Laguna Azul

Three of us remained, after a week in the Yucatan Peninsula we finally got a taste of authentic Mexican streets as the Mayab dropped us off the highway in Bacalar. We walked with our packs on our back asking around in our broken Spanish where the centro was. In the city's charming plaza we met a man named Guillermo, he escaped Mexico City thirty years ago, after a world tour painting his murals. He told us that Bacalar was magical, when I asked him what made it magical, he replied "because extra-terrestrials live here". We spend the night in a hammock in his backyard on the lagoon. Driven out by vicious fire ants we spent four nights at a campground in the middle of town, each morning waking up not wanting to leave, Palenque was calling our name but there was still a certain mystery in the air in Bacalar that I couldn't leave behind just yet. Nights at the Galeon Pirata, I met artists who were making waves, watched a bold exhibit of sexual photography, got slapped in the face by a mute creature of the underworld and soaked with love by a being from another world. Extra terrestrials do exist in Bacalar. In the early evenings we sat in the street with a group of French and Columbian travelers who sold jewelry, they left their homes seven years ago and have been moving north ever since, teaching themselves their art and supporting themselves with their craft. They sold us some wire and some stones. During the early afternoons we swam in cenotes and the paradisiacal lagoon, picked mames, coconuts, chico sapotes and anonas from trees, listened to Lukas, a fellow Vancouverite who has been escaping winters for Central America for ten years recount hours of inspiring information on living simply, extracting all necessary nutrition for the body from local fruits and veggies and working the body without repetitive exercise. We visited a medicine man among 500 species of indigenous mayan plants in his botanical garden. He cut fresh Sisim for me to boil and drink. On our final day in Bacalar, our group split yet again, Brandon and I continued to Palenque while Matous stayed behind with a woman we met at the forming of Camp Flow, a mayan astrologer who was moving to the desert to land that she had inherited form her grandfather to start a farm.