Tropical Delusion: Misadventures in Paradise

By Jeff Ashmead

What if you quit your job . . .
Sold everything . . .
and bought a small hotel on the beach . . .

South of Cancun, Mexico and down a long narrow road ending in turquoise blue water, you will find Soliman Bay. Here is where most peoples dreams are found, a small bay, white sand and palm trees, and a reef just offshore full of colorful fish. If you are visiting, the dream looks real, but if you intend on staying the locals have one bit of advice - guard your sanity.

Though it may not seem possible, this comedy you are about to read is 99% true. Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

May you laugh at our expense.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9781475921939

Jeff Ashmead

Jeff Ashmead lived in Mexico for three years, overseeing the construction of two beach houses on the Caribbean. He currently lives in Oregon.

Book preview

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

THE DREAM AND THE REALITY

ROUGH START

THE MOVE TO MEXICO

WELCOME TO PARADISE

ROAD DUTY

ILL WINDS

ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT

FINISHING TOUCHES

HAPPY INNKEEPERS

SO THIS IS PARADISE

OUT TO SEA

EPILOGUE

Manuscript Editing

by

Ali McCart

Interior Artwork

by

Stephanie Smith

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PROLOGUE

P aradise killed Walter. That’s how the story began.

Sherry and I were moving to Mexico to build our dream home on the beach. Fresh from California with Caribbean stars in our eyes, we were told a story that the locals pass on to all newcomers—it’s told because it’s funny, because it’s history, but more importantly, it’s told to prepare you for paradise.

We were seated comfortably at a table near the water at Oscar and Lalo’s restaurant, sorting out details with our contractor Greg. I dug my feet into the warm white sand and relished the sound of the small waves just over my shoulder. Sherry sat across from me in a green sundress, a Diet Coke to her lips, while Greg read down a list of items we thought needed attention. Then he paused, regarding us both with a serious expression. Have you heard Walter’s story yet?

We exchanged a glance—we had not. A playful grin swept across Greg’s face as he put down the papers and slowly revealed the story. We shook our heads in disbelief. Surely the details had been exaggerated.

Walter had been one of the first to build a house on Soliman Bay and live here year-round. This was back before the bay had electricity, and if you wanted lights or a blended margarita, you needed a dozen marine batteries stored in some damp closet and a noisy generator to recharge them when they got low. This was when the highway to get here was narrow and dangerous, and if you needed something other than a screwdriver for tools or wanted to decorate with something more than white paint, you brought it with you from the States—always asking friends and family coming to visit for a week to smuggle something in their luggage.

Anyone headed here needed to be adventurous, a little tough, and have a reason to stay. Walter, by the mere fact that he was here, was adventurous. He was tough, without a doubt, and more than qualified in his reasons to stay, though nobody knew at the time what they were.

Accompanying Walter to this primitive place was his wife, Lucy, who, unlike him, was not particularly tough, though she was supportive in his endeavor. From the outset it was painfully obvious Lucy was not in her element here but was more suited for suburbia, for even though the bay was practically deserted, she never took a walk on the beach before putting on a perfect face and a few gold accessories—usually limited to just earrings, a necklace, a couple of bangles, five rings for five gold-nail-polished fingers and, of course, the gold diamond watch—just in case someone really cared what time it was. Lucy also had a fabulous collection of designer swimsuits that should have been called beachsuits because they were never going to see water as long as she owned them. Then she topped it all off with a beehive hairdo. She was spectacular.

In the bewildered eyes of everyone, Lucy was Cleopatra of the bay.

Walter and Lucy, regrettably, were both alcoholics. Maybe they thought if they left their old lives back in the States, things would be different, they’d break free of the clutch of addiction, but their shadows were never far behind. It finally got to the point that they both believed they needed to do something. They couldn’t find the will to throw away all those bottles with their seductive liquids, so Walter wrapped a chain around the liquor cabinet, padlocked it, and handed the key to the caretaker, charging him with the sobriety of his employers.

You’ll be fired if you ever surrender that key, he warned.

Greg shook his head. You can imagine how successful that was.

Lucy did better than Walter, only having a drink when they went out to dinner at Oscar and Lalo’s restaurant, where we now sat. But for Walter, that wagon ride lasted as far as the neighbor’s front door, where Walter’s best buddy lived—Ted, or, as everyone knew him, Tequila Ted.

Now, Walter and Lucy were by no means idle drunks. Lucy had opened a beauty salon in town, and Walter had invested in property in the area. Lucy had her faithful customers and Walter his, well, let’s just call them associates, the local dons—the land barons, resort owners, and construction company owners. For in Mexico, as in most of the world, it’s all about money and friendships, and Walter knew this all too well, meeting them at their unofficial office, Oscar and Lalo’s Restaurant, where they regularly drank, ate lobster, and made handshake arrangements.

As time went by, though, it became obvious that this wasn’t working for Walter and Lucy—the drinking, the arguing—one thing led to the next, and Lucy came to hate it down here and went back to the States.

Then one evening, with a tropical breeze coming off the ocean and the sound of the bay washing over the shore just in front of the house, Walter sat in his recliner and silently dozed off forever. For two days the house lay silent until the caretakers became overwhelmed with worry—Walter never stayed indoors for two days in a row, not answering their knocks. So they forced the door open and, in answer to their fears, they found Walter slumped on the floor in front of his recliner. Walter had died likely on the first evening, rising out of his chair with outstretched fingers to his chest before crumbling to the floor. Now the authorities would need to be notified, but not before they took care of one last item. It was Walter’s practice to always carry a fat wad of bills on his person—for life’s just-in-cases—so they collected the money, counted out eight hundred US dollars, and took it straight over to Tequila Ted—it was better he take it than the police—and asked him (probably pleaded for him) to make the call. They wanted nothing to do with the Federales.

When the authorities heard the word muerta, Ted might as well have said, invasion. A truckload of heavily armed police arrived and surrounded the house with machine guns. Securing the perimeter, they barged through the doors and flooded the house, pointing guns into each room, but it quickly became obvious they were the only living souls there. The detectives soon followed, armed with notepads and chalk, but after a perfunctory investigation and a white outline on the tile floor they declared it a probable heart attack and called over Tequila Ted to identify the body of his friend, then an ambulance came to take Walter’s corpse away.

Sherry and I reached for our drinks, figuring the story to be over. It had just begun.…

The police told Ted he needed to go to the police station in Tulum, where the body would be taken for jurisdiction reasons, and where he’d need to identify the body one more time. So, a half hour later, Ted took off for Tulum, driving down the long dirt road from the bay until he reached the highway. It was here that he came upon what looked to be a van on its side, the wheels and undercarriage facing him, police and emergency vehicles on the scene. Figuring everything was under control, he continued driving to town, finally arriving at the police station, only to be told the ambulance had never arrived but had in fact been in an accident, rolled, and was now on its way to Cancun—Walter still inside.

Tequila Ted, realizing what he had seen on the highway, rushed back to the scene of the accident, but the ambulance was gone. He then sped on toward Cancun and eventually caught up with the ambulance—Walter was now on a flatbed tow truck. Ted followed until he arrived at the morgue, where the body, having been thrown around in the wreck, was finally dragged out of the bent-up ambulance and bounced onto a waiting cart. Ted was horrified Walter had died of a simple heart attack but now looked as if he’d come to his end in a Maytag laundry machine.

Inside the morgue, Ted was asked to identify Walter again, then to wait for the body to be released. When it finally came time to claim the body, Ted was told he could not have it until he paid for the damages to the ambulance. Evidently, Walter’s body had caused the accident. Twenty-five hundred dollars later, Walter was sent to the crematorium.

At this point in the story, we were incredulous. But the kicker was yet to come.

The funeral was held at the church in Tulum. Everyone was invited, and everyone came—the land barons along with their henchmen, Oscar, Lalo, close friends, expats, caretakers, and a couple who had a spider monkey rescue, along with two of their cute little monkeys. And of course Lucy showed up, her hair set in the perfect beehive.

Then Walter’s reason to stay walked in, having flown in from Mexico City: his other wife and love child.

Lucy was upset, to say the least. Sure, her marriage with Walter hadn’t been exactly functional, but another wife? And child?

The church was a hum of chatter. What would Lucy do? What was there to be done? How could Walter have kept such a secret? Were there even more wives somewhere?

Then Ted strode to the podium, and a hush came over the congregation. Someone in the back row anxiously made the sign of the cross, and everyone’s lips whispered the same prayer, Please, God, let him be sober, please. It was almost audible. Then Ted opened his mouth and out came his first utterance: Fucking Walter, what a time to die.… Ted was absolutely sauced.

Someone snorted with suppressed laughter. One of the monkeys, captivated by Lucy’s beehive, broke loose, jumped a row of pews, and pounced on the bounty of hair. Lucy screamed. The second monkey jumped to the aisle, and a chase ensued around the walls of the church. Everyone burst out laughing, except Lucy, who was in tears—the monkeys on the rampage, the other woman, and the love child were all too much to fit into an orderly ceremony.

All the while, up at the podium, totally oblivious—Tequila Ted rambled on.

As the monkeys were corralled, Lucy, disheveled but unhurt, dried her eyes, those in attendance caught their breath again, and Ted ended his eulogy—not with a farewell or an I’ll miss you, but by slumping over the podium, passing out, and falling to the floor.

The next day, Walter’s ashes were spread in the ocean.

No, the boat didn’t sink, Greg concluded, but it did run out of gas.

Sipping our drinks, enjoying the Caribbean breeze, Sherry and I smiled, believing it all to be exaggerated. Little did we know, Walter’s story was just one example of all that can go wrong in paradise.

THE DREAM AND THE REALITY

Liberty, I have come to believe, is when you have sold everything and all you have left is a big wad of cash. Paradise is a place you run to when you need to escape one of life’s bad dreams.

Sherry came across a real estate listing that looked to be an incredible deal, Casa Seis Machos, a six-bedroom hotel located on the beach on Soliman Bay, seventy-five miles north of Cancun, Mexico. When Sherry Googled the name, she found it had a rental website and called me over to take a look at what she had found. The home page picture was taken from out in the water just above the surface toward a palm-tree-lined bay, the beach had white sand, and a grass roof palapa stood just back from the shore with a hammock hanging in its shade. Rising behind this was the small hotel, two stories, brilliantly white, framed in windswept coco trees, its six patios gazing out over the Caribbean. It was beautiful.

Sherry and I had met six years earlier, at about the time I was awakening from exactly the kind of bad dream I wanted to run away from. Divorce. It happens. There were no kids; there wasn’t a fight, just this staggering realization that things were not what I believed them to be. Sherry, one might say, came to the rescue by helping me put distance between memories and living my life.

We met in the course of my employment, standing in soggy mud and drizzling rain in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. A gas technician with two days of stubble armed with a notepad and a smile, I talked with Sherry about the installation of gas plumbing for her palace-to-be, which stood behind her in a cathedral of glue lams and plywood. It was then that Sherry locked her eyes on mine and started making plans that had nothing to do with her building.

Sherry had worked for Hewlett Packard for thirty years, for the most part hopscotching around the world keeping projects for the multinational technology company on time. When most people retire from a job that demanding, they usually glide in and find a place to park. Sherry was just fueling up.

She started visualizing us running away together early in our relationship; the million-dollar house she had just built, soon became, for her, another been there done that and it was now time to move on—plus, there were too many other attractive women in this part of the world. It was during a vacation to Cancun, twenty-four hundred miles away and a day trip down the coast to visit some ancient ruins, that, in the clear blue sky, lush jungle, turquoise Caribbean waters, and white sandy beaches, Sherry found the remote hideaway she was looking for. And I was soon convinced it would be paradise.

The sunny photos on the Seis Machos website were enticing and, for me, foreboding. When Sherry got an idea in her head, she was a train moving at top speed.

Sherry called the reservation number, and a lady answered in German. Unfazed, Sherry asked, Hi, is the hotel still for sale? and the woman quickly switched to English to tell her that the real estate listing had expired, but yes, it was still for sale. If we’d like to see it, the six partners and family would be there the following month. After a few more questions, Sherry hung up and emailed a few folks we had become acquainted with in Soliman Bay from our previous trips down there—what did they know about the hotel? One person replied that he had taken a look at it, but didn’t like it. That the shore at that end of the bay was rocky with coral, and the neighbor ran a nudist resort. Coral and nudity might be problems, but not show-stoppers. We had to go see it.

The state of Quintana Roo makes up the easternmost portion of the Yucatán Peninsula, with over five hundred kilometers of coastline forming bay after bay on the dreamy Caribbean. These bays are part of the second-largest reef on earth, second to the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. Here an exotic variety of fish make the reef their home, along with lobster and conch, not to mention the occasional shark and, of course, three different kinds of sea turtles—the hawksbill, the loggerhead, and the green sea turtle. Along this coast and in these bays, turtles nest their eggs every year starting in May and the last of the hatchlings make it out to sea by October.

Just inland from the bays, and common along the entire coast, is the mangrove—tangled masses of roots sprouting from seawater ponds growing gnarled branches with yellowish-green oval leaves. They’re all protected—the Mexican government does not allow any construction or deforestation in mangroves. And inland from those lies the jungle—not the Amazon rain forest kind of jungle, but thick masses of shrubs and trees that serve as stopping points for hundreds of species of migratory birds and butterflies.

It is impossible to say anything about the Yucatán without also mentioning Mayan ruins. The entire peninsula is dotted with Mayan ruins dating from around 700 A.D. They can be seen along the highways, on a cliff overlooking the Caribbean in Tulum, or standing atop a pyramid in Coba in the middle of the jungle where, in the distance, irregular humps of green tell you there are so many more yet to be discovered.

Overall, Sherry loved the state, but particularly the middle center of the coast, called the Mayan Riviera, near Tulum. Here it was far from the loud tourist hotspots of Cancun, and was yet to be invaded by towering beach resorts. This is where Sherry was determined to find our home in paradise, overlooking a soft white beach, crystal-clear water, and perhaps a few surfable waves.

It was time for us to see Seis Machos in person. At five o’clock in the morning in the Cancun airport, nothing is open but the tired eyes of immigration officers stamping passports. I had only the weekend available, so we flew out late Friday night, stopped over in Houston, and then continued on to Cancun. Since we were using the old terminal, Avis Rent-A-Car was only a five-minute walk away; we could take advantage of their twenty-four-hour service to get an early start, and settle in before meeting with the Machos at nine.

The car lot gate was locked, but the fence didn’t connect to the neighboring wall, so we slipped through and headed for the office. We stepped through the unlocked door, only to find a phone and a scattering of papers covering the counter—no staff. Fellow travelers joined us, and we all mused on what to do next. Sherry and I were anxious to get moving, so we weren’t particularly excited about this delay. I found a business card lying on the counter with the manager’s cell phone number, picked up the office phone, and gave him a call.

Hola, came a tired voice. I started to explain, but after just a few words, the manager realized with alarm the situation and announced, ¡Ya me voy! He was on his way. I hung up and announced to a now-crowded office, Open twenty-four hours—starting at seven a.m.

We waited with hands in pockets, milling about the lot, looking up with hope each time a rental car pulled up to the locked gate and the person got out hoping to return it. We, wanting to rent it, they staring back at us with questioning looks, needing to catch a flight. One car after the next was abandoned in front of the gate until it resembled a freeway traffic jam. Finally the man on the other end of the phone arrived. And of course he came alone. Antsy to get going, I jumped in the first car blocking the now-unlocked gate, found the keys on the visor, and pulled it inside the lot. The manager joined me with a set of duplicates, and before long we had a neat row of cars in the lot and a clear exit for our adventure.

Finally heading south on the highway, we noticed material-laden trucks and workers by the droves swarming new resort sites. It seemed every time we drove this stretch, another resort was going up. The race was on to get our own.

We finally turned off the paved highway and onto the Soliman Bay Road, here a long white line of crushed limestone through a green carpet of mangrove stretched out before us. We drove half a mile until the road ended in a T near the beach and turned right on the narrow road that followed the crescent curve of the bay. We drove past several beach houses and palm-filled lots till we finally came to a high stone wall protecting the privacy of a group of thatched-roof huts (casitas). A sign on the wall read Nature Beach Resort, Clothing Optional. We figured we must be close and continued past a vacant lot to the next house.

The real estate photos of Seis Machos had detailed views from the bay and the beach, but we didn’t know what it would look like from the road. We’d envisioned the words Casa Seis Machos artfully painted on a roadside wall or on a sign planted among flowers at the entrance. Instead, we found it in the driveway nailed to a tree.

A VW van was parked inside and, recalling the German accent Sherry had encountered, I imagined the owners bringing it all the way from the Fatherland. We stepped out of the rental car and gazed at the top half of the hotel over a curtain of green palms; we were finally here and it looked imposing. I took a deep breath, and we ventured forward, crossing through the property’s chest-high wall. To the left of the driveway stood a small stick hut with a clothesline, and to the right, what looked to be the caretakers’ residence, a tall, grass-roofed casita with stick walls varnished the dark color of molasses. In front of us stood the garden, tamed by the edge of an overzealous gardener and chastened of any wild rebellion. We continued along its curving pathway