Where the Road Ends — Mexico, Chapter 3

Mexico, Chapter III — Tulum and the Edge

The second chapter had ended on a hammock, legs raised, the sea ahead, and the pleasant feeling that the world could quite easily keep turning without my supervision.

Then, as always, the time came to put my shoes back on.

Even paradise eventually presents the bill and reminds you that you cannot spend the rest of your life suspended between two posts with a beer nearby and no immediate responsibilities. Or rather, you could. But it would require a particular talent, very little dignity, and probably a better passive income than mine.

I left Isla Mujeres and returned to the road.

The third chapter began in front of a sign.

Tulum.

One arrow pointed downtown, others aimed in different directions, and the sky above possessed that indecent blue that, in Mexico, could turn even a road sign into a declaration of intent.

At last, I had a direction.

Geographically, at least.

As for everything else, I was carrying the same old confusion, only slightly more tanned.

It is curious how reassuring signs can be. One word, one arrow, and suddenly we believe we know where we are going. We follow directions our entire lives: school, work, marriage, house, retirement, death. A well-marked route, complete with a few rest stops and an ever-growing pile of installments to pay.

But what happens when the indicated road is not yours?

How many signs have you followed simply because you did not know where else to go?

That day, I followed the one for Tulum.

Not because I believed I would find an answer there. I had already learned that places do not solve a life. At most, they change the backdrop to our questions and, if we are lucky, make them beautiful enough to photograph.

Before the ruins came the town.

Not the polished Tulum of advertising photographs, the one with luxury cabanas, cocktails served inside pineapples, and people dressed in white linen pretending to have attained spiritual enlightenment after paying four hundred dollars a night.

The real town.

Dusty streets, low houses, cars parked before pink and green façades, power lines, concrete, little shops, and that combination of precarity and color that had followed me throughout the journey.

Tulum had not yet fully put on the costume tourism would demand of her. Behind the image of paradise remained a place inhabited by people who worked, waited, sweated, moved, and tried to reach the end of the day without worrying whether they looked authentic through some visitor’s camera.

Life had nothing to prove.

I walked and watched.

A colorful house. A car covered in dust. A road that seemed to end against the sky. Small things devoid of any tourist importance yet, taken together, capable of telling the story of a place far better than one more perfect photograph taken at sunset.

Then I saw an old pay phone.

It stood beside the road, squeezed between cars and the movement of the town. An object born to connect people across distance, now nearly an archaeological artifact before I had even reached the ruins.

Years earlier, someone must have waited in front of that phone.

They must have slipped in coins, dialed a number learned by heart, and hoped the right voice would answer. Perhaps they called home. Perhaps a woman. Perhaps someone from whom they needed forgiveness—or to whom they needed to tell a lie.

Today we carry the whole world in our pocket and still manage to say fuck-all to one another.

We are reachable at every moment, locatable, connected, updated. We can see whether someone has read the message, when they were last online, even whether they began composing a reply and then decided to erase it.

And still we fail to understand one another.

At least that phone demanded a gesture. You had to stop, find a coin, remember a number, and accept that no one might answer. Communication still had physical weight.

Today, one thumb is enough.

Perhaps that is why so many words no longer weigh anything.

I continued toward the ruins.

At Chichén Itzá, stone rose from the earth and challenged the sky. Tulum, instead, seemed built to watch the sea. Its walls did more than protect a city: they marked a boundary between the jungle, humankind, and that immense expanse of water that kept claiming the horizon.

The sky was filled with thin clouds. Buildings emerged among the trees, and the sea appeared behind them like a presence too vast to ignore.

Centuries earlier, someone had chosen that place to live, trade, pray, and watch the sun rise from the water.

They had good taste.

Evidently, even civilizations destined to disappear knew a fucking spectacular view when they saw one.

I walked among worn walls, openings, paths, and structures that had survived long enough to become heritage, mystery, and the backdrop for photographs of people wearing improbable hats.

The stones still retained the shape of what they had been, but they had lost their function. A room without a roof. A door that no longer protected anything. A window open onto a world entirely different from the one it had been built to face.

How much time has to pass before a ruin stops being defeat and becomes beauty?

When a house collapses, it is a tragedy. When an entire civilization collapses, we wait a few centuries, build a ticket booth, and start selling postcards of it.

Perhaps distance makes even disaster poetic.

Iguanas moved among the stones.

They wore the serene expression of creatures who know perfectly well that, in the end, ownership always returns to nature. Men had built cities, worshiped gods, fought wars, and established hierarchies. They basked in the sun on the remains of it all.

It was hard not to admire them.

No performance anxiety, no need to leave a legacy, no Monday morning meeting. Only warm stone, insects, and the certainty that human beings would eventually leave.

I photographed them.

Among those ruins, the iguana did not look like a naturalistic detail. It looked like history’s final signature.

We build.

Nature waits.

And nature, that patient bitch, almost always wins.

I kept searching for frames within frames. Walls through which to see other walls, stones concealing structures, stairways leading toward the sea. I did not want merely to show the place. I wanted to find the way that place was looking at me.

At one point, I came upon a dark passage.

The stone formed a kind of tunnel. At the other end, light exploded, nearly erasing every detail of the outside world.

Two figures were walking through that darkness.

An adult and a child.

I do not know who they were. I do not know where they came from, what bound them to each other, or where they would go once they emerged. They were only two silhouettes, one larger and one smaller, joined by a hand.

The adult walked toward the light.

The child followed.

Or perhaps it was the other way around.

Perhaps the child was pulling the adult out.

The best photographs do not answer. They leave you inside a question and close the door.

That image will have a story of its own, because some photographs stop belonging to the journey in which they were born and begin speaking about something much larger. Here, it is enough to leave it at the precise point where it happened.

Between stone and sea.

Between the past and whatever came next.

Between darkness and a light too fierce to reveal where their feet would land.

Perhaps growing up means discovering that the adults who held our hands did not truly know the way. They were only trying to walk with enough confidence not to pass all their fear on to us.

And perhaps loving someone means doing the same.

Not promising them there will be no darkness, ruins, or wrong roads. Just saying: I do not know where the fuck we are going, but for now, give me your hand.

The beach came immediately afterward.

At first I saw it through a structure that divided the landscape into small rectangles. Sand, people, and sea appeared fragmented, as though I were looking at freedom through bars.

Outside, tiny figures walked near the water.

On one side were the ruins, the walls, and everything men had built to endure. On the other were nearly naked bodies entering the sea, leaving behind nothing more than a few footprints.

Centuries of history ended on the same sand where someone was spreading out a towel.

There is something profoundly democratic about the sea.

It does not care who you were, how much you make, which deity you worship, or how many people follow you. It gets into your shoes, ruins your phone, and reminds you that you are made almost entirely of the same water you are contemplating.

I descended toward the coast.

The path crossed rocks, vegetation, and stairways. From above, the beach looked small, cut between the cliffs and the sea. Then, as I drew closer, the landscape began swallowing everything else.

The ruins remained behind me.

Ahead were the waves.

The sun slanted down across the water, foam broke against the shore, and people became shadows inside golden light. A man walked near the rocks. A couple crossed the sand. Other bodies moved in and out of the sea.

No one seemed to know they were part of the conclusion to my story.

For them, it was only an afternoon.

And that is what I have always loved about travel photography: people keep living while you assign enormous meanings to their most ordinary gestures. Someone takes a walk and you see loneliness. Someone looks at the sea and you build an entire theory of freedom on top of it.

Perhaps they were only wondering what to eat for dinner.

But art is also this elegant form of emotional appropriation. We take the world, pass it through whatever we carry inside, and then pretend we merely documented it.

We never document only what we see.

We document who we are at the moment we look.

The journey continued along the coast.

The great ruins slowly gave way to small things. A fish painted on a wall. The pointed leaves of a plant. Fragments of coral piled on the ground. An iguana camouflaged among the rocks. The surface of the water beneath a sky that had suddenly turned gray.

The landscape was no longer trying to impress me.

It was asking me to come closer.

It is easy to photograph a pyramid, a cliff, or a sunset. They are subjects that do much of the work for you. Harder is stopping before a stone, a dead branch, or a plant grown against the wind and noticing that a story exists there too.

A bird perched on the broken trunk of a tree.

Below it, the palms kept moving in the wind and clouds had covered the sky. The trunk no longer had leaves, but it was still useful. It was not alive in the way it had been, yet it continued to offer a place from which to look at the world.

Perhaps we do not become useless when we lose the shape we once had.

Perhaps we simply change function.

The rocks continued toward the sea. In some places, the water was clear and almost still; in others, it arrived agitated and dirty with foam beneath a heavy sky. There were remnants of old structures, weathered wood, little piers, and concrete seats facing the horizon.

Someone had built two places from which to watch the sea.

They were damaged, scarred, and surrounded by vegetation. No cushions, no cocktails, no music selected to create an atmosphere. Only two blocks of concrete before the water.

They seemed perfect to me.

We spend an absurd amount of money reproducing sensations that have existed freely since before us. We pay for rooms with a view, panoramic terraces, exclusive experiences, and wellness packages to obtain a few minutes of silence before the sea.

Those two seats promised nothing.

Perhaps that was why they still seemed honest.

I lingered over the details: veins in the stones, the outline of the coast, a piece of wood dragged onto the sand, and waves repeating the same sentence without ever growing tired.

The sea had accompanied the entire journey.

At first it had appeared at the end of the streets in Playa del Carmen. Then it became the boundary to cross on the way to Isla Mujeres. Now it reclaimed the space, erased buildings from the landscape, and left only rock, wind, and distance.

Where does the road end?

Perhaps it does not end when the pavement does.

It ends when you can no longer continue in the same form.