristine (seaweed has been an issue in the Caribbean of late, large blooms of Sargassum, likely because of excess nutrients provided by agricultural and human runoff.)

The manager had arrived as a one year old here 30 plus years ago with his parents in a RV that they had driven from Utah. They were into skydiving and skiing and his dad has gotten an order for 30,000 Velcro wallets (he had been making a few on the side in his garage) which he was able to spin into a business that he subsequently sold.  They liked to scuba dive and spent several years the area, including diving in the myriad of cenotes.  One thing led to another and Josh’s parents built a small hotel, originally a spot for diving, fishing and exploring denotes.  It is now a full on hotel.  His parents were mostly retired and he liked to invest in cryptocurrency. I love hearing this kind of story – the world we live in is an amazing, variegated place. You couldn’t have made this up.

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The beach vacation – now so much part of our consciousness that we take it for granted – is a peculiar cultural artifact.   That you would take considerable time and effort to get to a place far away so that you could spend a lot of time in the blazing sun while doing nothing seems odd when you think about it. And, for those of you in colder climes, the fact that you get into a flying metal tube in the middle of February and be lying on a tropical beach within 24 hours of departure, making your winter that much more bearable, is nothing short of fantastic. Fur trappers in 19th Century Northern Alberta mostly had to put up with the winter they were dealt, though I suppose access to Lots of rye whiskey helped.

The idea of a beach vacation started in Britain in the early 1700s, prior to this the ocean and the seaside were seen as dangerous, isolated places. The English upper class started going to spas that were located by the seaside and then began to see the seaside as itself somewhere healthy to be.  In the mid 1700s, the upper class would ride in “rolling bathing machines” – covered wagons – into the water so as to be able to bathe without exposing themselves to public view.  What a great name for a conveyance!  What would the modern day version be -something on tracks, with GPS, air conditioning and a really good sound system? Elon Musk may be working on one.  As late as the 1930s in Britain police were arresting folks for bathing in clothing that was too revealing or too close to the opposite sex.

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The love of nature, closely embedded in the romantic movement, made getting away to places of natural beauty, particularly as Britain industrialized, developing its “dark satanic mills” which made cities dirty and unhealthy, an attractive goal.  The Romantic poets (Shelley, Wordsworth and others) looked to nature for inspiration and as a kind of ideal and this raised folks’ awareness of nature’s beauty (and fragility), not unlike the environmental movement today.

Things developed steadily in the 1800s with the expansion of the railway which made getting to the seaside easier for even working class folks, and the construction of towns dedicated to holidays (e.g. Blackpool, Brighton).

The French came up with the bikini in the 1950s, which was a scandal in itself – the Pope called it sinful – but, as is now evident, it gained wide acceptance in sunnier climes and pretty much eliminated the desire to have sexually segregated swimming areas.  More modest cultures – much of South Asia, the Middle East and some of Africa – continue to find the way folks in the West expose themselves beachside somewhat loose, promiscuous and decadent.  Women (and these edicts typically restrain only women) should be modest, chaste, demure.

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I thought you would like to hear the results of a careful study your diarist is undertaking on speed bumps in Mexico, whose results he hopes to publish in a peer reviewed journal once the data is in.  Like 40 degree below zero winter weather in Winnipeg or young children, these cannot be avoided here and often demand your attention when you least can offer it.

Broadly speaking, there are three types of speed bumps, each with a couple of variants. Any can be signed or unsigned, and signage when it occurs can be well in advance of the bump or right at it, or can be a “false flag” – a sign with no bump present.  The latter can be especially confusing when driving at night, which I try and avoid.

The first and most common speed bump is a additional layer of asphalt laid in a half round shape with a 5 – 6” radius.  This type is often unsigned, shows up randomly, even on tollways and will give your shocks and springs a solid work out if you are not able to slow down in time to meet it.  These are especially popular in Chiapas – I ran over dozens of them during my drive from the highlands to the coast and they felt there like a political statement.  “You have taken advantage of us for too long, we will make you pay.”  We got slowed up by one on our drive south of Tolum on a deserted stretch of road… as I rapidly downshifted several locals came running out of a nearby lean to proffering snacks and drinks for purchase.  That is taking service to a new level.

An unusual variant of this first type of bump is a very thick piece of rope laid across the road…this is not as effective as the asphalt bump and I think truck drivers might risk having it picked up by their tires and tangled on an axle.

The second type is a double line of semi spherical, 6” in radius metal objects embedded in the pavement with the convex side up.  You experience these most often in towns and cities on major thoroughfares, often with no signage or notice.  If you do pass over them at speed, they provide a shiatsu-like massage to your tires but not a lot more. Sometimes these have been driven over so much that either some of the metal hemispheres have collapsed or they have been torn out of the road surface. In this case, you steer your wheels to the areas closest to the surrounding road surface so as to minimize the bump.

The third and final type is most challenging if you do not see it in time to downshift.  It is a 6 – 8 foot slab of concrete with inclines on either side leading to a flat top, which is raised 1 – 2.5 feet above the roadbed, like a feature in a skatepark.  Not slowing down for these would result in launching the car like a stunt driver in the Fast and Furious franchise, with disastrous results. Fortunately, everyone takes these seriously and locals know where they are, signed or not, so when you see vehicles ahead of you slowing down, you know to do the same.

The drive from Cancun, where we had rented an AirBNB, takes you down a four lane divided toll road a mile or two off the Caribbean and through flat, dense jungle.  Massive gates – like minimalist sculptures – for gated communities (a little piece of America) on either side of the road, one for the PGA Golf and Country Club.  Billboards for high end restaurants with luscious hyper realistic photos of steaks, the meat either in its dark pinky, marbled rawness, or charred a rich brown-black like a burn victim in an industrial accident.  Luminous, almost surreal.  Lots of power lines, weaving in and out on either side of the road, as if fending off the jungle, microwave and cell phone towers – we need our connectivity – and not a hint of elevation change.

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Teams of maintenance folks in fluorescent green and orange coveralls trimming the shoulders with weed whackers or machetes – either tool making the task Sisyphean given the kilometers they have to cover.  Billboards for luxury villas, gated communities or lots in developments about to break ground – American real estate fever has a firm purchase here.  

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Theme parks with ziplines, water slides and American size entry fees, one by Nickelodeon, the cartoon TV channel, with sculptures of its cartoon figures prancing along the top of a massive entry gate.  All painted a uniform, iridescent orange (even Sponge Bob Square Pants, who should be bright yellow).  Something got lost in translation between corporate and the site (“Just use up that orange paint – we’ve got a bunch of it and the bigwigs from America are only here one evening, they won’t notice.”)

Our AirBNB is in a somewhat aging gated community on the outskirts of Playa del Carmen.  The house itself is funky in a way that we like – not everything works exactly as you might expect but the host is responsive and he happily trades messages with me in Spanish.  AirBNB hosts down here have got there photographing process totally dialed in – the photos posted on a listing are full, inviting and attractive and, while not a misrepresentation, certainly an enhancement of reality.  Our place is small but has a nice back patio with a table where we have dinners.

The neighborhood is comprised of two story townhouses in varying states of repair, one or two appear empty, almost abandoned.  Some have been tricked out with carports, fully tiled front yards (Mexicans have a thing for tiles), garden features and sometimes additional floors.  Service trucks, smaller cars parked on the street, the occasional scooter and one or two full size pickup trucks.

Neighbors will sometimes generously share music they like: as I write this I am being serenaded by syrupy and heartfelt Mexican pop song, loud enough that I can make out the words and feel the bass.

There is a lavanderia at the entrance, an aborrote (general store), a small taqueria and the ubiquitous OXXO.  Carmen at the lavanderia and I became best friends when we spent about an hour one Sunday in a Fabuloso scented haze trying to find our laundry order which had gone missing.

We go for walks in the evening and see folks returning from work, joggers and dogs being walked –  the dogs grace us later on occasional evenings with a deeply moving choral performance, whose fervor, length and atonality is impressive.  In the morning we are woken by the sudden tropical sunrise and the lovely songs of multiple varieties of birds that remind one that you are somewhere different from home.

Playa del Carmen’s claim to fame was as a ferry terminal for nearby island of Cozumel, years ago it was a fishing village.  It has evolved as a lower key alternative to Cancun and has grown considerably – it is now a town of 350,000 people that spreads out on either side of the highway.  Beaches are moderately difficult to access and we found some of the best food away from the touristed downtown in the suburbs.

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The tourist area is nice to visit first thing in the morning before the crowds build, the weather gets warmer and the general hubbub increases.  We went for a walk on the beach this morning first thing and, once we made our ways around the guys repairing jet skis in the narrow and ill defined public entrance, we got to a nice strip of white sand and the calm water of the Caribbean Sea.  Working our way past folks doing yoga, others meditating and one or two very large, heavily tanned men who were happily established on loungers in front of their hotels, each looking like a nicely browned pork shoulder or a very large toasted coconut.   Then by a roped off area with loungers and umbrellas laid out for a high end resort – within the rope there is a separate section with a small sign that says “For Premier Members Only”. While all hotel guests are created equal, some are more equal than others.

When on the Mayan Riviera it is essential to do a little dental tourism – you see signs everywhere for dental offices that will trick you out with whatever you need – cleaning, root canals, all sorts of cosmetics procedures at 1/4 to ½ American prices.  Quality is hit and miss – I think it would take several visits before I’d want to get something serious done.   The office we went to was stronger on marketing that it was on the actual cleaning we scheduled, but the experience was memorable and another slice of a visit to the area.

The dentists’ office was in a beautifully landscaped and gated community, in and nicely laid out retail and office area.  After a fair bit of sleuthing, we found the office, on the second floor of a low commercial complex laid out in a pleasing but rather complex way.  The waiting room was full of Americans, many of whom were not happy because the promised Wi-Fi access didn’t work and the chauffeur service provided by the practice was running behind (from what I could tell, way behind.)

We watched the cross cultural disconnect unfold – the Americans trying to be understanding but nonetheless pretty demanding, clearly mapping their expectations from the land of the free to their experience here and the Mexican staff doing what you do in most cultures when you have no control over outcomes which is to seek to be gracious and save face (both yours and your interlocuter’s). Frustration on both sides.

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Our cleanings were mediocre and were clearly a gateway to an upsell (in my case a bunch of cosmetic veneers, so that I could have the bright white, even teeth of a Mormon missionary or Swedish supermodel). I love a good upsell.  But the dentist and I had a good conversation about Mexican history – he is from Veracruz, which played an important role the the war of independence, the war of reform and the revolution.  Well, to the extent you can have a good conversation with your mouth filled with fingers, implements and doodads. I would say that our cleanings, which were ¼ of the cost of one in the U.S., were about ¼ of the quality, so I guess we broke even

I should note that Lexie had her teeth cleaned at a low key office near Tulum that catered to Millenials and Gen Z – she paid 1/2 of what we did and her treatment much more thorough. And she got a cool bamboo toothbrush to take home – we all love our tchotchkes.

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I have now become quite good at picking up and dropping of folks at the airport in Cancun, which receives hordes of visitors from the Eastern U.S. The website notes 4 terminals, Google maps only three and signs on the access road show no airlines arriving at terminal 1.

More important is deciphering the paperwork needed to board a plane, which involves a mysterious combination of online and printed forms, an app you need to download and complete which is then ignored. When Jennifer (my first pickup) came out of the airport she ended up in a taxi shuttle area from which there was no exit. Ditto with Liam – he ended up wandering down the access road in the pitch black – we were only able to find him through a tracking app that Apple provides its users (Lexie, Jennifer and Liam are all Apple users. I am not).

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On Lexie’s return to Seattle, finding the Alaska Airlines counter was one of those developing country mysteries that we uncovered only after multiple inquiries that generated ambiguous and contradictory responses.  The required paperwork was impressive (a boarding pass on your phone wouldn’t do, you needed paper).  Lex duplicated most of what she had input online and we are sure that the stack of papers she and her fellow passengers generated were filed appropriately and helpful for all concerned.

The folks in the first class line became enraged when they found out that an equipment change meant two thirds of them wouldn’t get their plush seats.  The wrath of an American consumer who has been denied what she is due is something to behold, particularly when that thing (or service) involves issues of status.  The small Mexican fellow behind the counter, in a rumpled dress shirt and tired looking tie, absorbed this dutifully, perhaps dreaming of the day when he could turn the tables and do the same to an American customer service person somewhere stateside.

There were hordes of tourists, mostly making their way back to the U.S. for Thanksgiving, the most traveled holiday of the year, and one in which air travel this year will be especially fraught.  I am rather glad I will be driving home.

Lexie’s boarding process got me to thinking about patience, how we learn it, what are its uses.  I used to think patience was like a muscle, the more you exercised it the better you got at it.  This was the only thing that kept me sitting in a church pew with our mother as a child, and what got me through excruciatingly boring classes in Architecture school.  This kind of patience aligns nicely with the hint of fatalism found in reformational theology, my Scottish forbears’ worldview. “You are suffering, there is a reason for this, just put up with it.”

Then I spent a year in India and traveled there for another 3 months – by rights this should have given me a patience muscle the size of one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s  quadriceps. 

But no.  It turns out that patience isn’t a muscle, it is a reservoir – each of us has so much and when it is depleted you’re done.  I have returned to India several times over the years and have found my patience as thin and as tight as a jazz musician’s snare drum.  Jennifer and I were in the airport in Mumbai a number of years ago trying to get a connecting flight to Kerala, during an all-India airline strike.  It was pandemonium – I’m lucky that I am not now sitting in a jail there having murdered one or more gate agents.

I have no patience for anything now, this undoubtedly indulged by the pace of life in America and the extraordinary levels of customer service folks provide to win and retain your business there.

Cancun is a peculiar bird and probably the least Mexican place that I’ve spent time in in the country.  The hotel area – a strip of hotels along a sandy spit – where development first started, feels like a slightly aged version of Las Vegas.  High rises, condos, steak houses, a lot of American brands (travel to another country to eat what you can get at home.).  Liam spent a couple of nights in a hotel there when his flight was cancelled twice(!) and was charged 5X the going rate by a cabbie to get there and ate at a Hooters where he scored a “Hooters Cancun” t shirt.

The metro area, which didn’t exist 50 years ago, now is a city of 900,000 and an economic driver for the region. (It took Calgary 120 years to grow to the same size).  The Mexican government then wanted to capture some of the growing American tourist trade in the Caribbean and through a careful selection process that evaluated 100s of places, settled on a small fishing village with almost no infrastructure in an area with immense poverty.  (There had been a large sisal growing and processing industry here staffed – weirdly – by South Koreans that had fallen on hard times.)  The government built infrastructure (the airport, roads, utilities) and financed the construction of the first ½ a dozen hotels (investors thought them far too risky) and began promoting the area as a tourist destination within 4 hours of New York.  Spring break for ¼ the price of Florida.

And the rest as they say is history.  There were plans to build several cities up and down the coast, but these got shelved after the 2008 financial crisis but there is still word of putting an international airport in at Tulum, now a small town that retains a loose, semi touristy, scruffy feel.

The name the “Mayan Riviera” came later – I can imagine a high end ad agency pitching the idea (“like Monaco with tacos!”). And the beaches from Cancun to Tulum, about 1 hour south, are a tourist machine, with someone on every corner with a Shop Vac ready suck your wallet clean.

(My laptop packed it in a couple of weeks ago and so I am writing this on a tablet using a Spanish-formatted keyboard that I picked up at a RadioShack. Please forgive the increase in typos.)

“Even if they call me messianic, I am going to purify the country.”

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador

You need to have a large ego to be a politician, and even more so in a country that is riven by poverty, corruption and drug trafficking. AMLO (the initials by which Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is known) considers his Presidency to be the fourth seminal event in Mexican history, the first three being:

• The war of Independence (from Spain) in 1810
• The war of Reform which radically reduced the church’s power in the country in 1858 
• The Revolution which completed the secularization of the country in 1910 – 1920

Now that is some high self regard!

Americans tend to think of Mexico as having only three facets: sunny beaches, nasty drug cartels, and a porous border through which come a lot of undocumented migrants.  But it is more than this.  Mexico is America’s second largest trading partner (Canada is 1st); it has a youthful, well educated population; it has a deep and rich history and culture, and along with Central America could easily serve as a counterpoint to China’s recent dominance of manufacturing.

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AMLO was elected in 2018 in an anti corruption platform with significant popular support (his predecessor’s wife had acquired a multi million dollar mansion that she claimed she had paid for with her earnings from acting.  This turned out to have been a “gift” from a contractor who was angling for some large government contracts.)

AMLO’s message is populist – he is very popular among the poor – but his vision for the country appears to be a nostalgic return of Mexico to the ‘70s, when the state ran everything major, and the governing party had a tight alliance with the two or three, now sclerotic unions. The Venezuelan journalist Moise Naim refers this mode of thinking – seen in his country’s leader Maduro – as “necrophiliac idealism”. Nostalgia is limited neither to the left nor to the right.

He has said his policy is “Abrazos, no balazos” (hugs not bullets) towards the narcotraficantes, reducing pressure on the organizations, which has given them license to expand their reach, typically violent and lawless. 

Halfway through his six year term, AMLO has both done too much and too little.  He was slow to acknowledge Covid as a threat, refusing to wear a mask, continuing to have major political rallies and being vague both about having the country supplied with the vaccine and getting one himself. As the virus spread, hospitals were overwhelmed and a black market developed for oxygen cannisters. Mexico’s is about ⅓ the size of the U.S. and has had the same number of Covid deaths (and American numbers are not anything to write home about.) Most of these deaths have occurred among the poor.

He has done little to investigate or curtail femicide, which is sadly all too common and, like his predecessors, is unable to address the massive number of unsolved murders and disappearances.

AMLO canceled a major airport expansion on which $3.8 BN had already been spent and has said he wants to use a military airport whose runways are not appropriate for civilian aircraft and which is more than an hour from Mexico City, instead.

Over ½ of Mexico’s economy is informal and cash based; eventual shutdowns and a sinking economy due to Covid meant that the poor could not earn money or buy food.  The economy shrank by 9% in 2020, which may not sound like much but, in comparison, the American economy only fared worse than that in two out of 10 years of the Depression (1929 – 1939). And it is a fairly corrupt place to live and do business: ⅓ of people surveyed recently by Transparency International had to pay a bribe to get a government service and the country is in the most corrupt third of countries (124th out of180) in which to do business.

AMLO announced he plans to renationalize Pemex, the country’s oil and gas concern and considered its crown jewel.  After NAFTA was signed 30 years ago, the company had slowly begun to modernize (it was notoriously inefficient and bureaucratically unionized.) and develop partnerships with international producers.  He plans to force electrical utilities to buy and burn local coal, stranding a number of more efficient wind farms developed privately and polluting the air.

He is very popular among the poor – and to his credit, has made efforts to provide cash distributions to the elderly, the disabled and those unable to work.  AMLO has a daily press conference at 7 AM that runs for at least an hour and during which he castigates his enemies, makes advantageous leaks of confidential information and reminds listeners of his purity and simplicity.

AMLO has begun to show an authoritarian streak of late, threatening to shut down news outlets that are critical of him and bestowing favors on allies without oversight, having opponents arrested on trumped up charges, and attacking civil society organizations and environmental groups, who he classifies as “neoliberal enemies of the people”. The New York Review of Books places him in the company of Vladimir Putin (Russia), Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (Turkey), Narendra Modi (India), Nicolás Maduro (Venezuela), Rodrigo Duterte (Philippines), Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil). All men who run autocratic democracies.

Likely AMLO will not be able to stray too far, even with his popularity: civic institutions are (just) strong enough here and the country’s ties to Canada and the U.S. (via NAFTA) to maintain its stability.

I am having a latte at a French pastry place, with a tasty pain de chocolate, on the main tourist street of San Cristobal de las Casas.  Locals are pitching jewelry, herbs, prints, chocolate, amber and jade to marks like me sitting outside.   An indigenous woman has a stack of locally made, handwoven blankets,. (Or are they manufactured in China, shipped here and sold as the real thing?)  Their pitches are mild and respectful.  Now a guy is selling cubre bocas (face masks) to keep us healthy.

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San Cristobal is a town of 180,000 people whose economy is driven by tourism and agriculture. It was founded in 1528 by the Spanish in the central highlands of Chiapas, in South Central Mexico. The town has a  gridded layout typical of colonial settlements, with single and two story buildings on very narrow streets and is surrounded by high oak and pine covered hills.

The town is at 2,200 Meters (7,200 Feet) and cool – my bed at the hostel has heavy blankets, something I’ve not needed thus far in the country.  The drive here from Oaxaca, with the highway weaving its way up the escarpment and views down towards the Pacific coast, was magnificent.

Chiapas has been the nexus of left wing political protests – the sense is that the poorer South, mostly indigenous, gets a raw deal from the federal government. The Zapatistas (EZLN for the initials in Spanish), a socialist libertarian organization, went pubic with their demands for change in the early ’90s and conducted a sporadic campaign of violence. Their name is taken from Emiliano Zapata who drove the Mexican revolution in the South and focused on the rights of the agrarian poor. You may remember a fellow being interviewed with what looked like a bag over his head (To my eye it looked like a badly made Halloween costume) named “Sub Comandante Marcos”. Since then, the EZLN has mostly been engaged in civil resistance – strikes, roadblocks and the like. As you would expect, the group aligns itself with anti globalization and environmental movements, seeking a return to the past. Were it that simple.

Chiapas has had a long history of maltreatment of indigenous folks, which has resulted in uprisings,  including the “Caste War” or “Chamula Rebellion” from 1867 to1870 and the “Pajarito War” in 1911. And Mexico, like other countries, has favored those with lighter colored skin; Criollos were those who could claim pure Spanish lineage and they ended up running things. Sadly, you do not see anyone with darker skin or indigenous features in advertising or on television (e.g. in Telenovelas), and most senior politicians and businesspeople are similarly pale.

I take a long, meandering walk around the downtown, away from the tourist area where things are a little quieter and you can see life go on.  A cluster of teenage girls taking posed fashion photos of themselves.  A fellow with a bicycle setup selling what look like jicama carved into the shape of paletas (popsicles), with a variety of other worldly colored sweetened powders to roll them in.  A fellow selling roasted corn and sweet potatoes, cooked on braziers made of galvanized wash tubs.

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A truck drives by selling filtered water with a loudspeaker strapped to it’s roof, playing a tinkly version of “Raindrops ar falling on my head”.  Thank you Hal David and Burt Bacarach.  An older fellow shuffles along using a shiny metal cane; the stains on his t shirt nicely highlighting his sizable belly.  Bas relief for the body.

A tortilleria with its machine squeaking and grinding, is doing a steady business in fresh corn tortillas – a Kilo (2.2 lbs) costs about 20 pesos ($1) – some tortillerias provide salt, lime and chile for you to taste a fresh warm tortilla from the stack you purchase.

The filtered water truck and the mechanized tortilleria get me thinking about technology and how if moves – seeps really – from more developed economies to emerging markets. I love seeing how technology is absorbed – from a vulcanadora fixing a tire with a hammer, a hand pump and some patches, to the counter guy at the Oxxo ringing in my purchase in a POS that is undoubtedly networked nationally and manages the inventory of the brand’s 13,000 stores.  And how the much maligned internal combustion engine has eliminated back breaking labor for millions of poor people around the world.

Much has been written on technology transfer and its effect – often negative – in developing economies.  The amount of effort required to enable this transfer, through developing infrastructure, education, governance, rule of law and trade relationships, is enormous.  In developed economies we take much of this for granted as it is just available, like the air we breathe.  And, we forget how much things have changed in our own society:  In my first year of college I used log tables, a slide rule and a calculator that could only do simple mathematical operations.  Years later, in my first finance job out of business school, we used green screen computers and Fedex; fax machines were state of the art.  Email and the internet wouldn’t come for another 10 years.

We grouse about the effect of technology on our lives but the incremental changes it triggers are powerful.  I no longer take a guidebook when traveling – Google maps and internet searches are much more efficient.  In fact, they free me to discover a place on my own terms and at my own pace.

Of course we need to managed our relationship with technology: studies recently leaked from Facebook indicate that a material percentage of people surveyed say that using the social media platform had become addictive and teen women experience significant problems in how they think of their bodies because of Instagram. And friends with school age children tell us this past year of isolation and a lot of screen time has been really hard on some of their young ones.

I found parking a block from the hostel, which is bright and cheery and run by a young Mexican returnee from Phoenix.  His English is really good but readily speaks Spanish with me, after I insist we do so.

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This morning in the kitchen I have a long conversation with a Brazilian lady, a French woman and a Colombian fellow (the latter are a couple) in Spanish, in which I just manage to hold my own.  The couple are heading to Guatemala to renew their visas and have been traveling here for several months.  He runs a hostel in the mountains of Colombia whose business collapsed during Covid; she is from the French alps and spent a year in Chicoutimi Quebec.  She and I try to explain what a Canadian winter is like to the Brazilian but it is outside the realm of her imagination.   How do you describe the taste of a mango to someone who had never tasted fruit?

The Brazilian is making herself a couple of days worth of meals and while she cooks, tells me about her work in Brasilia at a digital library for public health professionals and her travels.  She hopes to go to India which I describe as both awesome and shocking, often at the same time.

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As I write this later in the day, an Argentinian (Their Spanish sounds like it is being spoken by an Italian) next to me on a couch is having a long and involved conversation with a woman about what sounds like business and life plans.  I mean, this conversation is going on and on.  And on and on and on.  Interesting how we do that – travel several thousand miles away and have a conversation that we could have, and probably should have, face to face.

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I hear an American in an adjacent room explaining in great detail to a Spanish speaker why, although he has studied Spanish, he doesn’t actually speak it, doing so in that fully revealing but wholly impersonal way that only my countrymen can. I can tell that the Spanish speaker is puzzled; for her, learning a second (and third) language is something done out of necessity and for opportunity; it has opened up the world to her. English speakers are alone in this regard: we really have no need to learn another language, ours has a global currency.