"Tell me again why you're going to this godforsaken place," said a friend, whose own vacation destination was Hawaii.
The place to which my husband and I were heading was a small town called Mulege halfway down Baja California's east coast. We chose to spend a week there because Joe Cummings' "Baja Handbook" suggested it as a base for sea kayaking and exploring ancient cave paintings, neither of which my husband and I had ever done. The town itself didn't have a bank, a bus depot or a car rental agency, and when, after a sudden rain, the maid brought us soaking wet towels from the clothesline, we discovered there wasn't a place to buy towels either.How can I explain why Jack and I chose a remote Mexican town over a more easily accessible Caribbean paradise? What kind of idiots prefer open windows to air conditioning, fish tacos to gourmet meals and antique buses with haphazard schedules to rental cars?
I have to raise my hand.
For the most part, Jack and I don't enjoy places that make our wishes their highest priority. For one thing, you pay dearly for that kind of attention and expensive lodgings don't make me feel pampered. They make me critical. Highly indignant, I find myself saying things like, "For all this money, I can't believe we can't see the ocean from the bathroom!" Besides, there's no hotel room on earth much nicer than my own bedroom. Why would I go looking for something I already have?
In Mulege we paid $14 a night for a double room above a large courtyard. The towels, even dry, had seen better days, but I was thrilled to find we had hot water, a firm mattress and an engaging half-tame in-house pet raven to pal around with. All week long I said things like, "Look, hon, they swept the floor!" At night, with our unscreened windows open and our room bathed in a romantic orange glow from the streetlight, I felt like Rita Hayworth in a '40s movie. Jack and I were happy as pigs in mud. In fact, we were in mud much of the time since Mulege boasts only two or three paved roads.
If you believe the ads, you'd think that being catered to at every turn makes you more alive, but after a few days of predictably perfect experiences, I get restless. What sets my heart pounding is using my wits to communicate with someone whose language I barely speak, or tracking down a bus with no posted schedule, or carefully avoiding the poisonous spines of dead puffer fish strewn along a deserted beach. I can testify that there's nothing like finding a scorpion in your room to electrify the senses. (The next morning, we moved to the second floor.)
Jack and I also like the way that a challenging environment encourages togetherness. At home, we lead our separate lives quite competently, but in Mulege, we needed each other. I can ask simple things in Spanish, but only Jack understands the answers. It took both of us to figure out: how to rent a kayak when the operators of BajaTropicales have no phone (you run into the guy on the street); how to find something to eat before you leave for a hike to the caves at 7 a.m. (find an early-rising taco maker); and why the raven was following me around like a lovesick pigeon (it wanted to bite me).
What better payoff could a vacation deliver than the opportunity to rediscover that you and your mate make a terrific team.
When you take away the things most vacationing Americans depend upon - access to a car, TV set and telephone, stores bursting with consumer goods and the ability to do or buy just about anything if you have the money - you find yourself with something wonderful.
Time on your hands.
There wasn't much to do, and so we made friends. With Mexicans and Americans, with taco stand owners, ranchers, fishermen, expatriates and retirees, with the California Rotarians who had come to run Mulege's weeklong dental clinic, with the raven and her owner, with a girl who walked around town selling her mother's delicious empanadas. By week's end, we couldn't walk into a restaurant without having to stop at every table to greet our new comrades.
We made friends with a long-lost part of ourselves, too. We found to our delight that we were able to be wholly present, relaxed and patient, in harmony with the pace at which real things happen in a natural environment. That's what made it so hard to come home. Dreading all the mail to answer, phone calls to return and the endless list of errands waiting for us, those two easygoing souls opted to stay behind.