We docked just after 8am alongisde another cruise ship. In fact, we docked with two other cruise ships at port. But the one we parked alongside was from Italy and considerably larger than our own ship. It didn’t dawn on me until later that, like I said, this ship is from Italy. Italy, on the other side of the Atlantic. our ship left from New Orleans and still took 3+ days to get to Cozumel, crossing the Gulf. How long were these people at sea to get to Cozumel? Crikey that’s some leisure living.
Anyhow at the end of the pier Nico and Ian were waiting for us. This was actually the point of the trip. To see these two, and deliver Martina to them for transport en route to Australia.
Wow. The last time I saw Ian was early October when he departed from Queens, NY en route to California on a motorcycle tour. From there he made his way to Holbox and met up with Nico whose been waiting tables out there. The idea was to get Martina to them and flying was simply not an option – too expensive, too much hassle, and clearly nowhere near as much fun as we’ve had here. Holbox is located around the other side of the peninsula, closer to where we were in Progreso yesterday, but nonetheless they met us here. We rented a jeep, and quickly got out of town and went scoping for some waves.
We found some good strong waves, salty water, and fresh beach. We were pretty much all alone on the east side of the island. Granted the water was so strong that we couldn’t go too far out but we spent some time here, had some beers at a local stand, a picnic on the beach with some food that we brought from the ship, and then headed back into town to find some snorkeling equipment and a proper meal.
While heading back we stopped to inspect these two geysers that were spraying water a good 20 feet into the air. Near them were these pools of water that vibrated and filled with air-pressurized water every time the waves hit the rocks, a little bit of water finding its way through the rocks and to the surface. Amazing.
When in Cozumel, eat here! It away from the market area a little, and it’s a total dive restaurant, but it’s so good. The lady-owner cooks everything behind the counter and it’s all really fresh, I mean she doesn’t cut a tomato until you order it. Fresh! And cheap. We all ate bountifully for around $20! I recommend the coconut water!
Before Angie and I headed back to our home for the next 36 hours and we split ways with Martina, there’s another part to this story that lacks a visual counterpart. We went snorkeling! We had around 2 hours before we had to retrieve Martina’s bags from the ship, so we grabbed some gear and hit some beach just south of the ships. We found some access to the water where only 4 other people were scuba-diving. The water is amazing, the fish are amazing, the reef is incredible. Groupers, yellowtails, I think I saw a barracuda even. And this pool of really tiny yellow fish that were totally friendly and playful. Some people back on the boat reported seeing seahorse, 3′ wide starfish, and such. I’m not a skillful swimmer at sea so I wasn’t able to head too far out; any opportunity I get to go back I’d love to take a s.c.u.b.a. class, they sounded affordable and you don’t have to head too far out (just 150 feet from shore) to see some incredible sights.
Home for the next 36 hours. By the time we were headed back to the ship, another ship had docked at one of the other piers, for a total of four ships at Cozumel! Cozumel’s wikipedia entry currently says that there was a third pier before a hurricane in 2005 took it out; should they rebuild it, there could potentially be six cruise ships docked at any point, accounting for anywhere upwards of 20,000 people!
As for the cruise experience, it was something else. There was Maja in the dining hall; Ananais in the piano bar; Rob the Pianoman; and countless countless others that really made the experience worthwhile. Martina, Angie and I clearly had the advantage too, as we were always one step ahead of the pack, and went about things the unorthodox path in order to maximize our experience. Twice even we were asked by others on the boat, “Are you artists?” because it was clear we went about things a different way. We were the first ones off and the last ones back on.
We found out the ship had a crew of roughly 900 people, many of whom go unseen for days on end, and workers are committed to six month contracts. They work long hours and really commit their lives to making sure ours is taken care of. It’s an odd position to be placed in, but it’s people – you talk to them, hear their stories, and they really make it worthwhile. They come from all over – Bosnia, India, Phillipines, Russia, USA – and they’re all crammed into their own deck and at sea for months. It’s an incredibly weird construct that humans have come up with, the cruise ship. With advances in technology you can stay connected to the world via the Internet (for a pretty penny) and there’s now satellite television round the clock; some people ride these things continually, live on them for months out of the year. It’s a world unto itself.
The final day at sea flew by, as we zipped back across the Gulf doing nearly 24-26 knots (en route to Mexico we spent most of our time around 16 knots by comparison). Angie and I were a little silent without Martina and mostly spent the day on the pool deck reading and recovering before we arrived back in New Orleans the next morning, bright and early debarkation began at 7am! Whoop whoop.
Re-entering the Missisissippi delta at night. Some land can be seen intersecting the moonlight, with lights on the horizon from small towns or oil refineries or the like. Welcome home.
(Next: back in New Orleans, some Prospect 1 art, back to it)
While you go on these cruise ships to relax, to really take advantage of the adventure you have to get up!
We docked at Progreso and disembarked at 7am! Angie, Martina and I were on the first shuttle bus to the end of the pier:
there’s a reason why you need a shuttle bus to drive the pier. It’s over 4 miles long! That building on the horizon is the halfway point, and is where the pier terminated until about 30 years ago when they built it further out to accomodate the then-bourgeoning cruise industry. 4 mile pier!
We hit the town of Progreso a little after 8am and were on a mission. There were two “tours” of Progreso available, and we decided on the tour of Dzibilchaltun for it’s Mayan ruins and sinkhole, the Xlacah Cenote (oooooh yeah!). However on the boat they wanted $56 per person and grouped people on an actual tour bus with guideperson and didn’t promise much else other than you would see the sights. We paraded through the market where the pier touched the land and found guides there offering the same tour as the ones sponsored on the boat for $29/person – an alternative tour though that we needed to round up 8 people to fit into a van and didn’t depart for over 2 hours! This didn’t quite meet our desires. We decided to hit the beach and travel further away from the market merchants and see what we could find in terms of transport and offers.
As we were the first ones to hit the beach, we quickly met this guy Jean from Florida who has satisfying become “stuck” in Puerto Progreso, Mexico. We told him what we were looking for, a cheap, authentic guide to the Mayan ruins at Dzibilchaltun. He works a bar down the beach and gets punters to stop by for drinks but knew the locals and looked into the situation for us. He got us in touch with a friend of his, Kiko, and bam we had ourselves a soon-to-be college graduate driving us around the highways of Progreso at 9am!
It doesn’t get any better than this. Kiko offered to turn the a/c on and we were all replied “No no we’re fine!” We were a full hour ahead of those tour busses, and best of all we got the all-inclusive tour, guide, and ticket to the ruins for a bargain $25/head!
Quickly getting into it, the grounds at Dzibilchaltun are f*%^ing awesome!! Do you see that temple in the distance? (zoom in to see it if you can’t) That’s the Temple of the Seven Dolls (even though Martina counted eight!). And during the first equinox, the sun can be seen in the temple corridor, like an architectural calendar. Bloody amazing. A calendar and sense of time all dependent on celestial bodies, 2012 here we come!
But here’s the real reason why we came to Dzibilchaltun!:
Xlacah Cenote! A sinkhole (say cenote, kinda sounds like sinkhole) older than your grandma’s hairdo! Incredible. Crystal clear freshwater, complete with fishies that love to say hi, give a little nibble! The whole of the Yucatan has these underground waterways and sinkholes that stretch for miles, miles, miles. The whole of the Yucatan. The left side of the cenote in the image above is shallow, as in three inches shallow. There are many rocks which provide a natural path to the mid part of the pool which is entirely walkable at around 5′ depth. Then, up in the top-right the deep part of the pool is deeeeep. Around 140 feet deep! And leads to some tunnels that connect to other cenotes all over the Yucatan. This place is amazing man. And the water is a constant perfect temperature.
Now there’s an incredible part to this day and the entire journey that is missing a visual counterpart. Kiko drove us back to Progreso after we were done swimming (like I said, some of the “official” tour groups came along while we were in the water and they didn’t even get in – Loooosers!). We had just under 2 hours before the boat departed so we told him we’d like to grab some food. He told us there was a McDonald’s, “No don’t turn on the air conditioning! NO by food we don’t mean McDonald’s!” We explained that we wanted what he would eat! Yucatan snackery! He took us to this bar right on the beach near where Jean and he work, and introduced us to this Yucatan-branded form of siesta, where you purchase a beer or liquor and get these countless trays – nearly 20 between the four of us – of treats, snacks, appetizers. It was ridiculous, they kept bringing food! Salsa, habanero sauce, tortilla wrapped delights, and in particular these two appetizers, one made from a seed that had the same consistency as a deviled egg yolk stuck inside an avocado, but it was a single seed; and the other made from some tiny seed that Kiko couldn’t translate. The seed is converted into several foods, included a clumpy substance similar to dried out brown sugar; another that is ground up with oil and looks like a darker form of hummus. Whatever those two foods are I have to find out! But seriously we bought 8 beers – I tipped Kiko by buying his beers – and refueled on some authentic cuisines! Yessir!
So getting back onto the boat was the best part. We all sware that we weren’t the only ones on the last bus back down the 4 mile pier, and you can see other people in the background heading to the boat. However we were the last ones on the boat! And as we were meandering back down the pier people all over the boat started waving at us, signaling to hurry back to the boat. “C’mon you guys, we’re ready to go!” As we stepped back onto the boat they quickly slammed the door behind us and asked us what room we were in because they didn’t have time to look us up – they had to trust we were legit passengers – and informed us we had less than 2 minutes until they raised anchor and headed back out to sea!
The day didn’t demand much in the way of activity or excitement really. We all packed our bags and generally just lounged about waiting for the adventure to begin. Martina and I did stock up on “emergency chocolate”, our thoughts being that should the situation become dire we could always survive at sea on a block of Green & Black for a couple weeks. WTF were we thinking! Neither of us were really prepared for what we were about to encounter:
Oh Mm Gee. It got real once in the taxi driving to the pier and we could spot the tail-exhaust of the ship from about 3/4 mile away! The whole ‘cruise industry’ has this thing down to a science: the staff at the port greeted us and took our one check-in bag, it disappeared and was in our room by the time we got there! Angie, Martina and I got our ‘fun pass’ identification cards which guaranteed us to have fun… or else. Us 3 were bunking in a room that had a queen-sized bed and a bed that folded out of the wall. I remember walking into the room, quickly dropping our bags and Martina, upon spotting the nightlights that operated behind plexi contour art proclaiming “yeeeeeeaahhhhhh!!!!” and literally jumping up and down.
We exited, took a random path to start learning our home for the next several days and quickly found our way to the top:
Holy crap.
These things are humongous, and wild. And run like clockwork. Within our first hour they announced our life vest and life raft tutorial which sounds cumbersome but really wasn’t and is necessary, you never know. We did a 180 from the port and started heading downstream to the delta and out into the Gulf. Even considering the tutorial we had enough time to catch glimpses of the city on the horizon and even spotted the neighborhood Angie lives in from the boat:
Bywater area.
On the same token this following shot is of the Lower Ninth Ward. It’s hard to tell in this image but consider this is the same Lower Ninth pictured in my ‘on the Eve of Change‘ post:
Now I’ve never been on a cruise before, I had no idea what to expect. In short these things are designed to pamper. It’s incredible, and pretty ridiculous, in an amazing way. Geez that doesn’t actually tell you anything does it! Okay, your bedroom is “turned down” twice a day – cleaned, changed, made anew; food is limitless, seriously you can eat your body weight daily if your intestines wouldn’t revolt; there’s round-the-clock entertainment in the form of musicians, gambling, bars, game rooms, stage performances, etc.; there’s a gym; multiple hot tubs and pools; there’s a sauna and spa for chrissake!; there’s even… an art gallery!
Clearly when I saw that I knew I was going to have some fun. is that Comic Sans? seriously? These ships were obviously designed in the early 90s! No but seriously there’s a real functioning art gallery on the ship, and yes we saw some people buying art, expensive art, like more expensive than all the expenses me and my party paid for the entire shebang. Times ten. People, are here to have fun, spend money, escape themselves, and be taken care of. and party.
The evening of the first full day on the ship, which we spent entirely at sea, there was a formal gathering and dinner which the captain emceed. Some people, “veteran cruisers” as they’re called, live for this. They came prepared. Not me, I packed two pairs of shorts, flip-flops and my boy scout belt! I didn’t even bring a towel, thinking it’d be so hot all the time I’d air dry when necessary (I forget the interior of places like these are always air-conditioned!); meanwhile these people packed jewelry and a pair of shoes for every day. Outclassed. Still, we had our fun:
Thanks – in part – to the performances, wisdom and hospitality of a one Rob the Pianoman.
If you take the Fantasy ship be sure to look this guy up. He plays at the Cleopatra Piano Bar (duh, he’s a Pianoman!). He made our night on several occassions. This Georgia boy will not disappoint, and his single-handed take on some classic songs (a la Dylan, Van Morrison, the Beatles) is not to be missed!
Next entry: Progreso, Dzibilchaltun, Mayan f*%^ing ruins!
so Shalin lives in a dollhouse, Angie lives in a dog shack, and Martina doesn’t actually live here and was the catalyst behind convincing me and Angie to take a boat trip to Mexico. All of which has nothing to do with the house pictured above, but at the same time that’s where they all live, but not really. New Orleans is weird. Yup, and these are my friends.
Getting to the house was difficult, which was expected. The driver of a city cab didn’t use the meter and charged me $12 for a journey that would have been difficult considering the weight of my backpack but wouldn’t have been untraverseable any other day on foot (I’ve since realized). He didn’t know how to locate the cross street given the address and suggested that having to drive to find the address might be too far for the fare. Welcome to New Orleans!
Once settled, the first order of business was food, so we set out for a walk in search of po-boys! While walking, it became clear that New Orleans architecture is obfuscated by the abundance of growth and green here. The city neighborhood’s landscapes are dominated by trees, plants, flowers, foliage and probably account for 30% of the density of the town:
As for dinner, I think I just about managed to capture everyone with their faces stuffed:
So service here is so slow and almost awkward, but is a journey in and of itself, you just have to roll with it. Then you’ll have a great time! Our waiter must have made at least four maybe five trips to the kitchen to actually figure out what they had in terms of deserts, but eventually landed us with exactly what we wanted:
Devoured, Gone. We Are Hungry.
As I arrived in the city in the mid-afternoon, by the time we finished with dinner the sun was set. Even having been here a week now I’m divided between seeing the city during the day and seeing it at night. It’s beautiful both ways:
The moon here is flipping bright. Bright, and low. And routinely about as big as I’ve ever seen it. Definitely as bright as I’ve ever seen it. So much light gets reflected here, which was more pronounced once we got out on the boat (will save that for the next post).
As for my first night in New Orleans I experienced something magical that I highly recommend to all if you want a flavor of New Orleans that you simply cannot find anywhere else. I journeyed – under Martina’s guide – to the Venue, a club up river where DJ Jubilee (a high school special educator during the day) and Katey Red (a transvestite rapper and teacher also) spin a distinct brand of music that is unlike anything else I’ve heard. Part hip-hop, part electronica, part bass, Bounce as it’s called has it’s own beat rhythm and vernacular that rivals Grime in the UK in its propensity to energy, but is contained to the shores of this fair city.
Music and club shots begin around minute 4. That mirrored wall… will live with me forever!
I can’t even recall where I left off to be honest. Some of this stuff might even go as far back as the end of May, I don’t have a clue. I can’t keep up with my own life it seems, let alone keep up with documenting it appropriately anymore!
Hopefully it’ll all make sense eventually. Here we go!
Ziggurat Dismantled
Finally took it all apart. My first piece of architecture, it weathered the elements for nearly three months. Next time I will build it 10x as big! Watch its birth here.
this is Queens
clicks to larger image. Condos on the right; debris all around; Citibank tower in the background. this is Queens these days.
this is also Queens:
warehouses on one block with joined two-story homes on the next. new bike lanes and wide roads, front yards with statuettes and pine trees, old school antennas, power lines that still criss-cross the streets, what’s not to love about this place?
Workhat:
my work productivity increased exponentially with the construction and implementation of this head-top device. I no longer needed a keyboard or even the confines of speech, as I could simply “beam” my thoughts to humans and machines alike.
Baseball
the new Yankee Stadium looks gorgeous, it really does. can’t wait to see the interior.
Boy that was a good day! And to think they intentionally walked two others to get to Miles. suckers!
A swing n a miss!
Euro2008
Even though Croatia lost, I still flew their flag outside my window. They really were the most-exciting team to watch up until their defeat, and have one of the best color schemes and patterns around. Next time hopefully De Silva will be healthy.
Mermaid Day Parade
Finally got a Saturday off and got to watch the Mermaid Day Parade. To be honest it was a bit of a flop. The coordination was a bit haphazard, I guess that’s to be expected but there were times where the space between performers was nearly the length of the boardwalk, making the parade feel disjointed and lonely. Still, there were highlights of good costumes and color:
Rode the Wonder Wheel with Angie. Swinging style!
Just imagine, soon this will all be condominiums!! I CANT WAIT… barf!
My buddies came by for a visit:
So glad we have a new neighborhood dog walker!
I love how the smallest pooch won’t have nothing to do with a leash. Kinda reminds me of myself in those regards.
And beyond
There’s more. Plenty more. Trying to organize it all. Have started packing up in preparation for eventually getting kicked out by the MTA and having to move house. Which has thrown my art production into a complete tailspin of late. Plus after Amelia’s passing I got a sore throat from internalizing all of my grief, that lasted over a week, and made me realize how susceptible my own body was to external pressures and how we can make ourselves sick, quite literally.
