Thursday, I was driving our rental car through the small Mayan village of Izamul. A young teenaged Mexican accidentally rammed the back of my car with his brand new motorcycle. Bump! and his motorcycle fell over. The rider was not seriously injured, but he did have several scrapes. A crowd formed. My Spanish suddenly seemed patchy and unhelpful. A policeman finally came to the scene and doted on the Mexican boy, dusting him off.
The boy had scraped his knees and elbows in the fall from his bike. The accident was totally his fault, even the policeman admitted that, but to smooth things over, I offered to pay for things. They were in and I was out, I thought. Let me be magnanimous. The boy named Ricardo and his mother got in our back seat. We took them for a short office visit to the local doctor ($5) and to a parts store for a replacement fender for his motorcycle (maybe $15). It turned into a great chance to get close to the people. We talked about the historical importance of the Mayan culture. Mom spoke Mayan, she said, but Ricardo did not.
The local cop who spoke good English said he had once been to Los Angeles, California. He understood the Mexican system as well. My last expense in that small town was about $35 dollars which went into the cop's pocket as the "Mordida", the Bite, they call it. Again, I did not mind bribing him... it got us out of a sticky situation. We said goodbye to Ricardo and his mother and continued birding.
One of the marvelous tropical birds we saw that day on a telephone wire was the Turquoise Browed Motmot (Eumomota superciliosa). The long soft blue tail feathers were impossible to miss.
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Shaken but grateful from the previous events, we ate lunch and drove on. We spotted a Gray Headed Kite (Leptodon cayanensis), soaring in the sky above the road. Merida is a bustling metropolis in the northeast of the peninsula. This is a totally modern city. We stayed in the Holiday Inn there. We ate a steak dinner in a tentlike pavillion and enjoyed it. The prices in Merida were slightly higher than in the little town of Valladolid. But Mexico is inexpensive, anyway you look at it. Robert slept like a log.
Robert and Berry
photo courtesy of wikipedia
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