In Uaxctun

Ali and I ate whole cloves of garlic on the earthen floor of our little hut, giant cockroaches crackling above our heads in the dry, straw-thatched ceiling. The garlic was meant to repel the mosquitos' bloodthirsty appetite that had suddenly, with the setting of the sun, become so devastatingly apparent; but it had little success, and we made our way through the dense, humid jungle to an evening meal with our hostess. The crudely screened porch where we sat and ate was not as primitive as the kitchen from where the food emerged, but it was a savory meal of roasted chicken, yellow rice and diced beets, wholesome enough to satisfy our hunger after a long day of bruising busrides and a cumbersome search for lodging, that at one point in time had seemed utterly desperate. Luckily for us, as so often occurs when traveling in foreign places, we were bailed out by a child, a young boy of nine or ten years, who directed us to this woman's empty hut for rent. He was not surprisingly shirtless and without shoes, and his well-worn jeans were so brown with dirt and mud that from a distance he appeared to be naked. His Spanish was blunt, but effective enough to understand and, more importantly, he was able to understand us; pointing to the end of the long stretch of open grass that divided the village in two, it could have served as a runway for small aircraft, and then jabbing his finger left as if to signal that by turning at the end of the tract we would find what we were looking for. Which we did find, a place to eat and rest for the night, upon following his directions. Up to that moment, we had encountered nothing short of oblivion from the locals in the village as they had mostly refused even eye contact with us, much less conversation, and with only one bus arriving and departing daily, we had begun to consider the option of roughing it that night in the jungle on the edge of this apparently inhospitable community.