There’s a little town on a rise above the fjord in East Greenland. Ittoqqortoormiit. It means the place with the big houses in East Greenlandic. The only community on nearly 10,000 kilometers of coastline (6,200 miles). Three to four hundred people live here. Five to seven hundred visitors show up every year. I was one of them.

Out of Reykjavik on a private charter, we flew into Nerlerit Inaat, the airport thirty-seven kilometers up the coast. It’s a red and white metal building on barren terrain, mountains behind. Two portable toilets sat outside, strapped down to pallets. There was no plumbed sewer. Waste went into bags. When the bags filled, they got buried.

I sailed on a schooner called the Opal. She was anchored off the coast. An easy Zodiac ride from shore to ship.

Sailing from Nerlerit Inaat toward Ittoqqortoormiit, we passed an abandoned village. A Danish colony started in 1925, the same time as Ittoqqortoormiit. The last residents of the now ghost town moved out in 2005. Some of the houses were still painted red and green and gray. Others had been bleached bare by the sun, weather, and time.

At Ittoqqortoormiit, we put on lifejackets and hopped in the Zodiac bound for the town dock. The first thing that caught my eye was a seal tied off to the dock and floating in the water. Deboned, maybe, or the skin preserving in salt. Seals are one of the animals I love. I recoiled.

The houses climbed the rise in front of us. Red, purple, green, dark blue, painted against a canvas of stark bare rock, patches of snow on the ridges, and dark water below. Pitched black roofs. Each plot with enough land for a snowmobile, a dog sled, a pickup, a motorcycle. No cul-de-sacs, dirt roads. Just above freezing temps, under a sky that could have been any hour. August at this latitude gives you twenty hours of daylight and no way to know the time without a watch.

The town was quiet. A generator humming somewhere. An ATV passing, a truck, then someone on a motorcycle. Once in a while a dog barking. No throngs of people. The few I saw paid me no mind. I paid them the same.

A creek ran through the middle of town, narrow in August and probably a wide river when the glaciers melt in spring. Along the bank, sled dogs were chained near silver food bowls knocked around in the dirt. Some sleeping on the cold ground. Some milling about. Empty dog sleds tipped over. Puppies running loose. Our guide told us not to pet them. If a visitor touched one, it would have to be put down. These were work animals, not furry companions. I’ve worked in animal welfare, and standing on that bridge looking down at the dogs was tough. You have to set that aside and take in the whole picture.

Polar bear pelts hung over wooden racks built onto the sides of houses. Some on porch railings. Whole hides, trimmed. Musk ox hides drying alongside them, shaggy and dark brown. Bear skulls mounted outside a couple of the houses. Laundry drying outside.

The tourist center was two rooms. There was an old man just inside the door, his face carved by the sun, weather, and time. A woman at the desk selling a few postcards, sealskin mittens, polar bear boots. Our guide said not to buy polar bear items. Customs in our home countries would most likely confiscate them. I bought a Christmas ornament made of sealskin. Small enough to pack. There were no Greenland t-shirts, no keychains, no coffee mugs. Nothing designed for the passing tourist.

Someone had to be sent to unlock the office where our passports could be stamped. The office was on a side road. Nobody was required to have their passport stamped in Ittoqqortoormiit. The stamp was our souvenir.

The grocery store sat in the middle of town. Small building, no windows, no signage, a dirt parking lot out front. It looked like a little warehouse, or a PX on a military base. The town gets deliveries twice a year. Once in July. Again in September, before the ice closes the fjord to cargo ships until the following summer. In between, the shelves go bare. Hunters go out onto the sea ice.

I didn’t go in.

I lived in a town where groceries didn’t come regularly. I already knew what sat on the shelves. Practical goods, packaged goods, some clothing and hardware. A little bit of everything. What I didn’t want was to take anything from a town that only sees shipments twice a year.

Walking back toward the Zodiac, we passed dead seals hauled up above the tide line.

Ittoqqortoormiit runs on a hodge-podge. One tour operator, a family-run business that invites visitors to stay in their home. One guesthouse, self-catering because there are no restaurants or cafés. One tourist office. One community art shop. One museum in the old Royal Greenlandic Trading store, built in 1930, though closed for renovation. That’s what the town has to offer a visitor.

Two supply ships a year. Royal Arctic Line, Greenland’s state-owned shipping company, runs the route from Denmark and West Greenland when the fjord opens in July and September. The state has been running supplies to this town since 1925, when Denmark founded it as an outpost. Food, fuel, building materials. Everything the town needs from outside arrives in those two windows. In winter, the ships stop coming altogether. In winter, the ships stop coming altogether. In between, hunters go out on the sea ice for food.

A helicopter runs twice a week from Nerlerit Inaat. The same helicopter carries residents, workers, tourists, fresh food, and mail. In winter, the helicopter doesn’t fly. Drifting snow, total darkness, weather.

Tourists come in the same weeks. Expedition ships when the ice retreats. Schooners like the Opal, small groups off the Iceland flight. A few independent travelers on the helicopter. Somewhere between five hundred and seven hundred a year, most of them arriving in the weeks the supply ships come in.

The population has been shrinking. Around 360 today, down from 539 twenty years ago and that’s counting the kids. Hunters need sea ice to hunt seals and other marine mammals. A shorter ice season means less hunting. The way this town has always fed itself is fading. Tourism is what comes next.

My pueblo in Mexico faced a similar question in 1992. The road got widened. The airport got expanded. The shipping came in through Progreso. Cancún grew from a fishing village to a city of a million. My pueblo has 2,000 people now, spread across both sides of the highway. A Pemex and a 7-Eleven. Thirty-four years.

Ittoqqortoormiit doesn’t have a road to widen. It has a helicopter that can’t fly when the weather turns, a runway thirty-seven kilometers away, and a fjord that opens for two months of the year. All three run on the same short season. Ice comes later than it used to, and the town gets a little more time. That’s the only way this town gets bigger.

When I was there in August 2023, the town’s tour operator was Nanu Travel. Two years later, Nanu Travel has gone quiet. A new family-run business, Tsigaar Naasor, has opened as the town’s only operator. Two years, one flip. That’s how thin things are here. The town is one decision away from having no tour operator.

The town’s answer is a homestay. Guests eat what the family eats, sleep where the family sleeps, live in the house. Guest and host, no middleman. Whether that works at 500 to 700 visitors a year, or whether it holds at all, is a different question.

Ittoqqortoormiit’s future isn’t decided yet. The ice keeps the town isolated. The ice keeps the hunters fed. When the ice thins, the town has to build another way to live. Tourism is what comes in when hunting falls off. It runs on a short season. That season is getting longer. Whether the summer brings more tourists or more trouble, no one knows. Not even the town.

I stayed in the road in Ittoqqortoormiit and didn’t go into the store. Twice-a-year deliveries meant the shelves were for the town, not for tourists to pick over. That I already knew from a small pueblo in Mexico thirty-four years ago, when the shelves ran near-empty from May to December and you learned not to buy what somebody else was going to need on Wednesday.

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Other pieces from the road.

It took six of us to move Harry, we struggled under his bulk. He was a big man and the rough cut pine box corners bit into our hands on the shoulder of the road going into Puerto Morelos. We got him up high enough to slide the box from the bed of one pickup into the bed of another. Nobody wanted to be the one who dropped him.

There was a plane to catch, American Airlines Cargo in Cancún, and that was it. Get his ass on the plane. No time to be solemn about it.

My friend Harry was from Dallas. A stocky-built lawyer with a gold diver’s Rolex on his wrist, a gold chain around his neck, a gold wedding band. He was a cave diver and he came down a few times a year with his buddies to dive the cave systems along the coast. We finished every visit the same way. Dinner at Papaya Republic in Puerto Aventuras and Harry with a snifter of flaming Sambuca and three coffee beans sitting in the bottom at the head of the table.

He came down that last trip with Jack. Jack was Dallas too, older, up in his late sixties, a marathon runner, lean as a rail. Next to big burly Harry the two of them looked like a setup for a joke. An odd couple who had been diving together for years.

Harry and Jack were both experienced enough they did not need guides. They were diving Chac Mool Cenote on their own, a cave system Gary and I had discovered and mapped years before. Their dive, on this particular Saturday, went well and they were on their way out of the cave as planned.

Jack leading, Harry flashed his light at Jack indicating a problem, but not a panic. Harry got on the line to follow it out. That line, kite string, is a safety measure so you can find your way out in the dark. He had a heart attack in the cave. Jack led him out, yet Harry died on the surface.

Word got to me with the news about my friend Harry. Jack had already called Harry’s wife Linda in Dallas, now on her way to Mexico. I called her to say I would pick her and her daughter up in Cancún.

It was Labor Day weekend, 2002, which means nothing in Mexico except the US consulate is closed. Repeated calls to the consulate went to voice mail, as we tried to figure out how to get Harry home.

Once on the ground, Linda wanted to see Harry.

This was before refrigeration was something you could count on, and Gary and I were worried about what she’d find. To say it was a funeral parlor would be a gross overstatement. The place they’d taken him was a cinder block building with a roll-up garage door in Playa del Carmen. Three new caskets stacked on the right. A desk. We walked around back to a room, and there was Harry. A bit bloated. A bit blue. He was closer to room temperature than cold. Better than we anticipated. They asked if we’d brought clothes to dress him. We said no, he could just be put into a body bag. Harry would be dressed by a mortician in the US for a double funeral.

Harry’s father, Harry Senior, had died the very next day after Harry (jr.) died, without ever knowing his son was gone. The two Harrys, father and son, were going to have one funeral in Dallas. Harry would get dressed there alongside his father.

Before we left the woman at the desk banged Linda’s Mastercard for $6000 USD on the spot for mortuary services, like a casket, paperwork and taking care of the body.

Now it was off to the Ministerio Público, which by some odd miracle was open on a Sunday afternoon. It was with a sigh of relief Linda signed a stack of paperwork, and received a bag with Harry’s Rolex, gold chain and his wedding band. His jewelry was not stolen.

That night though drained, we went to dinner at Papaya Republic. We told Harry stories. We ordered a Sambuca in his honor, coffee beans and all. It wasn’t solemn. It was awkward. The US holiday weekend had us in a holding pattern trying to coordinate documents and arrangements. Linda scheduled her return flight, and Harry was to be checked into cargo. With the paperwork from Playa the airline waived the need for his passport.

Tuesday morning I picked up Linda and Harry’s stepdaughter at their hotel. The plan was to meet the funeral people with Harry at their place in Playa. Then follow the pickup truck north, parked in the street with a pine box in the bed with Harry’s name written in marker on the box, the feet marked, and the head marked, so you’d know which way he was lying I guess.

Playa was a much smaller city than it is today, and where there are hotels and resorts, there was nothing but jungle on either side. And it was where the entrance to Mayakoba stands today, where the truck with Harry’s body broke down on the highway.

Parking behind the crippled truck, flashers flashing I got out, and walked to find out what was happening as the driver and his passenger buried their head under the hood.

“Oye, ¿qué pasa?” I asked with the questioning head nod gesture.

¿Necesita agua? Pretending to be a Green Angel, the Ángeles Verdes roadside crew.

Mexico was loaded with logistical problems, and this was one more. The hood was up. They had no phone, so one of them got on the radio chatting back and forth to someone.

Linda and her daughter stayed in my car. Linda is Mexican, and Mexico was never going to catch her off guard. A truck dying on the highway with a body in the back did not rattle her. She laughed and said it was Harry, playing a joke on us. And the clock was running, because cargo doesn’t wait.

We were to limp up to Puerto Morelos where a second truck would be waiting for us. The two pickup trucks were like bookends, with their tailgates backed up to one another. But now the question was how to get Harry from one truck to the other. That is where the six of us stood shoulder to shoulder on each side of Harry. Harry’s widow, his step daughter, me and three guys slid our hands under the rough pine edges of the box to hoist Harry into the other truck.

Once at the airport, Linda checked Harry into cargo with only minutes to spare to check-in herself. I hugged her and apologized that we would not be at the funeral, and she asked me to go get his passport once the consulate opened. Then she flew home with him.

You would think this is the end of the story. Oh no, wait there’s more.

A couple days later I called Linda and told her I had Harry’s passport. I mentioned she must have been relieved once they landed in Dallas.

I asked if the hearse showed up at the airport, yes she confirmed. She said they’d waited a long time, like hours, at the baggage carousel. Some people never got their bags at all. Harry had leaked all over the cargo hold. He wasn’t embalmed right, and he’d leaked. The plane sat on the tarmac for days while “hazmat” (hazardous materials experts) cleaned it out.

And when the funeral home in Dallas opened the pine box with Harry in it, they found what a border and a body bag and hot weather will do. Somebody in Playa put a big ole Texan’s body into a used, small, Mayan-sized coffin. The funeral director had to come at the casket with a crowbar to get Harry out.

There was a funeral. Harry’s father in an open casket. Harry in a closed one.

You cannot make this up. I’ve told it a hundred times and I love it more each time. For Harry and for Linda both.

He died in a cave, on the line, on his way out. Doing what he loved, and I get to say that because it’s true.

The last time I saw him, there were three coffee beans in the bottom of a glass.

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When I first came to the Riviera Maya in 1992, and for many years after, the beach was pristine. Idyllic pinkish-white sand. The waves lap on the shore. A few people. You could swing in a hammock strung between Seagrape trees. Or stroll along the waterline and catch a glimpse of a sea turtle, or a school of cuddle fish. Pure fantasy. Right? That was the illusion people came back for, time and time again.

When someone booked with us, the money went to where they would stay. But what they were really paying for was that vision. A dream they wanted to live in for a week, pack-up and take home as a memory. Every property write-up and destination piece I wrote led with the beach. And what it stood for.

The first question, always, was what is the beach like. The region’s whole pitch was the beach itself.

The goose that laid the golden egg was the beach. We sold it. The business I ran was one of the first anywhere to put that coast online and take a booking from a stranger a continent away. A lot of those beach descriptions were mine to write. Some of that was the era. There weren’t jungle tours, adventure parks or much else built out. But we always knew the Riviera Maya was more than the beach. The cenotes. The Mayan culture. The places you could not find on your own. We knew drivers, restaurant operators, shopkeepers, the cenote owners, the people we trusted. Out of them, we could build a guest a day they'd never find alone.

Then, around 2011, the sargassum came. A little at first. It came and went. The guests took it as a temporary thing, and mostly it was easy to clean up. Over the years it became more substantial. It got its own season. You would arrive late in the afternoon, have a beer, look at a pristine beach, thrilled to be there. The next morning there would be six inches or more washed up on the beach and another three feet of it out in the water. Beige coming in, then brown, turning crusty and black as it dried, smelling like low tide, or rotten eggs. I never liked this sea tangle touching me. Gives me the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it. Now you had to wade out through it to reach clear water, the weed scratching at your legs. Paradise turned nasty overnight. Hardest on the families with little kids. It was not only the properties. My one weekend treat was lunch at an oceanfront restaurant. I would show up to find the shoreline stacked with weed, the smell riding the wind. That one was heartbreaking. And a bit nauseating.

For years the biggest complaint I ever got was about “turtle grass.” People wanted a “swimmable” beach. A perfect beach. Perfect meant just sand, no rocks, no corals, no turtle grass. Turtle grass is a good sea grass, the sea turtles eat it. People would want a path cleared through it so they didn’t have to walk across it. Now it was this.

One family reunion I will never forget. A big multi-generational trip in a rented home, and the owner would not pay to clear the seaweed, so it kept mounting up. They had a pool. They wanted the beach. They were furious. There really isn't anyone to blame, it is like the weather, beyond our control. But we were small and agile and we worked with a lot of independent owners, so we could call in favors. We called an owner with a much more expensive villa and said, here is the situation, the seaweed is terrible, would you take them, make an offer. At the same time we told the first owner something had to be done. In the end we moved the reunion into a bigger villa. Less beach, less seaweed a huge pool, a cook, and enough amenities inside to put the trip over the top. The seaweed became a non-issue.

That was the job. Not the beach. Knowing who to call.

It was not always that dramatic. With three or four hundred properties spread along a very long coast, we could not always know which beach was affected. Beaches change even without seaweed, normal erosion based on currents and weather. You cannot predict it. But we knew the nuances. Where there is a cut in the reef for the boats, that is often where the weed comes in, so we would steer a guest further up the sand. Now the forecasts do some of that for you. NOAA and the monitoring networks can tell you where it will be heavy before you ever get on the plane, so you can pick your spot, or pick another date.

I do not think leaning on the beach was the mistake. The beach was the biggest asset, of course you lead with it. The miss, for the ones who made it, was having nothing else ready, no cenote, no obscure ruin, no pueblo, no cooking class already familiar to a guest. When the beach failed, they scrambled. The ones who had all that in their back pocket, and we did, could save a vacation.

The places making it now are the ones that were never only a beach. The resorts and boutique hotels with an identity beyond the sand, the pool, the food, the design, where the beach is secondary. The operators who sell the cenote and the ruins and the day trip. The diehards who love the area move their dates and come anyway. The places struggling are the ones with nothing to offer but the sand. And that is before everything else people have gotten wary of, the bad press, the taxis, whether they got their money's worth.

People used to ask me if a vacation rental was a good investment. I always said:

If you have to mortgage your home to buy it, the answer is no. A vacation rental is like Vegas. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, and you do not want to lose the roof over your head because you borrowed against it.

Some of those owners are selling now.

The cleanup is not cheap, and somebody always pays for it. The head of the Riviera Maya Hotel Association puts the bill at around $150 million a year, just to keep the sand visible. That is in a state where almost everyone lives off tourism. It is a lot of money to spend defending a single commodity.

This is the worst season on record, worse than last year. The Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt keeps getting bigger, fed by warmer water, farm runoff, even dust off the Sahara. It lands everywhere now, from Key West to Barbados to Puerto Rico, which is taking the worst of it. And the same rule holds all the way across: the leeward coast stays clear, the Gulf side of Florida, the sheltered side of every island, because geography decides which beach you can use, not marketing. It came early this year, January and February.

Nobody can stop it. There is no association or agency in Mexico or the Caribbean you can hold responsible for an ocean. The man who runs Tulum’s beach crews, David Buchanan, has said it plainer than any brochure ever will: they see it every day, and they cannot hide it. A researcher there, Iván Penié, said this year is beyond what the Navy, the state, and every private crew combined can clear. Everything anyone is doing, moving a family to another villa, a town dropping a barrier in the water, is a short-term solution to a long-term problem. The sargassum decides how long the season is now, and how short, and what each day looks like. Like weather.

Still, some places are handling it better than others, and it is worth asking why. Puerto Morelos, just up the coast from where I was, has stayed swimmable through weeks when Playa del Carmen and Tulum were buried. Not because of anything in a brochure. It has a reef about five hundred meters offshore, a protected marine park, that breaks the open sea before it reaches the sand, and no other big beach town on that stretch has one that close in. They backed the reef up with a couple of kilometers of floating barrier and a Navy ship that sits offshore and pulls the weed before it lands. They stayed open. Their mayor calls the beaches sargassum free. That’s a stretch. They still get it in the summer peak. But Puerto Morelos fares better than its neighbors, and it fares better because it had more than one thing going for it.

They are doing the smart thing with what they haul off, too. The hotel and restaurant owners there started a program to turn the weed into something useful, plates and packaging, fertilizer, building block, fuel. Down in the Dominican Republic an engineer built an unmanned boat that skims it off the open water before it reaches shore. In Barbados they mix it with waste from the rum distilleries and run cars on the gas that comes off it. This summer nine islands sent people to Martinique and Guadeloupe to study how the French islands handle theirs.

None of it is a cure. What it is, is spreading the bet. The places doing better are the ones that never staked everything on a clean beach, the ones with a reef, a plan, a second product, a phone full of people to call. It is what I did moving one furious family to another villa, done at the scale of a whole coast.

And it is not only a beach. Everybody in tourism is selling something the weather can take back. Ski towns sell snow, and this past winter was the thinnest in over a decade, resorts closing weeks early and a few not opening at all.

Wine country sells the vineyard and the view, and Napa and Sonoma have burned in three of the last four autumns, so harvest season and fire season are now the same season. Canada’s forests, the whole reason someone books the lodge, are on fire as I write this, over 800 fires at once. Every one of those is a beach. So wherever you are in this business, the question is not whether your thing is beautiful. It is what you sell on the morning the beautiful thing is gone, and whether you already know the answer before you need it.

I left in 2019, after twenty-seven years. I watch it now from Maine and visit time to time. It is heartbreaking. Not the business of it, though that is real. It is sad because the place is one of the most beautiful on earth. The beach and the jungle and the cenotes, the ancient culture, the people born there raising their kids. None of that should ever go away.

Everybody is counting the economics, and you understand why. Nobody is counting the turtles. The weed piles up on the same sand they nest on, and the hatchlings cannot get through it to the water. That was the thing I used to send people down to the beach to see. A glimpse of a turtle.

Nobody is adding up what that one costs.

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A few honest questions

Where does the sargassum even come from?

It took off around 2011 and has come back every year since. There is a belt of it now that stretches across the Atlantic, and it keeps growing. Warmer water, nutrients from agricultural runoff feeding the blooms, and even dust off the Sahara. Trade winds and currents carry the floating mats to Mexico, Belize, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and parts of Florida.

When is the season, and which beaches stay clearest?

Roughly April to October, worst in summer, though 2026 came early. The clearest beaches face away from the open Atlantic.

I run a destination or a small tourism business. What do I actually do about this?

Look at your destination’s assets and resources. All of them, not just the beach. What else can a guest do in your area, nature, culture, people. Build real relationships with the people who own and run those things, so you have somewhere to send a guest when the beach fails. And plan for the bad season while you are still having good ones.

A ski town lives on snow and still asks what happens the year it does not snow. Business is not always sunny. The ones who make it already asked the what-ifs.

If you missed earlier parts of the journey…

Passing customs I see Macon through the glass. He’s the guide for the climb from North Carolina. How nice for him to meet me at the airport at this hour of the night. A car and driver are waiting. The driver grabs my bags, tossing them in the back. We are scrambling out of the parking lot. Why are we rushing? The resort I am staying at is 10 to 15 minutes from the Airport. We pull into a hotel just on the other side of the tarmac. Following Macon, I am standing in a dimly lit, open air hotel bar overlooking the runway. A bottle of red is breathing. Macon walks toward me with two wine glasses in hand. The last flight of the night takes off, and like flipping a switch, the runways lights go out. I sip my wine in the dark at the edge of East Africa and think. Black and white, like a Bogart film. You read about nights like this. I am in it.

Springlands Hotel is a nice basecamp considering where I am. Nur, a guide, leads me to my room. No energy to unpack. A good night of sleep is what I need.

Today the others arrive. A day to rest, floating in the pool. One thing I don’t have floating is ice in my gin and tonic. I say hello to my team mates. I overhear someone in a hushed voice, the guy sitting across the garden had to be brought down the mountain in a makeshift wheelbarrow.

I am the only woman on the team. My ego is telling me I have something to prove. Hell, I am a cave explorer, a diving hall of famer. Full of bravado. I lead the charge hoofing up the dusty trail. The men and sherpas behind. On to Rongai Cave sitting at 2,600m or 8,530 feet above sea level. Not a bad first day.

There is a little less pep in my step today. Before lunch a few of the guys pass me on the trail. Then two more. The guy with a bit of a gut passes me. I picked him out on day one as the weak one. He doesn’t even look at me. Five miles to trek, following behind. The camp sits at 3,450 meters or 11,319 feet.

Arriving at camp, big yawns, my head aches.

I blow up a plastic flamingo I packed, mounting it on the top of my tent. My head swims. A little humor for the trail. The joke may be on me.

Macon is making popcorn, tonight’s appetizer to go along with the boxed merlot.

The sleep does me some good, but this dull headache is still gnawing at me. Wow these guys, the sherpas schlep our gear like it is nothing. Watching them head up the trail.

I am at the back of the pack today. Seven and a half hours. Florian is my designated porter to carry my WATER. Embarrassing. A porter to carry my day pack. Florian takes my pack, grinning, always grinning. The trail keeps going up. “Pole pole” in Swahili, slowly slowly. The altitude is catching up with me.

Looking around it looks like a desert. Desert plants. Big boulders. I take a mental note, a perfect place to hide and pee. Just planning ahead. Being at the back of the line, with Florian, gives me time to think. I park on a rock to rest. I am not the “mas macha” I was a couple days ago. The woman who disappears into darkness and returns. Being a big underwater explorer means nothing here.

The afternoon is long. The trail in front of me and behind me. No one in sight. I keep putting one foot in front of the other. I am not rushing now. The competition is with myself, not any one of these gray-haired guys. Florian keeps step. No banter. In Mexico, where I live, “chupi” is the nickname for a baby’s pacifier. I yell out “chupi”, Florian is quick to pass me the drink tube to suck. My babysitter. It’s 4pm, marching into camp. Tents up. The guys are in the mess tent. Dropping my jacket in the tent I join them. One of the porters is making cream of celery soup. Ugh. With minimal ingredients, no kitchen to speak of, it’s really good. Or maybe I am really hungry.

Two more sleeps until the summit. Full belly, a Ibuprofen, Diamox for altitude sickness and burrowing into my sleeping bag.

My knuckles are raw and bleeding from repacking, stuffing my gear bag each morning. Thank god this is a six-day climb. I am the last to arrive at the final camp before our summit attempt later that night.

Porters have carried two two-liter bottles of Coca-Cola for the guys who oversee the Kibo Hut. It’s liquid gold to these guys. Kibo is kinda like a base camp for the summit at 4,720 m (15,485 ft). Several teams are set up including us. The sun is bright and the winds are picking up. The plan is to head for the summit at 11 PM. Barring any clouds it will be a full moon. Before we break from dinner, Macon tells us to wear clean socks. What an odd thing to say. I am five days without a shower. Clean socks? Hunkered into my mummy bag, downing my sleep cocktail of Ibuprofen and Diamox the wind starts to howl. It’s hard to sleep with the wind ripping against the side of the tent. They say with the windchill it will be -20F on the climb. Yet I am snug in my cocoon.

I wake at 10:15 pm. I don’t feel rested. I dress. Outside, the windchill is below zero. I look at my socks and pick my favorites. They are not clean. Like some sports fanatic who thinks socks bring luck. I lace up my boots, hit the latrine tent, and don my headlamp. Another hit of diamox.

Balaclava up over my nose. The sky is clear. The moon, full. I’m at the end of the pack.

No snow yet. Scree under my feet. Slow going. Step and breathe.

Step.
Stop, leaning on my climbing poles.
Gasp.

I feel like a fish out of water. With each step, I stop to pull in a breath.

My feet are freezing. Moisture-wicking socks hold moisture. My favorite dirty socks, forming ice crystals. Why didn’t I listen?

My head is pounding. I grab only a glance to see where I am. The stars. Far below, the lights of Moshi.

Step.
Lean.
My long gasps are so loud I swear the whole mountain can hear me.

The team is stopping, waiting for me. I sit on a snow-covered rock and Macon asks if I want to turn back. Through my tears, “No!”

I don’t quit. Anything. I am not quitting a mountain.

A new porter joined us at Kibo. She is on all fours in the snow, vomiting.

I keep going. I don’t know how far the summit is. The goal is the sunrise.

One foot.
Gasp.
The other foot.
Another gasp.

FULL STOP.

The cave diver in me surfaces. In exploration, one body is better than two. If my body gives out up here, I risk not only myself but all of us at altitude.

I think of the wheelbarrow. Being hauled down like the guy at the resort. Going home, telling everyone who thinks of me as “mas macha” that I couldn’t do it.

I can see the crest in the moonlight. Six hundred forty-two feet below the summit. 19,341’. I want it.

My head drops.

I’m calling it.

Eddie, accompanies me down, elbows lock. One slow step at a time. I am on autopilot. I slip in the loose gravel, Eddie catches me. Over and over. No thoughts, except step, inhale, down.

I plop myself in my tent, exhausted. My feet in dirty boots hanging just outside. Eddie unlaces them. I wrestle out of my jacket and snow pants. Suddenly, a hand passes a coffee cup of Coca-Cola through my tent door. The elixir.

Sleep.

It’s still dark. I have to pee. Wind gusting. I hate the thought of going out to the latrine. Feeling around for my headlamp, I find the elixir coffee cup instead. No pride, nor energy. Squatting, I pee in the cup. And a bit on my sleeping bag. I unzip the tent door, my bare hand shoots out into the biting cold to dump it. I refill the coffee cup again and again. Feeling better, I can only imagine the view from outside the tent. It’s kinda funny.

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If you missed my previous adventures check out:

The best place to sit is in the back of the church. Closest to the center aisle. Someone told me that before my first Luminiscence show at the Basilica de Notre-Dame in Nice, and they were right. From back there, when the lights drop, the color comes down the whole length of the nave toward you, the kaleidoscope spreading across the vaults. I’ve queued up early every time to get my seat.

I love churches wherever I go. I like the history, the architecture, the hush of them. So the last time I sat there, watching it come apart in color, I thought: a building that usually only draws a crowd on Sunday mornings, full on a Thursday night. I meant it as a good thing. I’m still not sure it only is.

The Basilica de Notre Dame is the setting for a light show that runs three nights a week. On Fridays, you can hear it with a live choir; on other nights, it plays with digital music. I always choose the choir. To me, the difference is hardly worth arguing over, but the basilica feels more alive that way. I’ve seen three shows there, and each time the building became a stage.

Old churches are mysterious places full of tradition and ritual. The gold leaf, the candles, the heavy silence. Some old reflex still wants me to genuflect. This was nothing like that.

Since 2023, it’s spread from cathedral to cathedral, Nice, Bordeaux, Paris, London, Philadelphia, São Paulo. Each show is made for that church. The narration, music, and projections fit its history and architecture. In Bordeaux, dozens of hidden projectors are calibrated to the stone itself. You can’t see the Nice show anywhere else; different building, different story. The old masons shaped these vaults over centuries. Now programmers are measuring them to the millimeter so the light can follow the same surfaces. Maybe that’s not desecration. Maybe it’s just a modern spin on ancient architecture.

The experience is more than the arches and saints. It’s the building’s history, the music, and the light across the ceiling. You see angels and clouds like the Sistine Chapel, then the Milky Way, then an arboretum where raindrops hit the glass.

Compare it to the Rembrandt and Van Gogh immersive shows. Warehouse or simple box style rooms. No soul to sell. Impressive in their own right, the experience is different. It is sight and sound but without the depth of marred history, mystery, architecture, and reverence. The space itself was not sacrificed for the show.

Hall des Lumières in Manhattan is more of a middle ground between warehouse immersive art and the cathedrals. A former Beaux-Arts bank (the old Emigrant Savings Bank) built around 1909 is a temple of money reborn as a temple of art. The light show is still impressive, and with the building’s unique H design allows you to move about the room, different vantage points, alcoves, and cavernous ceilings.

The place that is not only a projection screen but the subject is the Basilica de Notre Dame, and the other churches. Still consecrated, still holds Mass, and the show often tells the basilica’s own story across its own vaults. The building is a living shrine of sorts. Alive because of its parishioners. What’s left of them, anyway.

Empty pews, the cost of keeping these buildings standing, tourism is survival. Cologne Cathedral now charges admission, money earmarked for the roof. The light show isn’t sacrilege, so much as a lifeline. In France, only about 2% of Catholics attend Mass every Sunday, and just 7–8% practice regularly. Otherwise its crickets, with the occasional visitor lighting a candle, or kneeling in worship. The collection plate can only do so much.

Where Istanbul Draws the Line

I took off my shoes, the borrowed scarf slipping, and stood at the back of the Blue Mosque while prayer kept moving up front. You feel right away it is still a working mosque. People coming and going, a rhythm you don’t want to be the one to break. So the light show, when they run it, stays outside. They throw it on the walls after dark and everyone watches from the square.

Across the plaza, Hagia Sophia has been everything. Cathedral, mosque, museum, mosque again. The layers are all still in there. But it prays again now, and you don’t run a spectacle through a room full of people on their knees.

Here they keep the show on the outside walls. The buildings that let it inside are the ones where almost no one kneels anymore. Like Nice.

What the lightshow does not buy, and what the Church keeps hoping it will, is faith. The pitch, especially in the American cathedrals, is that the awe is a doorway, get them in for the spectacle and maybe some of them stay for the God. Come for the lights, stay for the rest. Maybe. I’ve never seen anyone count the person who bought a ticket and came back for Mass. I didn’t.

In Paris, people have been ready to call in an exorcist over contemporary art in churches. Repeated traditionalist protest. Most recently as this month at an art installation in a Paris church during the Nuit Blanche festival. Despite the pushback, the show still went on.

They’re protesting a silent disco with drinks, an Eminem playlist, a provocative art installation. None of it has anything to do with the church it’s playing in. That’s what brings the petitions out. The light show is a different animal. It’s pulled from the church’s own history, built for that one room and useless anywhere else, which is maybe why nobody was protesting outside in Nice, at least not on the nights I was there. A disco just wants the walls. Luminescence wants the building.

What does the light show actually buy? All of this.

The answer starts with money, which the diocese is not talking about. These buildings are money pits. The roof, the stone, the heating bill in a room the size of a soccer pitch. The collection plate stopped covering that a long time ago. A show that sells out three nights a week gets closer than Sunday’s offerings do anymore. Some of the ticket money goes to a production company. This is a business, not a charity. A portion goes to the building’s own repairs, and the bigger money lands in the town. The people who come for the show fill the hotels and the restaurants and the trains. Looking at the numbers, they are boring in an accountant sort of way and staggering. England’s cathedrals put a couple hundred million into local economies in a year. That is what tourism is supposed to do. Benefit the people who live there.

Luminiscence and other similar shows have sold over 4 million tickets. You can have whatever feelings you want about that. The feelings don’t fix the roof.

I’ve stepped into churches throughout my travels. None were lit like this. This time I was inside, in the dark, looking nowhere else. Not taking in the statues, the crucifixes, not stopping to light a candle. The narration was in French. I don’t speak French, but I followed the story anyway, through color, light and sound. I kept going back, and I brought someone new each time. There was always something I had missed before. The building felt larger the longer I sat there.

Which leaves me about where I started. Back of the church, on the inside aisle, on a stranger’s tip, waiting for it to go dark. A building that sat empty six days out of seven, now full and paying for its own roof. I know some people would call that a step too far. Me, I think it’s a blessing.

What are your thoughts as to churches becoming an attraction beyond religion?

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For saints, sinners, and the just plain curious.

Answered prayers, the logistical kind.

Q: What is Luminiscence?
A: An immersive light-and-sound show projected inside historic cathedrals. It combines 360-degree video mapping with music, sometimes a live choir, to tell the story of the building. It’s produced by the French company LOTCHI, now part of Banijay Live.

Q: Where can I see Luminiscence shows?
A: The show tours cathedrals across Europe and beyond. Past and current cities include Nice, Bordeaux, Paris, Strasbourg, Reims, London, Brussels, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and São Paulo. Locations rotate, so check the official site for what’s running now.

Q: Where can I buy tickets?
A: Through the official site, luminiscence.com, and ticketing platforms like Fever, Tiqets, and GetYourGuide.

Q: How much do tickets cost?
A: In Nice, prices start around 12 euros. Pricing varies by city and seating.

Q: How long is the show?
A: About 45 to 50 minutes.

Q: When does it run?
A: In Nice, three nights a week, typically Thursday through Saturday, with two showings a night. Schedules differ by city.

Q: Is it suitable for children?
A: Yes. In Nice there’s no minimum age, and small children are welcome on a lap.

Q: What’s the best seat?
A: Toward the back, on the center aisle. That’s where the projections converge and the color runs the full length of the nave toward you.

Q: Are there other cathedral light shows besides Luminiscence?
A: Yes, and it’s spreading fast. AURA runs in Montréal and at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Luxmuralis tours cathedrals across the UK. Hall des Lumières in New York does the same idea inside a former bank. Luminiscence is the biggest name, not the only one.

Q: What is AURA?
A: An immersive light-and-sound experience created by Montréal studio Moment Factory. The original runs inside Notre-Dame Basilica in Montréal, and a version plays at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. It turns the architecture itself into the canvas, with orchestral music and projection mapping.

Q: What is Luxmuralis?
A: A British art collective, the artist Peter Walker and composer David Harper, that stages immersive light-and-sound shows inside cathedrals. It tours UK cathedrals and has appeared at Washington National Cathedral in the US, with themed installations like Space, Life, and Time.

Q: Is it disrespectful to hold a light show in a church?
A: Depends who you ask. The shows run outside of Mass, tell the building’s own story, and rarely draw protest. The objections tend to land on silent discos and Eminem playlists, not on a show pulled from the church’s own history. After three visits, my take: a full church beats an empty one. Yours may differ.

And if light and sound shows at a cathedral have you grabbing your rosary tighter, here is a video of a now famous Catholic priest DJ’s techno music. If you watch this, you may want to go to confession.

It was 2010. I was a long way from Mexico. My friend Kelly had lived in Akumal, my pueblo on the Mexican Caribbean coast. Animal welfare was her thing. She organized spay-and-neuter clinics. The kind of woman who was not afraid to get dirt under her fingernails. Down-to-earth, hardworking, gritty. She invited me to join her on a Humane Society International project to Tanzania, “dog and donkey clinics” in the bush. Without a second thought I said “yes, but no buses.” Kelly explained we would have handlers and a driver to escort us.

The trip began in Arusha, Tanzania, just south of the Kenya border and home to Mt. Kilimanjaro. I climbed it two years later. A tale for another time. Yohana from Tanzania Animal Protection Organization met us. Donkeys are the John Deere tractor of many people in Tanzania. Yet, farmers are notorious for putting oxen yokes on their donkeys, which causes injuries. Kelly’s job was to talk to the farmers about their burros, vaccinate dogs and sometimes a clinic turned into field triage.

Our driver Ernesto drove us west from Arusha. A well-educated, handsome guy. Doing side hustle guiding and driving while looking for a job. We were not on safari and did not need a guide. That was not to say we didn’t want to have some fun along the way. We took the road less traveled in our Land Rover. Out to Ngorongoro Crater for a glimpse of the Big Five. I read the crater was the place to see black rhinos. We saw huge tusked elephant bulls, lions like the cliche, lounging in trees, and herds of wildebeest and zebra. Lots of zebras. No black rhinos.

We were quite the traveling road show. Village to village. Questionable hotels and dorm rooms. Fried street food in the small cities, kebabs or coo-coo and chips, fried chicken and French fries. We avoided water and juices. Cokes or bottled beer. Less chance of a parasite that way.

I remember one day the only thing we had to eat was stale crackers and warm beer.

A few of the towns had a local bar. We went in the evening for a beer and a game of pool.

Across the road from a rice processing plant, women sifted discarded husks in a field for half grains of rice. Bagging the rice to take home. The women had a great laugh as they tried to teach the two muzungo (white people) Kelly and I to sift rice. We never got the hang of it. The husbands sat under a shade tree. Kelly went over and talked donkey yokes. From the field across from the rice mill, we were ushered into a beat up old car and on to the next town.

At the clinics I helped with rabies injections for the dogs. In an open-air metal barn the town queued up for vaccines. Grubby, skinny hounds were led by boys and men on lengths of rope.

One stop became a donkey M*A*S*H episode.

A donkey’s back achilles tendon had been slashed with a machete by a pissed off neighbor. From what we were told, the donkey had gotten loose and tramped into the guy’s garden. The animal was in desperate condition lying in the dirt. A makeshift needle, heavy thread, a five-gallon bucket of water. Kelly prepped to suture. He was not sedated, just patient. Big brown eyes. All of town gathered around to watch. Kelly with the help of some of the guys sewed and closed the gash. The donkey would be lame, but alive. Then with rope, fabric and gauze Kelly made a makeshift sling to hold the hind leg up. He was going to make it.

Two weeks later we learned a hyena killed him.

Juma was our point person in Kahama. As we drove in an old beater through the outskirts of town, I saw a woman plowing the yard. A stick with a scoop tied to the end as a hoe. A mud brick house behind her. Juma said a lot of households were run by women now. The men had died in wars or from HIV/AIDS. Here she was, plowing by hand.

From Kahama, we were to continue west headed to Kigoma. Our driver said he would not go any further. Full stop. Hijackings on the highway. He bowed out.

We took the bus.

On the bus with the partially shattered windshield, we pushed through a crowd at sunrise to get on. Yohana came to see us aboard. Inside, Kelly and I grabbed two seats together. I took the window. Kelly took the aisle. We did not plan to get out until Kigoma. Heavy backpacks on our laps. We dehydrated ourselves so we would not have to make a potty stop and risk our seats. Plus a hole in the floor over skid-plates as a restroom was far from appealing. Prince Valium helped us sleep along the rough highway. Time drifted by.

Delirious, we arrived in Kigoma, the furthest western part of the country. And we had hotel reservations! Off the bus, we wandered looking for our hotel. Suddenly I saw a zebra, and I thought I was hallucinating from dehydration and sedatives. “Hey Kelly, I see a zebra.” Kelly saw three zebras, only for us to realize we were standing in a small herd was roaming near our hotel. The hotel was small and resort-style but a far cry from posh. The window air conditioner was loud and we were grateful for it. Two beds. A private bathroom. We did not have to share.

The next morning, we were taking a boat up Lake Tanganyika to Gombe. Gombe is where Jane Goodall’s camp was with her chimps just south of the Burundi border. A big wooden boat with an open berth. No cabins, no seats, no head. It reminded me of a “chicken bus” in Mexico or Guatemala. There must have been an easy 70 or so people on board. Chickens, big plastic containers of gasoline, cases of Coca-Cola, flour, other supplies. Chock full.

For me this was a ride to the next stop on my adventure. To the other passengers, it was a grocery run.

You had to find a place to sit. You either stood the entire time, or you found a little spot on the gunwale. We parked our butts for three hours on the rail as we made our way up the lake. As we took this heavily burdened boat up the lake, a guy had to bail water at the same time because there was a leak. Someone was always bailing water out of the bottom of the boat. I wondered how many people on board could swim.

I sat next to two young Tanzanian boys and took a picture with them holding up the Tanzania flag.

The day was hot. A woman near me stood with her toddler in her arms. She looked tired. She did not speak English. I gestured. She handed her child to me. He slept against my chest until her village. Then I handed him back.

The boat stopped at little villages along the lake. We were the last stop. There were fewer and fewer passengers with each stop until we were the last people aboard.

At Gombe we were staying in the cinder block dorm building. Our dorm room had a toilet with no seat, or door. You could do your business and shower at the same time. A communal room with tables and chairs for socializing.

Baboons everywhere. The windows had bars on them to keep them out. From the inside it felt like jail. At night baboons rattled the bars and tried to get into the building. When baboons roar, they sound like big cats, like lions.

During the day, we hiked the mountainside with a guide. We found a troop of chimps and sat with them. I swear one of them was less than two meters from me, about five or six feet. You could take pictures. Just keep a low profile. There one time I sat in tall grass on the mountainside and looked across at the Congo. Wow, there’s the Congo, there’s Burundi, there’s a chimp.

Jane’s camp was different. A roof over open air. Walls of chicken wire. Her desk. Her bed. Her books. No walls between her and the jungle. From wherever she sat she could see out. More rustic than our dorm.

Three or four days later, we did the whole boat trip in reverse, back down the lake to Kigoma. From Kigoma we flew to Dar es Salaam, our gateway back to the States and Mexico. That night in Dar es Salaam, we had a nice hotel room. Two women who had not had a shower in a few days. Questionable food, warm beer, and here we were in a nice hotel. Each of us had what we considered to be nice clothes. If they were clean, they were considered nice.

That night, dressed up in our clean clothes, we went to the hotel restaurant. The hotel was a nondescript chain. The restaurant felt fancy after time in the bush. The menu. The drinks. The service. They brought us a gin and tonic with ice in it. We did not talk much. What do you say after a trip like that. We were grateful. The shower. The ice. The clean clothes. The whole trip.

We took our separate planes home from Dar es Salaam.

It was not goodbye. Never is, with us.

On the second floor of the Tourismuseum in Unterseen there is a display tracking the six-day hiking route Johann Wolfgang von Goethe took through the Bernese Oberland in 1779. They had his dates, his route, and even journal entries. I stood there a while, reading it all.

Switzerland was not on my list. My sister wanted to go. Once there, I was fascinated to learn about how long Interlaken has hosted guests and tourism. I have lived in or near tourism towns most of my life, and some in the mountain regions, but it never occurred to me that Interlaken was one of the first destinations to embrace Alpine tourism. Alpine tourism didn’t start with ski lifts or snowboards. For a long time, people saw the Alps as something to cross, not somewhere to vacation.

Places like Interlaken, Grindelwald, and Lauterbrunnen were attracting Romantic-era travelers and artists. They came for the scenery. Really, it’s the cliffs, the waterfalls, and that almost unreal feeling you only get in the Alps.

Interlaken quickly became a place for wealthy visitors. People who’d come to “take the cure.” They’d stay for weeks, breathing the mountain air. Doctors back then prescribed goat’s whey for nerves, digestion, lung trouble, and just about every complaint blamed on city life. I learned that every morning before sunrise, local goat herders would hike down from the high pastures with wooden tubs of fresh, warm whey on their backs, so guests could have it at breakfast.

Local aristocrats staged the first festival at castle ruins outside town. Farmers performed stone-tossing, wrestling, and yodeling for European tourists. The start of Swiss cultural tourism. Traditions like yodeling are still part of the region’s folklore today.

Interlaken kept noticing what wealthy travelers would pay for, then shaping the next version of the experience to sell them.

The Tourismuseum is the only museum in Switzerland dedicated to the history of tourism. It’s in a clergy house built in 1640. Four floors full of history on the souvenir trade, transport, mountaineering, and hospitality. The displays go back to the 1770s. They show how locals decided what to protect (the landscape, the view, traditional practices) and what to sell to tourists (experiences, transport, hospitality, souvenirs).

The Höhematte Meadow is the best example. In the 1860s the Belle Époque, a period of prosperity and cultural growth was hitting Interlaken. Grand hotels going up.

The Grand Beau-Rivage opened in 1874. Steamships across Lake Thun and Lake Brienz. Speculators eyeing the unobstructed view of the Jungfrau, the most valuable open ground in the valley, for a hotel and casino zone.

Thirty-seven local landowners, farmers and local hoteliers watched developers circling the meadow. As a co-op they purchased the land. Nothing shall ever be built on the Höhematte, and the view of the mountains shall be preserved forever.

They understood the view was worth more empty than full of buildings.

The view is what people come for.

You can stand on the Höhematte now and look at the same mountain the British aristocrats saw in 1850. The view is not luck. It is a 160-year-old civic agreement. The farmers then could not have pictured what the meadow gets used for now. Paragliders. Lots of them. They launch off the cliffs above town in colored canopies and float down to the same field the speculators wanted to pave. The pact stands. The view stays. The field still belongs to everyone.

It’s deliberate.

Even the cows in the valleys are intentional. The country pays the farmers to keep them there. You hear the bells from across a field, ringing as the cows shift their feet. The bells are how the farmer knows where the cows are. The country decided a long time ago that what tourists were paying to see had to be real.

Protecting the view was one decision. Made it once, and it's held for 160 years. Keeping a town livable is the opposite kind of problem. There is no pact you sign and walk away from. It is a fight that resets every year, up against the same money that never really goes away.

I am not going to pretend Interlaken has solved the problems of tourism. It hasn’t. In the Lauterbrunnen valley buses run between the villages all day, every day, full of visitors on their way somewhere. The village priest, Markus Tschanz, told Swiss public broadcaster SRF that the people of Lauterbrunnen feel like employees in an amusement park. Even the carpenter, he said, has become a tourist employee. They cannot escape it, because they live there. I worked in an amusement park for years. He’s right.

I walked along the Lauterbrunnen valley trail JRR Tolkien walked at 19 years old. The trails in the valley felt close to sacred, mystical. Or maybe that was just me. Every so often a small sign asked visitors to keep their voices low, mind their dog, and to tread carefully. People did. I also found the modern day farm stands along the path.

Self-service cabinets sit at the end of farmer’s driveways in the Lauterbrunnen valley. Wooden, on legs, with glass-front refrigerators inside. Inside the fridge are wedges of cheese with handwritten paper labels, fresh veg, dried meats and jars of pickled things. A small painted cow on the side as the only signage.

There is a coin slot, and I actually saw one with a credit card swipe. No farmer in sight.

You open the door. You take what you want. You pay. You keep walking.

I bought cheese and meat sticks from no one, twice that week.

My friend Kashi lives in Interlaken. We worked together in Mexico thirty years ago. She runs vacation rentals here. We talked about the challenges of rentals and Airbnb, plus the community and similar stories I’ve heard from owners and managers wherever I’ve gone.

We talked about the town. Kashi told me that even kindergarteners are taught to walk to school on their own. The kids take the train alone. Her two boys have been riding up to the ski mountains by themselves since they were eight, putting their gear on at the platform, spending the day skiing, then coming home.

In a place that has been hosting strangers for 250 years, they have still built for their own kids, not just for the people with cameras. You see it in small things. An unwatched cheese fridge. The fact that Kashi didn’t even know there were Interlaken police.

This isn’t tourism done well. It’s what’s at stake.

During the years Kashi has been building her rental business, Interlaken has seen second homes rise by nearly 30%. The town also enacted a two-year building freeze while a group figures out how to slow the conversion of homes into rentals. The Lauterbrunnen council has proposed a 5 to 10 franc entry fee on day-trippers, exempting anyone who books local lodging or arrives by train. April is one of the months the tourism boards have been steering visitors toward, to take some of the July-August pressure off.

We came at the right time by accident.

Interlaken has had 250 years to figure this out. It still hasn't. Most places don't get that long.

There are good Mexico days and bad Mexico days. I was having a bad Mexico day. Perhaps it was the scorpion on the inside of the shower curtain while I showered. Maybe it was the make-shift flame thrower of a Bic lighter and can of hairspray needed to kill the cockroaches. Maybe it’s because I left home almost three months ago to a place where I did not know the language or culture. Maybe because the day ended in “why”. Why was I here?

Bad Mexico days make you question every decision you made up to this point.

That day also happened to be February 14. Valentine’s Day. Hallmark had not found its way to the Caribbean coast. Chocolates? No chocolatier. Hell, Hershey’s Kisses had not even been in stores yet. But that afternoon Gary got down on one knee and asked me to marry him. Secretly I believed it was because I was crying and he had not thought of a gift.

He had chosen Valentine’s so he’d remember the date.

Of course I said yes. Yes, because we renovated the house in Baltimore together. Yes, we relocated to a foreign country together. Yes, he was my exploration partner and we knew we had each other’s back.

There was no ring for the moment. His mom’s ring sat in a safety deposit box in Baltimore.

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We picked Halloween as the wedding date. I always said because getting married is fucking scary. Gary picked it because it was his grandfather’s birthday. And it was also just before Mexico’s Día de los Muertos, Day of the Dead. So why the hell not.

We wanted to be married in a cave. Of course it is hard to get a justice of the peace or clergyman into an underwater cave. We picked the cenote that would look beautiful in the photos.

Invitations were sent to the printer.

Then our friend Buddy offered to build us a platform over the water at Dos Ojos. We’d been exploring that cave system. A huge cenote, drip-stone covered in moss and mold, clear blue water, mot-mots calling, a true hidden-world feeling. On the invites, all 15 of them, I crossed out the original location and penned in Dos Ojos.

The process of getting married in Mexico is through a justice of the peace. We went to the Registro Civil (Civil Registry Office) in Playa. It was a lengthy document, in Spanish. Typed out on a real typewriter with real carbon paper and kept in the municipal records in a bitácora. Now this document is probably the biggest fuck up I made in Mexico. And it all has to do with my name. I did my name wrong on the form. Maiden name, mother’s last name, and Walten. I have many aliases in Mexico. That is part of the reason I still go by Walten today. Undoing it in two countries isn’t worth it.

The other box we checked wrong was who owns what. If we own things in “common” or separate. We could not read Spanish. We just took our best guess, and checked the box. At that time we owned nothing but the dive gear we arrived with, so did not over think the decision. Blood tests done.

Destination weddings were not a thing, so we did not invite people from abroad. We could not justify asking people to fly in for a wedding in the jungle. The only exception was my parents. Who also served as a mule, to smuggle in bottles of champagne from the States. I bought a small bouquet from the only florist in Cancun for $40. A guy hawking silver at the top of the hotel zone in Cancun sold us wedding bands, $12. Still in a drawer somewhere. And a cake from the only bakery in Playa, $30. That was 50% of our wedding budget.

By October, we had moved to Akumal, a beachside village with eleven full-time residents. The people who worked at the hotel in town lived in Mayan villages in the Yucatán, Katunil and Sotuta, and went home to their families by bus or colectivo, once a month.

The morning of the wedding I drank a Bartles and James wine cooler for breakfast, overlooking Half Moon Bay from our condo at Las Iguanas. Calming my jitters. And there waiting was the mother of the bride in a tropical print outfit, with pretty sandals. I marched her right around and told her to put on her jungle shoes. The jungle is no place for pretty sandals.

Cenote Dos Ojos lies about halfway between the village of Akumal and Tulum. About two kilometers into the jungle. Today you can drive right up to it. Back then there was a very rough road not made for cars. Our friend Buddy, part inventor, part zen disciple, built jungle road warrior trucks. Frankensteins of the automotive world. We loaded the wedding party up into the back end of two trucks and headed out to the cenote, where Buddy had built the platform over the water. We were the first people to be married there. And maybe still the only.

Of course the JOP was late. No one warned him he had to hike two clicks into the jungle. We had to tip him extra for the hike.

There were about 10 people there along with my parents. Most everyone was a cave diver. Someone brought a plus-one. Gloria. Originally from Havana, she offered to sing a Spanish love song. A cappella, her voice rose up into the dark where the lights didn’t reach. My dad toasted Gary, called him a gentle man, then toasted us. Even the toughest cave divers had a tear in their eye.

Once back by the highway, a woman in a huipil was waiting with her young son. He walked up to me with a handful of wildflowers he had picked, and handed them over. I gave him a kiss on the cheek as thanks.

The reception was at La Lunita in Akumal. The restaurant was not open yet for the season, but Annette the owner extended an invitation to host us and our ragtag wedding party. A tiny skeleton bride and groom sat on top of the cake as we did the celebratory mordida, “the bite” where we try to shove each other’s face into the cake.

Gary and I were married more than twenty years. I can’t tell you the year we divorced. Divorced in the US, still married in Mexico. We weren’t going to pay two sets of lawyers in two countries, and there was a better reason than that. If anything happened to either one of us in Mexico, the only people they let into the ICU are spouses.

My ring. It was beautiful, and I had it for years. Kept it in our safe so I would not lose it diving. I still wish I had it. A safe is only safe if it doesn’t get stolen. One of the many times we were robbed, they took the safe, and the ring inside it.

What remains from our wedding aside from the story are images stuck together in an old wedding album, sitting in a Texas storage locker. Of course my dad, proud of his oldest daughter, would always show friends and family his favorite photo from that day. Me squatting in the jungle with my skirt hiked up, peeing. His daughter is in her element.

Missed the reception?

You can still buy me a drink.

What's the strangest wedding you've been to? Tell me in the comments.

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There are more stories on the way. Pull up a chair.

“I prefer to go in at the seaside road,” Stefanos said, “to see the place where I give the ring.”

It was a small chapel above the sea in the settlement of Aeolos. “Panagia Katafygiotissa” on Katafygi Bay. The walls were painted by a man named Dimitris Mytaras, whose name I had not heard. But then again why would I. I knew nothing about Greece. Stefanos asked what we cared about and then he built our day together from that.

The only place my sister and I wanted to see, the must see, was the Temple of Poseidon. That was the whole list.

The white-washed chapel was not on any list. It was his. It was the place he proposed to his wife. He could only get in because friends lived in the village.

Mexico’s Riviera Maya, from 1992, with a boyfriend and two trucks of dive gear and $7000 USD. I know what it costs to give a stranger your day, your knowledge, your country. I know what gets traded when the price is money. And I know what the years do to the people who keep giving it away honestly.

A friend gave me his name before I flew over. She is American and Greek, and she hires Stefanos every time she lands in Athens.

He kept talking.

He had been talking all morning. The way someone talks who has things he wants you to know about the place he lives in, and about himself, because he can’t separate the two.

His daughter was nine. His wife was from Crete and owned a beauty salon in the neighborhood we drove through. He worked from before sunrise to past midnight, some days to two in the morning when the overnight flights came in.

Those are long-ass days.

But that’s high season anywhere. You work when there’s work.

He was not from Athens. Paros was home, his parents still there. He flies back often. The car comes by ferry. The long boat ride he can’t stand. One small island is his favorite though, and not a famous one. Schinoussa. Down past Naxos. Tiny, 229 people. The water he could not describe was that beautiful.

Taste tsipouro, not ouzo, he said. Ouzo gives you nothing but a headache. (Yes, I knew that from personal experience.) The best wine in Greece was Malagouzia. Then he spoke of a motorbike accident in 2010, the one that made him pray and keep praying. He went to church every Sunday now.

All day he showed us places and how to see them without the admission price or the queue. The back way to ruins and the photograph no one else had found.

Then he pulled the car over. “Get out,” he said, “I will stay with the car. Go watch, it’s very traditional.” It was a changing of the guard at the president's residence, on a side street, no crowd, just a handful of people.

We stood a few feet from the ceremony. A tour bus would never travel this side street. A regular taxi would have driven straight past, but not him.

At the Temple of Poseidon he told how the sea got its name. Aegeus's son Theseus went to Crete to kill the monster Minotaur. He promised his father he would come back under white sails if he lived. Theseus killed Minotaur, got drunk on the way home and forgot to change the sails. Aegeus saw black sails. He threw himself off the cliffs. That is the Aegean Sea.

Then, without changing tone, he said the average salary in Greece was 880 euros ($1020 USD) a month. Before the crisis, in 2004, 2005, if you didn't have coffee in your house you went next door and the neighbor gave you coffee. Now if you knock, the neighbor won’t open the door. He said it the same way he said his daughter was nine. The same way he said Malagouzia.

I knew this. I had told a version of it myself, in Mexico, by the end. The pressure of tourism shows up first in the smallest gestures, the ones that used to be free. But it shows up second in something harder to put your finger on: the willingness to give a stranger the inside of your life. He was still handing it over. He was driving us along the seaside instead of the highway so he could show us where he gave his wife the ring. He was nine years into the job and he had not yet learned to stop.

I can say this because I did the same thing. I whored out my whole life for the business, for the customers. It helped. The business worked. Was the price worth it, I still wonder. So I knew what I was watching when I watched him. I had been him.

But then he gave me what I used to give my guests. The day. The stories. The thing you cannot buy because it was never for sale. I had spent a career handing it to strangers. Now a stranger handed it back to me. The friends I made were never an accident. They were the selfish reason I kept going.

I should be honest. I am glad I went to Athens. I do not need to go back. Maybe I am too much of an outdoors or small town girl. It was congested and the noise did not stop.

The graffiti was everywhere. He drove through all of it. He still handed us his story. His daughter, his island, his wife’s ring, his Sunday church, his favorite wine. The city was wearing him down. He had not let it take the work.

He told me about the cruise ships. Three, four a day into Piraeus now. Two thousand people at a time. They walk off the boat for a few hours and walk back on. They do not sleep on the island. They do not eat a meal there. “They buy only one salad, and one ice cream, and one souvenir,” he said. “Only that.”

You cannot see a place that way, he said. You want minimum two days. One island, one place, something. I had one day. He told me you need two. The next morning I flew to Santorini like everyone else. He gave me a full day. I was already leaving.

But that was Santorini, the next day. Back in Athens, the driver still had hours to go.

His daughter was sick. The nine-year-old. She was home waiting for him to take her to the doctor while he drove us through Athens. He mentioned it once and kept driving. My sister and I both insisted he drop us off early and go take care of her.

He bought us souvenirs. He paid for them out of his own pocket, small things, before he left us at the Acropolis. A sick child waiting at home, the 880-euro month most Greeks live on, and he bought us souvenirs.

Then he came back. After we had walked the hill and seen the marble, he came back for us at the end of the day. The last thing he did was make us promise. “Do not take a taxi off the street, they cannot be trusted”.

This is how Stefanos lives. One person trusts him and hands him the next. My friend, then me, then whoever I tell. The cruise ship needs none of it. It does not need his name, it does not need to trust him, and it never comes back. Two thousand people, a salad, an ice cream, gone by dark.

I spent 27 years building the same thing he has, one guest at a time. Trust you cannot put on a brochure. It does not scale. It was never meant to.

That is what is worth flying for. Not the view. The man who takes the long way to show you where he gave his wife the ring.

If something I wrote made you think, laugh, or feel like someone finally said the thing — buy me a glass of Malagouzia wine. It keeps me something to sip after a long day of writing.

Buy Me A Glass of Wine

The promoted version is the coastline, the festival, the Michelin chef, the views. It’s the two sentences in the tourism brochure, the photo taken in October that brings visitors in March, the “emerging food scene” with three restaurants and two of them seasonal.

The other version is the woman who tells you to ignore the menu. The family that’s fed people at that crossroads for three centuries while the military took two-thirds of their village. The son who chose to come back. The lemon orchard that almost disappeared and came back because two people decided it was worth planting. The bakery that closed not because of too many tourists, but because not enough people live there anymore.

I’ve spent 35 years inside this industry. Business owner first, in Mexico’s Riviera Maya when there was one gas station in Playa. Then internet entrepreneur, professor, consultant. I’ve watched the official version get made. I know why it ends up as two sentences about Templar chapels and the rhythm of the seasons.

Destination Sunday is where I write about what gets left out. Some weeks it’s a field piece, a place I went, something I found, what it reveals about how destinations survive or don’t. Some weeks it’s a closer look at how the industry works: why landing on a travel list can break a small town before it helps it, why the repeat guest is invisible in most destination reports, why more marketing rarely fixes what’s broken.

You don’t need to work in hospitality or tourism to follow this.

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Most of the time the gap has a person standing in it.

The woman at the hotel in Comps-sur-Artuby told me to ignore the menu and look in the case instead. She waved off my spilled drink. She brought lavender ice cream I hadn’t ordered and didn’t charge me for the drink I’d knocked over.

The family has been doing that since 1737.

The tourism association gave the village two sentences.

If something I wrote made you think, laugh, or feel like someone finally said the thing — buy me a margarita. It keeps me on the road, at the bar, and writing.

Buy Me A Margarita

I was 27 years old. I felt all of 7.

Foreign face, foreign culture, foreign language, and I am the foreigner.

My first job, in Mexico, at the first all inclusive resort in Playa del Carmen. Seemingly the first American to be part of the resort staff.

Two months before I had an office in Baltimore. A window, a secretary, business lunches, and business suits. A dive shop owner and cave explorer, Mike Madden called long distance one day and asked me if my boyfriend Gary and I wanted to come work for him in Mexico.

“What does it pay?” Mike told me to fax my resume.

Four pages. Four pages that took me 20 minutes to send since the long distance connection to his fax machine kept dropping. Let’s see there was marketing for Kraft General Foods. New frozen pizza test marketing for Pillsbury, beer promotions with NASCAR, event marketing for Lipton Ice Tea. Coca-Cola, Pepsi, 7 up and blah blah blah. Yes I was proud of my resume.

A fax came back. “Nice resume.” “$400”. “Dollars”.

“A month.”

I was to run a dive concession at the new Diamond Resort. Sharing a space where two girls who handed out beach towels to guests, as I hustled people to try to Discover Scuba classes in the pool. Ironically it was only a handful of years earlier I was the tourist taking a discover scuba class at a resort myself.

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Yet it was these two cute girls, young women, who handed out towels, Nellie and Gina, who watched me eat alone for a week. One day I saw them across the dining room sitting at a round table. They smiled and waved me over. I was embarrassed at being recognized as the lonely girl. Part of me almost passed at the invitation, because sitting with them meant being face to face with the fact that I was a foreigner who did not speak their language. But I knew how uncomfortable it was to eat alone.

So I walked over to join them.

A corn tortilla on its own is dry. A little sweet, a little nutty, warm cornmeal smell, not a meal until it is holding something. Up to that point I had been tearing them in half and eating them like bread. Pushing food on my fork. I had little experience eating tortillas aside from roadside taco stands. Gina watched me and laughed. Then she showed me. Slap the tortilla flat across your left hand. Bring the right hand up, slide it across the left. One motion. Roll.

That was how you ate.

We built a vocabulary broken in two languages.

Those first weeks working at the resort I commuted up from Tulum. Living in a palapa on the beach with no electricity or hot water at a place called Gatos. The studio Gary and I planned on renting would not be available until after the Christmas holiday season. A plight around the world of needing a place to live versus tourists who need a place to stay for the holidays. Evenings we listened to the shortwave radio spinning the dial for any signal that sounded like the outside world. And in the middle of the night we listened the the rats rummaging through the care package my parents had given us when we left Baltimore.

The road to the resort was dirt. Playacar was jungle. Where the Xaman-Ha aviary is now, was a garbage dump. A far cry from the booming international destination it is today.

There were good Mexico days. What people do not tell you when you become an expat is that there are bad Mexico days. Day to day life is frustrating. Convenience had not yet made it this far south. The gas station was out of gas. Immigration was a ferry ride to Cozumel. Groceries were a trip to Cancun with a cooler in the back of the truck and a half dozen stops to fill it.

The frustration compounds. Tears follow.

One night I remember getting drunk on Dos Equis, donning my red power business suit and matching shoes. Yes, I brought a couple suits from the States. I thought they might be useful. I went across the street to Mike’s home to use his phone. One of only a few phones in Puerto Aventuras and drunk dialed my mom. Collect. Drunk crying that Coca-cola used to pay to hear what I had to say, and here in Mexico no one cared. She listened, I blubbered. She told me, “you can come home anytime”. To return home was to admit failure. I was not going to fail. She knew I would not come home. She ended the call as she always does, “God bless you and keep you safe.”

A few days later I went down to the marina in Puerto Aventuras and walked into the Cedam Dive Center office where Mike’s secretary Beti worked. Beti was about my size. She dressed for the office. She had a friendly smile and not much English. The two suits I brought from the states, from the life I left behind, draped over my arm, the matching red and white patent leather shoes in hand. I told her in Spanglish that I did not need them here. If she did not want the clothes she could give them to someone who would.

She took them.

The only suit I needed in Mexico was a wet suit.

I have no idea if the shoes fit her.

I never asked.

I think she thought I was a crazy gringo.

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In 2012 I was on a clowning trip with my best friend, Patch Adams, and a group of other volunteer clowns in Guatemala City. “Guate” was one of the most dangerous cities in the world. Our purpose was to go to orphanages and hospitals, mental institutions and, well, clown around. Make people smile, make the kids laugh, make a connection. Just what Patch Adams does. The real one, not Robin Williams in the movie. Lots of stories came from that trip. But the one that makes me cry almost every time I tell it is the old folks home.

A retirement community is way overstating what it was. A series of one-story, cinderblock buildings. Each old person had a room which looked more holding-cell like, than a home. A basic bed, small table, a chair. A few staff people flitting around the compound.

I had been living in Mexico for quite some time and knew poverty. But there was something about walking the grounds of this stark place that made the air feel heavier. Desperate. Lonelier. In Latin America, family takes care of the elderly. There was no family here.

We were there for a special lunch in a community room. Music playing, somebody’s birthday, clowning around with these old people as they ate their sandwiches on white bread. (White bread? No tortillas?)

In the corner was an old woman with fresh lipstick on. She had a small frail body like little old ladies do. Long hair pulled back from her face. You could tell in her earlier days she was a beauty. Like the vintage Buicks and Chevrolets still rolling through Havana. Dings, a touch of rust, and still something regal about them. She was dancing to the beat with a sock monkey. Just a toy. Dancing in the corner like no one was watching.

Except I was.

A woman who had probably lived better days. Days dancing with friends and family, at weddings, at parties, at birthdays. A whole life. Here she was, dancing with a sock monkey.

I choked up.

At the same time, maybe I had a raw nerve deep down. I didn’t have kids. Maybe when I’m old I will become the old lady dancing in the corner.

Maybe that is what triggers the tears

Maybe a glimpse of possible reality.

When I got there it was jungle. Sand roads, and one gas station in Playa. One in Tulum. A garbage dump where the Playacar aviary is now. The state of Quintana Roo was younger than my little sister. Everybody was a transplant. People from Mexico City who saw an El Dorado. Mayans who didn’t speak much Spanish saw work, foreigners seeking a better life saw a paradise. People running toward something, people running away from something. All of us figuring it out with whatever was at hand.

I stayed 27 years.

What I saw in that time, people going today will never see. Not because I was special. Because I was early. Because I was stubborn. Because going home meant failure and I was not going to fail.

These are those stories.

Not just Mexico. A life spent in places most people see on a map and wonder about. Smoking shisha in Istanbul. Jane Goodall’s chimps in Tanzania. Schooners in Greenland. A clown suit in Guatemala City. The first internet reservation service on that coast, built before most people knew what the internet was.

I never thought any of it was remarkable. It was just what I did.

My brothers in arms, Jim Coke and Dan Lins, told some of their stories over happy hour. They’re gone now. And their stories were buried with them.

I’m not going to let that happen to my stories.

You don’t have to go to the highest mountain or the deepest cave to have an amazing life. But if you’ve ever stood at the edge of something and wondered whether to jump, these stories are for you.

I’m a woman who after all these years is still trying to figure it out.

Welcome.

Buy Me A Margarita

This week the patriarch of the hotel, Arnaud Bain, sent me an email. Three paragraphs of thanks. A paragraph about his son, who he is proud of, and an invitation to come back.

That folks, is hospitality.

It’s the same gesture of kindness and care. Once at the table, once at the keyboard.

The Bain family has been doing it that way for 297 years.

His son’s name is Clément.

He’s 24. He has worked in kitchens since hotel school.

I am not talking flipping burgers!

Clément has worked at the Provençal truffle institution, Chez Bruno in Lorgues. The Hostellerie des Gorges de Pennafort in Callas, a country hotel-restaurant with a Michelin star. And a medieval castle turned hotel, The Château de Trigance, twenty minutes from his home.

For those of you not fluent in Michelin stars, this is not a minor league resume.

Then Paris.

Le 114 Faubourg at Le Bristol, one of the city’s palace hotels. The kind of place chefs spend careers trying to reach!

This year, Nice. At Les Agitateurs, a Michelin-starred restaurant by the port.

And next, home.

Back to Comps-sur-Artuby population 346.

In Arnaud’s words:

Mon fils sera également très content de vous lire et est également très motivé pour reprendre la suite de notre maison familiale. Il sera la dixième génération !

Roughly translated: my son will be glad to read this, and is motivated to carry on our family house. He’ll be the tenth generation.

A 24-year-old with that resume could go anywhere!

He’s choosing a village of 346 people, a hotel his family has run since 1727, a kitchen that suggests lavender ice cream to people who spill their drinks, and the tenth generation of a story that has outlasted Louis XV, the French Revolution, two world wars, and an artillery camp.

The regional tourism page still mentions chapels and seasons. It still doesn’t mention him.

If you missed the original article…

In the spring of 1985, I was a senior at Clarion University in Pennsylvania. A band geek. Marching band, jazz band, concert band. I played the baritone sax. The biggest in the saxophone family. It was almost bigger than I was. The university announced a trip for the symphony to Mexico. The director said they didn’t need a bari player. But if I could learn bass clarinet, I was in.

I learned.

The harder part was the money. My parents were going through a rough spot. I may have embellished the home situation when I pleaded with the director for a scholarship. I got it.

The only other big city I had ever experienced was a band trip to NYC in high school.

Landing in Mexico City, I had a nervous excitement I had never felt before. Spanish was not really spoken in the US at the time. At least not in Pennsylvania. Everything was foreign. VW Beetles, trucks, horns, men pushing diablos stacked with cases of Cokes. The city felt enormous and small at the same time.

We were told no shorts. Prostitutes wore shorts.

One evening a group of us girls went to a bar around the corner from the hotel. Guys took turns singing songs in Spanish and we would sing them back in English. Happy Birthday, back and forth, two languages. That night a car literally jumped the curb in front of the tuba player in her scooter-skirt.

I spent one afternoon sitting on the steps of the Presidente Hotel flirting with the doormen. When they got closer, I’d scoot up a couple steps toward the doors. They’d back away. I’d scoot back down. Nobody said a word. Teasing on the staircase.

Our first concert was at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. There was no internet. No photos I had scrolled through beforehand. So I had zero expectations. Inside, the ceiling made the space feel cavernous. I was sitting in the middle of the orchestra, watching people filter in through the doors at the back of the concert hall.

I had been playing bass clarinet for six months. I was faking it and I knew it.

But when the music started, the acoustics took over. The sound blended and filled the room. The music hung in mid air. Whatever I was honking got swallowed by the hall. Only me and the person sitting next to me knew.

We played three concerts.

One day we toured the ruins of Teotihuacan. Arid, dusty, the sun scorching. No people hawking t-shirts, keychains, or ceramic mini-pyramids. On the way back we stopped at some roadside stalls. I bought some obsidian bookends and a handmade tablecloth. My mom still uses it. At this pitstop I had my first taste of pulque, a fermented drink that dates back to pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica.

The next morning off to Acapulco.

Acapulco was small then. People sunning themselves. Little kids swimming in their underwear, clutching their mother’s leg. Barkers with their wares going blanket to blanket on the sand.

Saturday night we played at Sinfonia del Mar. An open-air amphitheater near the famous La Quebrada Cliffs. Our backs to the sea, playing into the carved stone seating that amplified our sound. Waves crashed behind us and seemed to blend with the music. Across the water you could see the Tarzan House, once owned by Johnny Weissmuller and John Wayne. After the concert, our hosts provided mezcal in bamboo shot glasses. They told us to just shoot it back. It was vile tasting. We all shot it back anyway.

Our last day was Easter Sunday. A bunch of us attended mass. Not in one of the churches like Mexico City, the ones that looked like architectural art. This was a cinderblock building. Unfinished. Rebar protruding from the top of the support beams. One block back from the hotel, one block back from the beach, and it could have been a different country.

Five months later, an earthquake leveled parts of Mexico City. The opera house survived.

Menton, France is known for lemons. Lemon soap, lemon tea towels, lemon-print dresses, lemon sorbet, limoncello, and lemon tarts in every café window.

A few weeks ago, I was wandering le vieux (old) village and popped into a boutique on Rue Saint-Michel. The shopkeeper handed me a slice of Menton lemon. Rind, pith, pulp. Eat the whole thing, she said. So I did. No bitterness. The peel and pith were almost sweet.

That’s the part most people throw away.

Most visitors to Menton never taste it.

I wanted to know how a lemon could taste like that. So I went looking for the origins of the Menton lemon and contacted Maison Gannac to make a reservation to visit their mountainside orchard.

The lemons at Maison Gannac are the size of grapefruits. A few are even bigger.

I walked steep dirt paths above Menton. The path was loose under my feet. I kept stopping, stunned that branches could hold fruit that big. Huge lemons with thick peel, slightly knobbed, a deep saturated yellow that made the Meyer lemons we get in the United States look small and inadequate. On the ground was a box of freshly hand-picked Menton lemons. The leaf and a bit of branch were still attached, by law. I folded a leaf between my fingers and smelled it. It smelled like the fruit.

The peel is where the flavor lives, Laurent Gannac will tell you. Having a peel you can eat is the entire reason this lemon exists.

Every February, Menton holds a festival celebrating the lemon. A quarter of a million people come from all over. The parade floats are made of real citrus — 140 tons of it. Most of those lemons are imported from Spain. Menton lemons are too rare and too expensive to build sculptures out of.

The fruit that comes off the floats afterward gets sorted and sold. Nothing wasted. The festival, the tourism office, and the farmers all work together.

Most of the festival goers never see a working orchard.

If you do, here’s what you find.

A working farm. Not a manicured tourist attraction. The paths along the restanques, or terraces. The dry stone retaining walls that turn a cliff into farmable terraces are steep and slick with loose dirt and stones. The men who pick the fruit carry 15-kilo boxes up the slope on their shoulders. The orchard sells trees to people who want to plant their own. There are bananas growing in a small grove. The micro subtropical climate exists because of the surrounding mountains, the winds come in from the sea, and sunshine.

The view is the Mediterranean to the south and Italy to the east.

A kilo of these lemons sells for €10.9, approximately $13 USD.

There are 56 producers left in Menton.

Trained in horticulture and landscape design, Laurent Gannac chose Menton for the subtropical climate. Citrus was at the center.

He had no idea what a Menton lemon was. He had never heard of it. He was building gardens for clients, and every time he brought a lemon tree to a property, the customer would ask the same question. Is that a Menton lemon?

The repeated question forced him to find out. That is how he discovered five hundred years of history.

Around that time, he met Vanessa Zeenni. In 1991, their son Adrien was born. Laurent planted his first lemon tree the same year. Laurent bought the hillside knowing he might lose every franc. Then more parcels. He laid them out as restanques. Every retaining wall on the property is one the family built.

There were no inherited terraces. There was no inherited orchard. Just a fallow hillside and two people who decided it was worth turning back into a farm.

A lemon tree takes three to four years to bear fruit. Vanessa watered trees six hours a day. To carry the family through the wait, she trained as a hotelier and worked as a concierge in Monaco.

Adrien grew up among the trees. He says it himself in a video from a few years back.

Other people are born in cabbages. I was born among the citronniers.

He went to business school in Nice, then got an agricultural diploma at the horticulture school in Antibes. Joining his father in 2015, he brought what his father didn’t have… The idea of building a brand that ran from the tree to the shelf.

The team grew from two has grown to 30. They make almost a hundred products now. Limoncello, jams, candied lemon in salt, lemon powder, a creamy spread called L’Onctueux that he developed with the chef Philippe Colinet. They work with brewers on citrus beers. With an olive oil couple, Anne and Erwan, who make a Nice olive paste they pair with Menton lemon. Mauro Colagreco at Mirazur, the three-Michelin-star restaurant on the Italian border, cooks with Gannac lemons.

So does ChefAlain Ducasse.

The orchard visits, the boutique, all of it is farm tourism. The visit isn’t an amenity. It’s part of how the farm survives.

When Adrien needed to plant 200 more trees and convert a building into a workshop, he raised €130,000 from people who wanted to support him. A regional youth-entrepreneur program, Initiative Menton, backed him on top of that. They said it themselves in their video:

We are aware of the difficulty of starting a business in agriculture.

On my visit, Céline was the guide.

A worker walked past us with a 15-kilo box of just-picked fruit balanced on his shoulder, headed up a path. A lemon Adrien grew last year took nine months to ripen and weighed over a kilo. It’s family lore now. I also saw a tree that produces lemons and oranges from the same trunk, grafted together. Two fruits, one root. After touring the orchard, I was treated to a tasting session. Jams, preserves, and liquors, from sweet to tart.

Menton is a town built by people from all over. The Grimaldis from Monaco. The Sardinians. The English in their winter villas. The Italians whose street names still run through the old town. Laurent from Occitanie. Vanessa from Beirut. Almost nothing in Menton was originally Menton.

Nothing continues by accident. Adrien chose to come back. His cousin works in the family’s logistics now too. Younger people are coming into horticulture and want to start their own orchards, Céline told me. The interest is there.

The land prices are the problem.

Menton got very good at turning the lemon into a destination. The festival, the producer network, the chefs, the guided tours. All of it works.

The same tourism economy that gave the Menton lemon an audience has driven the price of farmable terraces high enough that a young person without family money cannot start what Laurent started. The hillside he bought in 1988, with the risk of not getting it back, cannot be bought that way today.

The lemon survives. The next Laurent might not.

Menton hasn’t solved how to make room for the next one. Most destinations haven't started asking who gets to come next, or whether they can afford to stay.

The Menton lemon almost disappeared once. It came back because two people arrived in 1988 and decided to plant it. If they were 25 today and walked into the same town with the same idea, they could not afford the hillside.

Walking down from the orchard, I kept thinking about the kilo lemon. Nine months on a branch above the sea. Cut by hand. The whole thing held together by people who decided it was worth doing.

Menton built a brand around a lemon that almost disappeared. The lemon came back because two people arrived in 1988 and planted it. If they were 25 today and walked into the same town with the same idea, they could not afford the hillside.

Most destinations don’t get a second comeback.

More from Destination Sunday

When I stepped off the plane and on to the tarmac, the humidity wrapped around me like a warm, wet blanket. I love that feeling. A baby blue and white Volkswagen bus (a combi), was waiting to take us south along the Cancun-Tulum corridor to Akumal. The combi’s sliding side door was missing and a side of a baby crib acted as a door. One set of the bench seats was removed so dive gear bags could be stacked. I sat on top, I was in charge of the beer. A cooler filled with cervezas bien fria. All of us knocked back beers, including the driver. And I watched the side of the road through the baby crib slats.

The highway 307 (or the carretera) to Tulum was equivalent to a rural road in the US. Far from the likes of the four lanes of today. Driving was certainly the most dangerous part of any trip. No shoulder, and if you catch the edge, it meant a tumble over the edge and into the jungle. And possible death.

The same shitty road into Aventuras Akumal still exists today as you get off the highway.

Our group stayed at a condo on the beach. Gary and I were offered the “crowsnest” a roof-top, palapa covered room. A romantic place for the cute couple. It was there where we were robbed the first night. I wish I could say it was the only time I have been robbed. It was not. The next day, a passport turned up in the shower. Another passport and wallet were gone. The second passport was later found in the jungle.

We took our dive group in that combi with the baby crib door, to the dive sites. Quite literally we would park alongside the road, careful not to topple into the jungle, and trek into the jungle with our gear.

We always asked the land owner for permission to dive. The owners often lived in a palapa with little or no electricity. A coke, or a small package of cookies, or a couple of pesos served as a thank you.

Today many of the cenotes have concrete or wooden stairways leading from the jungle floor to the water. We had barely a path to follow, sometimes jumping from heights to get into the water. Gran Cenote which tour buses frequent, had one single parking space, and a stick ladder to climb out. Each step was strategically placed on the wobbly rungs. One cenote Maya Blue now referred to as Cristalino was an effort for me to climb out of. Slippery rocks, grabbing saplings. My right leg slipped in between two rocks, up to my knee. I fell backwards. Landing on my doubles, on my back. “Is my light ok?”

Cave lights back then were custom-made plexiglass canisters with a battery inside. Crafted in someone’s garage in Florida. Heavy, expensive, and they don’t bounce well. The light survived. My knee, not as lucky.

I hobbled. It was the middle of our trip. I wanted to keep diving. That night I retold the story to our hosts. Someone produced a handful of pain meds. I continued to dive painfree and a wee bit woozy.

The big dive of any trip was to Nohoch Nah Chich, Mayan for the big bird house owned by Don Pedro. Mike Madden has been the primary explorer of the cave system. A couple-kilometer hike into the jungle. Don Pedro’s boys lashed our gear and tanks on to horses as we followed them through the scrubby jungle.

The boys used a rope through a crotch of a tree, as a makeshift pulley. Lowering our gear down to a stick platform at the water’s edge The staging area to set up for the dive. The water was so clear you could see the white calcite dunes and glimpses of the stalactites from the surface.

Returning to Baltimore I went to Johns Hopkins Sports Medicine Center for my knee. Of course the doctor wanted to know how the injury happened. As they were running tests, the attending doctor kept bringing in other staff saying “tell them how you got hurt, tell them,” and they looked at me like I was crazy.

No life altering injury, but my knee aches became a barometer while diving if I was close to getting “bent” (decompression sickness), and if it is going to rain.

And Mike Madden, whose dive shop filled my tanks, less than two years later he became my boss.

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I worked my way up in the PADI dive certifications and became a dive master for Sea Colony Aquasports. Aside from the general public we also did scuba training for the midshipmen at the Annapolis Naval Academy. Ah, the middies in their summer whites…. Oops I digress. Certification dives were done in a Pennsylvania quarry shadowed by the Three Mile Island Nuclear power plant silos. Love check out dives with the middies, yes ma’am, no ma’am.

It was there I met a dive instructor, Gary. I flirted with him over pizza and beer.

Gary and I talked on my commute home from work, almost every night. I had a cell phone, the big box one that sat between the two front seats. In that first month my cellular bill was well over $1200. I would talk about ads I had read about becoming a commercial diver, a merchant marine, or joining the Coast Guard. He shared stories about underwater cave exploration in Belize. Teaching cave diving in Florida. Cave diving. Huh? Never heard of it.

Finally, Gary asked me out on a date. The issue was that I had recently got engaged to a guy in Atlanta. A short-lived engagement, with an ugly ending, for another day.

One night sitting in a booth over dinner, I told Gary diving was number one and he was number two and as long as he understood that, we would get along great.

Weekends spent diving, rock climbing or working on house renovations he had started on his childhood home, where I then lived.

I had found a pair of rusty steel 72 cubic foot tanks in a barn in Virginia. The tanks were visually inspected at the dive shop. Gary offered to teach me how to dive doubles.

Off to the Three Mile Island quarry.

The steel tanks would turn me over on my back like a turtle. Over and over. Fighting each time to right myself.

It was not fun. I was frustrated. Crying in my dive mask. Gary said, “forget it, just get out of the water.” I took his words as dismissive and that pissed me off. I showed him. I fought my way to stay right side up, swam around and stubbornly crawled on my hands and knees on the shore getting out of the water on my own. So there.

I then started learning how to cave dive. I started my training in my rusty 72’s down in Florida, camping at Spring Systems. I was trying to learn the gear and the rules of cave diving. Wrestling my 72’s into the fill station at the end of each dive.

Some guy sat there watching me, grinning, asking about my tanks and if they were new. I looked at him like he was crazy. Telling him to look at the scuffed up paint and rust, no they are not new. Later that evening I learned that guy at the fill station was Sheck Exley, probably the most accomplished cave diver who ever lived.

Sheck was teasing, ME!

I had not finished my certification. Gary and I started running cave diving trips to Mexico anyway in 1990. Mexico. The mecca of cave diving. We stayed in Aventuras Akumal.

An area I did not know was going to become my home.

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Hungry, by the time I reached the village of Comps-sur-Artuby, I was ready for lunch. Comps sits at 900 meters. One of 23 villages spread across this relatively remote stretch of inland Provence. The eastern gateway to the gorges.

It is the kind of place you pass through on the way to somewhere else.
Most people do.

I walked into the Grand Hôtel Bain. A cute place with a terrace with tables. The chef was sitting outside at the table. Lunch service had ended, he said. But I could get a drink, a coffee or a dessert.

The bar area is classic with ceramic beer taps, shelves lined up with bottles, an espresso machine. Not a soul around though.

A woman’s voice came from somewhere in the back, “just a minute”. Standing in the doorway, I was getting a little antsy waiting. Looking up and down the main drag for other options.

Then she appeared, wiping her hands, and told me not to bother with the dessert menu. Go into the dining room, she said. Look in the case.

I did. Passing on dessert, I opted for an Aperol spritz.

Outside at a table on the terrace, the chef sat with a beer and a cigarette. Soaking up the sun with no particular interest in what time it was. A handful of people chatting at a nearby table looked like they were locals. An artisan shop across the street was open, as well as a local TABAC store (a local convenience store). A couple cars passed on the road to the gorge.

She brought my drink. Within seconds I toppled the glass. She waved it off. Then she leaned over cleaning up my mess and suggested the lavender ice cream. Homemade. “Lavender ice cream, ugh” I thought to myself. Yet, I said, sure with a smile, mainly out of guilt for spilling my drink. She returned with the ice cream and a fresh drink. The ice cream was amazing!

And no charge for the spilled drink.

I later discovered: the Bain family has been feeding passers-by at this crossroads since 1727. The hotel as it stands was founded in 1737 by Claude Bain and his wife Marguerite, under the reign of Louis XV. Arnaud Bain is the ninth generation. His son Clément just finished hotel school and is coming back to take over.

Also, the French military swallowed two thirds of this settlement in the 1960s. Building the largest artillery camp in Western Europe. The ancient hamlets are gone. What remains of Comps-sur-Artuby, the 346 people, the hotel, an artisan shop, a TABAC, a restaurant or two on side streets is what survived.

The Guinness Book of World Records recognizes the Grand Hôtel Bain as the oldest hotel in the world operated continuously by the same family.

The regional tourism association covers all 23 villages in this territory. They promote a variety of routes, sights, and places to visit. Their info for Comps reads:

“The Templar past of Comps lines the rocky ridges with chapel silhouettes. In the village, life unfolds peacefully with the rhythm of the seasons.”

Two sentences. That’s it!

No mention of the Bain family.

No mention of the world record.

No mention of the woman who tells you to ignore the menu, just have a look for yourself.

They described the landscape and the seasons.

They missed the person, the family story, part of what gives the village life and personality, beyond the view.

This is what so many destinations overlook. Not the gorge. Not the bungee jump off the Pont de l’Artuby. The woman who tells you to ignore the menu, just go have a look. The chef who has nowhere else to be on a Friday afternoon. The ice cream that was worth stopping for. The son who just finished hotel school and chose to come back to a village of 346 people.

Comps-sur-Artuby is not a destination. It is a place. There is a difference.

I am going to be honest with you. Many of you know I lived in Mexico, and I started a company called Loco Gringo. One of the first online reservation services for the Riviera Maya. I sold the company in 2019. And while I was blowing up my life, I decided to sell everything I own, and bought a travel trailer to live in. More details about all that later.

I went back to school for a master’s in travel and tourism for two reasons:

1. With nothing to do, I was afraid I would start having gin for breakfast.

2. I felt like I needed an advanced degree to validate myself and my 27+ years working in tourism and hospitality, while living on a dirt road.

I have a stack of certifications and accolades, all trying to prove something to someone.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love learning and enjoy school.

It took a getaway to the south of France to see it. Since the day I handed the keys to the new owner of Loco Gringo, I have been presenting a sanitized, vanilla version of myself.

Then AI came along.

Being a bit of a geek, I jumped into the deep end of the pool. I built an AI app. Spent a fortune. Shut it down. Tried consulting. Cared more about their businesses than they did. Started writing frameworks on Substack. It was mechanical and unsatisfying.

I have changed my Substack. To share the stories of being an expat, an explorer, and a traveler. A guest and a host. Avoiding potholes in business. And about life held together with duct tape.

If you are a already a subscriber, there will be nuggets of knowledge. You may not recognize the tone though. It’s the real me. No workflows or frameworks. Gritty details of boots-on-the-ground, bruises, and scars from witnessing a civilization grow from the end of a dirt road.

And if you unsubscribe, I understand. There are lots of consultants and people teaching how to promote your property on TikTok. But that person won’t be me.

Buckle up, because sometimes you can’t make this shit up.

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