Travel blog: Peto, Yucatan, Mexico

Sticks and Stones

4/30/2015

I am sitting in the court yard at the Hotel De Rodi y Eve in the city of Peto, Yucatan, Mexico. We drove four hours from Puerto Morelos (Quantana Roo, Mexico) to arrive in this city. We are in search of the convent trail, some churches, missionaries, and other religious sacred ground. Peto is not on the ocean, but the interior, somewhat arid, somewhat jungle. It is made of sticks and stones. Old sticks and old stones, new sticks and new stones. A Guernsey cow sits at the entrance to town, she is stunningly beautiful, shiny brown and primly flopped down in a giant pile of freshly cut branches. She is munching when we rolled in and she was munching when we rolled out.

Peto’s economy is clearly not focused on tourism. Matter of fact, we seem to be the only gringo’s among 22,386 locals, we stick out like a 4^th of July parade. I turned to my husband Mike and said, “What do you think we have to do to not look like such gringo’s?” He turns to me and says “It’s not going to happen.”

After that exchange we march on to the town square with our friends Dave and Bev, and try to procure a tri-cycle motor scooter to give us a tour of the city. Funny thing is, it was very difficult to explain we didn’t want to go anywhere, we just wanted a “tour”. The- would- be driver kept indicating “where to drop off?” After dragging in several folks from the now gathering crowd to (not) translate he let all four of us sit on the little bench arrangement mounted on the front of his 2 stroke motor scooter. The scooter whines with the efforts of pushing four not so small humans along the cobbled street, but alas, off we go. To the driver’s credit, he did not let us miss one street, alley, square, home or tienda, and drove us by every stick and stone. Why was this an amazing tour? Because it wasn’t a tour, it was a physical emersion into a culture that has probably not changed in the past 100 years.

Folks socialize and walk around the square, they go to the Catholic Church, and they eat at a small taco stands along the side of the road. They cook on open grills squishing corn balls into tortillas. The woman where traditional embroidered clothing, the men where trousers and short sleeved cotton shirts. They are nice to strangers.