This road stretches from the Tulum beach for about 50km to a village that sits at the very tip of a little strip of land. It is a known Bad Road. Halfway across the Yucatán, people are saying, “I hear they fixed up the road a little,” or “The road is really terrible now.” In Punta Allen, the 400 people who live there greet you by saying, “How was the road?”
There happens to be another way to get there—you take a tedious, rattly drive straight east from the main highway, and then get a boat across the bay. Because you have to stare straight ahead at the same scenery for hours, you get that optical illusion where the sky seems to be constantly receding. But then you get in the boat, and the bay is the palest turquoise and so clear you can see the bottom and the shadow of the boat, and the clouds are scudding across the sky just above the palm trees and so on. That’s where, two years ago, I was actually inspired to exclaim, “I love my job!”
This time, though, I thought I’d better drive The Road.
Even though I had rented the tiniest car available—not even a Dodge Atos, but a knockoff Dodge Atos.
Even though the rainy season still has not ended.
Even though the guy at the entrance to the nature reserve through which the road passes said, “You’re going to Punta Allen in that car?”
But for all the talk about the Bad Road, no one had ever explained to me just exactly in what way it was bad. A couple of times I’ve driven about 3km down the road past the nature reserve gate, and, yes, it was horrible, with these roller-coaster-like potholes, but if you just drove slowly, it was doable.
And I had all the time in the world, for once. I got started even earlier than I’d planned, and it was 10:30am when I passed the skeptical gate guy. I was guessing two, two and a half hours driving down, an hour around town, and then the drive back.
The road was bad. There were potholes, and pretty big puddles. There were a couple of muddy spots. But I kept it in second gear and kept my eye off the clock. But then, a little more than halfway into it, the pretty big puddles started getting bigger, to the point where there wasn’t dry land to keep one side of the car on. Soon, there was barely any dry land in between the puddles. And needless to say, I couldn’t see how deep they were. For some reason, I just kept driving through them, imagining that it couldn’t really get worse.
Finally, about 2km from town, the car stalled and wouldn’t restart. Miraculously, I happened to be on a tiny strip of dry land, rather than up to my axles in mud. After about half an hour, some guys came along and helped push my car out of the road. So I sat there, catching up on note-taking and so on, for a couple of hours while the engine dried out. By then I’d also readjusted my mental calendar to allow for spending the night in Punta Allen. By the next day, the water would be a little less, I reasoned, and I would’ve regained the nerve to drive out. Eventually, the engine started, and I rolled the last little stretch into town, to astonished cries of “You got here in that car?”
But that night the wind battered my little cabin, and it poured rain. When I woke up, the streets of Punta Allen, which had already been filled with puddles, were utterly swamped, just as the road had been. I walked around trying to find someone driving out, and this required walking through muddy water up to my knees—which means I surely managed to contract some horrible tropical flesh-eating worms. The low point was when I nearly stepped in some dog crap on a rare sidewalk, and thus destroyed the fantasy I’d built up about the water being just muddy, and nothing else. I slogged to the one place in town with a telephone and called Peter to whine, very briefly at satellite-phone rates, about my situation.
The story ends happily, though: I was able to secure passage out on the beer truck that happened to be making its monthly delivery, and the rental agency, amazingly, is retrieving the car, at no cost to me. (Although, as a side note, it turns out nothing has changed in Punta Allen, thus making my trip completely pointless.)
Most important, I was able to meet Tamara in Tulum as planned. Now she’s here, and that’s a whole other reason I probably won’t get around to blogging again for a bit.