A few months after we got married, Mitch and I celebrated New Years 1996 in Mexico. I was about to start my first year of law school at USC and (side story) was working for the inventor of the 3-D Printer at a little start up in an office center. He said “let’s go somewhere for New Years!” Part of my job at the company had been to work with a local travel agency as the company sent people all over the world to show off this amazing new invention. I said “I know a travel agent!” And we visited them on my lunch break. They had just learned about a new resort in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico called El Dorado. It had recently opened and was offering good deals. So we booked it.
We flew on an airline called FunJet. As we recall, the plane was made from parts of planes that had be decommissioned. Some were from bankrupt airlines. I remember one panel had logos from Eastern Airlines. We hadn’t seen an Eastern Airlines jet in a very very long time. The plane seemed rickety and no now seemed to care.
When we arrived at the Cancun airport, I recall it was semi-out doors and smelled like tortillas, which I thought was very exotic. We were picked up by some laid back guys driving an old school bus with several big coolers of Dos Equis. We ran into a problem not the road to El Dorado. It was getting dark outside and I told Mitch it looked like the headlights on the bus were going dim. He looked out the window and (Mitch knows some things about cars) and said “the alternator is going out… I hope we get there soon.” The driver knew it too. We got to a guerrilla check point and the driver told the military he could not stop the bus because it would not start again, so we just slowed down for the check. The militiaman jumped onto the bus, looked at us all, and quickly jumped off before we rolled too far from his station. We all looked very much like tourists and could never be mistaken for rebels.
Pretty soon, a man on the bus who’d drank too much Dos Equis complained loudly that he really really REALLY needed to get out to relieve himself. The hosts told him that would not be possible, but that he could pee out the door as we traveled. They said, “No one will look…. Everybody get your cameras!!!” He continued to complain – and we all hurt for him but we didn’t want that bus to stop. So he held it until we were almost there . . . whereupon the bus slowed down, he jumped from it, peed in the woods for a (long) while and then ran to catch up and jump back on the bus.
We checked in and I noticed that an older man and woman there were clearly on a secret rendezvous. He’d been drinking too and said some things that made it clear that he was married . . . to someone other than the woman who was accompanying him to this New Years event in Mexico. As Karma would have it, he drank too much at the New Years celebration that night, and broke a bone and had to get medical attention. We didn’t see them again. I have often wondered if that event resulted in his wife finding out what he was doing… and what he’s doing now.
That New Years Eve was also my first experience with sea turtle hatchlings. Hundreds bubbled out of a nest nearby and were making their way into the restaurant where we were eating dinner. People were scooping them up and taking them back to the beach so they would have a chance at survival. That was over 30 years ago and I like to think that some of those sea turtles are still swimming in our oceans today.
Fast forward 30 years and 6 months and here we are back on the Yucatan Peninsula as the guests of a dear friend, Karole, who has a membership at an amazing resort called El Cid in Puerto Morales. Every night, we had a gourmet meal with Karole at a different five-star restaurant… and her puppy, Romeo, was a super star everywhere we went!
El Cid had not been built when we were there in 1995/96. Like so much of the Yucatan at the time, that area was undeveloped. El Cid has built a second section more inland from the beach front section. It’s called Ventus Ha, and it is more focused on biodiversity and ecology than the typical resort. It has a distinctively calm and peaceful vibe.
Meanwhile, outside the El Cid resort is the quaint town of Puerto Morales. Puerto Morales has some of the same ubiquitous jewelry stores and T-shirt and souvenir shops you see in all coastal tourist towns, but it’s also a real working fishing village with a culture you can feel.
The best thing about this trip was spending time with our wonderful friend, Karole, who loves to laugh and who has had so many adventures and has the best stories from them. We laughed for hours every night at these amazing dinners where I felt like I was eating all the food in Mexico, but I could not stop. It was SO good! Karole lost her amazing husband last year – a wonderful man we all adored – and it was as if we felt his presence the whole time we were there, laughing and story-telling along with us. The resort employees all knew her by name and treated her like family.
Another great thing about the trip was waking up every morning to the same conversation: “What do you want to do today?” “How about nothing?” “Nothing it is.” We never had plans (other than dinner), and that never bothered us. in truth we conducted a two-day mediation and I filed a few cases while we were in Mexico, but it just didn’t feel like work since we were in such a beautiful setting.
Now on to one of the Yucatan’s most recent and more significant problems: Sargassum. It is affecting not just Mexico but many islands in the Caribbean and has even gotten to Miami.
What is sargassum? It’s seaweed that – unlike most every other seaweed – lives on the surface of the water. When sargassum breaks, it multiplies – like a Gremlin! When I was in college, I read a book titled The Wide Sargasso Sea and that was the first time I realized there was a section of the ocean in which surface seaweed was big enough to have a name. After some significant storms around the time of the pandemic, the Sargasso Sea got a lot wider. Now the Sargasso Belt, which stretches between Africa and the Caribbean, is so large, it can be seen from space. As you might expect, sargassum is hurting the tourism economy because it affects one of the biggest draws of the Yucatan and the Caribbean – the crystal clear blue ocean. When Sargassum is around, people do not want to get in the water. 2026 has been an especially bad year for sargassum. Each day, people would pull sargassum from the waters and use it for mulch. But it comes faster than it can be harvested. There is hope that the earth will take care of this issue because human solutions are not able to keep up at this point.
If the sargassum belt keeps growing at the rate it is now, we will be hearing a lot more about it soon. I suspect it is already starting to have significant effects on the economies of tourist-dependent areas.
Hearing the Whispers 