We arrived in Merida without a hitch. Merida is the capital city of Yucatan state, which comprises about a third of the entire Yucatan peninsula. Quintana Roo is east. That’s where Cancun is, and can stay there, thank you very much. It’s full of Americans acting American in Mexico, one of the few real problems this part of Mexico actually has. To the west is Campeche state, and a city named Campeche. It’s a walled medieval city, built to withstand pirate depredations, back when pirates did more than work at the World Bank and loan the jackals in your government money and later foreclose on the entire population.

Unlike the American airports, the Merida airport is completely sensible and pleasant. I spoke bad Spanish to everyone and they spoke bad English to me and everyone smiled. Everything was simple and orderly and clean. Immigration was one minute of pleasantries and a ka-chunk stamp. Customs was a friendly dog with a friendly minder who sniffed our bags and wagged its tushy. The dog, not the minders. The customs personnel were almost uniformly young, pretty girls who looked up at me like the top fright mask on a totem pole. Mayan Mexicans are low to the ground, and they’re a delightful mocha color I’m not.

Everyone but tourists were well-dressed. It’s amazing to me, but people in Mexico are poor, mostly, at least by American standards. The average wage in the country is something like twenty thousand dollars. No, not a month. A year. But everyone dresses properly and comports themselves in public in a way I haven’t seen since I was a child. Poverty of spirit is a bigger problem than actual poverty. Poverty of spirit on a big budget is a very American thing. And like my childhood, there are children everywhere in the Merida terminal. They’re all well-turned out, as we used to call it when mothers still cared about what their children wore. The Mexican children are rambunctious, but well-behaved. They smile great big smiles, even at imposing extranjeros like me, and their parents smile because they’re proud of them. If you want to witness a badly dressed, bratty girl squirming on the floor and wailing while her father tries to drag her vertical, you’ll have to wait for the next planeload of Americans to arrive. The Mexicans aren’t having any of it.

It would be an exaggeration to tell you that all the information you’ll find online about visiting Mexico in general, and Merida in particular, is uniformly worthless. An exaggeration, but not a wild one. Nearly every video on the Toob is a useless tourist come-on. Asking Gogol anything has been a waste of time for a decade or so now. Search Engine Optimization is a greasy pole that only the worst sorts of people can shinny up to the top. The blander of the highly ranked sites are usually in a format I call “delightfully information free.” There might be one fact adrift in a sea of keywords, fleshed out with acres of passive voice blandishments. Search engines hate any form of entertaining writing, and bury it like Imhotep every chance they get.

I’ll give you an example of the info out there. Uber is available, bigtime, in Merida, and I don’t know what it’s like anywhere  else, but in Merida it’s fast and pleasant and cheap. Rides across town are only three or four US dollars, and a buck tip makes the driver pretty happy. But just like many US cities, Uber is verboten at the airport. You can hoof it in 100-degree heat to the nearest bus stop and catch one there, and some people do. That’s because they read the internet. The internet has legions of stories about the taxi service that’s available at the airport. There are countless tales of sharp practice and overcharging. But it’s mostly that travel bloggers and suchlike are a pain in the ass, wherever they go, and they’re cheapskates.

To rent a taxi in the Merida airport, you go to one of a handful of booths in the lobby for the different taxi companies. You tell them where you want to go. The pleasant girl behind the counter does some math on a machine and it spits out a stub with a number on it for you to OK, or not. Here’s where the travel bloggers tell you to flee in terror. Take the slip to the next booth, and ask them to beat it. Do it over and over again until you’ve made everyone dislike you, and you get the best price.

Or, you know, look at the first, gouging price, and do the arithmetic necessary to turn pesos into dollars (a peso is currently worth about a nickel), and scratch your head. We were going all the way across town, in substantial traffic, on one-way streets with no visibility at every intersection, and the first, knock-down, drag out price offered was seven bucks. Just how cheap do people expect everything to be? They could take the bus outside for about fifty cents and really do it right. Me, I just smiled and forked over the pesos.

I’m sure my readers are thoroughly marinated in Hollyweird’s impression of a Mexican cab ride. A 1963 Chevy Impala with several off-color door panels pulls up in a cloud of dope smoke and unburned hydrocarbons. You get in the back seat, and there are some syphilitic chickens roosting on the back window deck. The driver has a gold tooth, weighs eighty pounds, and is wearing a cartoon sombrero with dingle balls swaying under the brim. He may or may not be wearing bandoleros with .45 cartridges over his shoulders.  That’s a personal fashion choice down there. Some prefer Bowie knives. You can’t put your luggage in the trunk because it’s full of lime, rope, sheets of plastic, and rolls of duct tape.

Um, no. All the cars are brand new and clearly marked, and the drivers wear casual but smart uniforms with their brand on it. Everyone is perfectly groomed, and the interiors of the (small) cars are immaculate. They generally don’t habla ingles, but they are quick to help out with baggage, and suffer along nicely with your broken espanol as you drive. No driver of any kind has ever taken a single wrong turn on any trip with any company we’ve used, including Uber, even though the city is an ancient, befuddling, one-way maze.

Actually, I’ve defamed travel bloggers uniformly, but that’s not entirely fair. The Mexican travel bloggers can be pretty informative, and how do I put this, more fun?

If you’ve taken your nitro tablets after that session with Brenda, I guess we can proceed. We made our way from the aeropuerto in the southwest corner pocket of the city, all the way up to the Santa Lucia barrio, located north and slightly east of the Zocalo, the main square smack dab in the middle of the city. We want to live like locals while we’re here. We’ve never been touristy, and aren’t about to start now. Here’s what a street scene in Santa Lucia looks like:

Yeah, houses can be three or four hundred years old around here. Many look like John Ford could make a western movie out front. There’s an astonishing mix of styles, and for a guy like me, born into and schooled in the dark arts of New England wood frame architecture, just plain astonishment. The entire city is built from rocks, sometimes stacked into walls, sometimes mixed into slurry and formed into shapes that defy description, but not admiration.

For example, a little further down the same street, you can stand dumbfounded in front of this place. I know I did:

So what’s inside one of those austere, weathered, ancient, mossy, blockhouses? You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, so tomorrow I’ll show you.

[To be continued. You can support Sippican Cottage by dropping a few American pesos in the Ko-Fi tip jar if you want. Might help pay our ransom.]