CHETUMAL
NOVEMBER 1974
Dear Doris,
Finally I decided to move on and I hitched a ride south. Since then I’ve been staying in an abandoned house with no roof on the outskirts of Chetumal. This is a real spooky old pirate town on a bay on the Caribbean coast near the border to British Honduras, the gateway to Central America. This is also a free port, so I’ve been eating imported cheese and drinking French wine for the price of a plate of beans and rice. I buy fresh shrimp from the fishermen for a few pesos and cook it on a small fire in my ‘living room’ here. The ocean is beautiful here to, emerald green in the morning, and even though it’s always hot and tropical (the jungle comes right down to the sea here) there’s always a nice sea breeze blowing in off the bay and I can hang my hammock between two coconut palms. At night it even gets so cool I have to wrap up in a blanket, also to fend off the mosquitos who are like a pack of invisible vampires, especially right around sundown. I’d like to spend a winter here, just to see what three meters of rainfall is like in one season. Judging from the construction of most of the houses here, the hurricanes must be pretty heavy. Some of the nicer old buildings which have seen lots of storms have window glass that’s half an inch thick. Most of the dwellings here in the jungle villages are made of bamboo shafts with thatched straw roofs. Since it’s mostly all swamp here, it’s hard for people to grow anything to eat, so most people seem to live off of canned goods from the free port of Chetumal, along with a sad little selection of vegetables trucked in from Veracruz and Chiapas. That and the usual red beans and rice and cheap maiz tortillas which are the staple of any Mexican meal. The mosquitos have put bites over every square inch of my hide here.
Today I’m gonna give myself a malaria shot before I go further south into the jungles of Central America to get to the ports there and look for work on a ship. You can buy the vaccine and needles right over the counter in pharmacies here, since doctors are pretty scarce in these parts of the world.
Love,
Jono
only way to do it.