Caribbean Breeze

We bid farewell to Mexico with a sense of nostalgia, drifting from the Yucatán Peninsula into the Caribbean, southward to the English-speaking Belize, and from there, into the jungles of Guatemala…

by Akis Temperidis
photography: Akis Temperidis & Vula Netou

9,295 kilometers in Mexico, over 165 days—five and a half months, give or take. It seems like nothing, really, but as we flipped through our journal, we realized that 76 of those days we hadn’t traveled a single kilometer. That’s because, in every town or village, we’d usually say, “Let’s stay one more day here.”

A love affair with a country, despite its vastness and the notorious violence of the drug cartel “states within states.” We didn’t meet any danger traveling from Tijuana to Chetumal, but while we were there, a massive uprising tore through border towns, with burning cars and deaths in the prisons. A one-day civil war broke out in Culiacán when the police made the fatal mistake of arresting El Chapo’s son, the leader of the infamous Sinaloa Cartel.

Toss in a few bodies of gang members, left in black plastic bags here and there, and you’ve got yourself a newsworthy snapshot of Mexico. But as a traveler, none of that touches you. You’ve got to be really unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

How many contrasts we lived through in this land… The greatest one? The cultural chasm that separates the mountain villages of Chiapas from the hotel zone of Cancún. On one side, the indigenous Mayans, scraping a living from the land with little expectation of anything from the Mexican government, and on the other, American capital that’s bought up vast swathes of Caribbean land, transforming it into gated luxury compounds, expensive malls, and five-star hotels.

It’s Mexico’s version of Miami. Not by chance, the only Mexico many people know is Cancún, and that is no more Mexico than a postcard. We wouldn’t have even come close if we didn’t have Greek friends there, who hosted us during the Christmas holidays and gave us a glimpse of something beyond our Spartan lifestyle.

Let me paint you a scene from the high-end “Greek” restaurant Ilios, where they’ve managed to fuse pita gyros with kitsch dances by curvy Mexican women in tunics, smashing plates to the soundtrack of… you guessed it… Zorba. It was cultural shock, sure, but the kind of strange wonder that you just have to experience.

We wouldn’t have lived in Cancún, but we’d trade our trusty Iveco for a sailboat docked in Isla Mujeres (Island of Women), where you can set sail for months, exploring the Caribbean. Maybe in another theworldoffroad (theworldoffshore?), maybe in another life…