Mexico, March 2021
I should get the Nobel Prize for Medicine after writing this blog.
I left London for South America in early December 2020, sensing that the UK and Ireland were going into a covid winter lockdown. Hearing that mantra start all over again “Stay At Home” – the contrary curious Chekhovian actor in me searched deeper for a hidden subtext, which I discovered was: “GET THE FUCK OUT!!”. Or maybe it was an immature and angry teenage actor re-emerging in me after Boris’s Brexit. Using reverse psychology as revenge – whatever Boris advised now – I would do the opposite.
I was a Rebel Without A Virus.
(cue: dramatic music)
So I spent 3 months in Colombia and then flew to Mexico in March. I’ll update you on the amazing seductive Colombian experience in a future blog but I need to write about Mexico first, as it’s fresh in my Nobel Prize winning head – about a race of people I encountered on the Oaxaca Pacific coast called… ‘hippies’.
I thought this race were doomed to extinction in the late 1970’s as a result of the yuppies, who spread like wildfire well into the 1980’s. But no, the hippies made a comeback. And they may be vital to curing covid! Even curing yuppies! Read on. Take notes. And buy shares in alpaca ponchos and multi colored haram pants.
After a 3-month stay in beautiful warm Colombia, I arrived in Mexico City, as mellow as a sea turtle. My friend Ingrid, recently back in Mexico City, but having spent most of her adult life in the US, caused a panic and anxiety in me during our first phone call, my first hour in Mexico. My second hour in Mexico – I was in a taxi going to a health clinic, which Ingrid booked for me, to get a covid test. I got so paranoid. I actually thought I had Colombian covid and the last thing I wanted – was to give Colombian covid to her and her parents. But I tested negative, with tears streaming down my cheeks, after a 2-foot swab stick was rammed up my nose. I spent the weekend recovering in Malinalco, 3 hours south of Mexico City, with Ingrid and her parents in their beautiful country house. I wanted to explore more country areas, so her dad recommended that I visit Oaxaca (Wa-hah-kah).
The Monday before leaving for Oaxaca, when back in Mexico City, I witnessed the most stringent lockdown preparations ever in the Centro, not for covid, but for the International Women’s Day march. I wondered why tall-steel anti-riot barriers and riot police (mostly female riot police) were needed in a march for justice and equality for women? Well, well, well.. Hell hath no fury. OK, the vast majority of women at this event were peacefully marching and singing. But around 5% were carrying graffiti spray cans and hammers! I followed the march from Plaza de la República like a naive tourist and a few minutes later – I got attacked! With purple spray paint! Just because I took a photo of a woman attacking a monument with pink spray paint! A few minutes later, I saw another woman hammering away at a small naked male statue in Alameda Park. It looked like she was trying to break off his small penis (a masterstroke of symbolism). Some protesters also broke through steel barriers into corporate buildings, smashing windows and chipping away at the concrete. It got really exciting when they broke through the barricades into a church. I wondered would they destroy the statues of the Apostles, but free the Blessed Virgin Mary and carry her out, doused in pink? When they tried to break through the steel barricades into a theatre (Teatro Julio Jiménez Rueda) – this was the moment I wanted to protest! In my heightened RP accent shout:
“Darling NO! Dahhling, It’s the theatre! It’s my life and blood! I’m an actor!!, Please, Sweetheart, No!”
And the moment they hear ‘Sweetheart’ – it’s taken as a derogatory anti-feminist remark and their hammers whack me across the face, knocking out those beautiful dental crowns that I got in Colombia a few weeks before.
Beautiful Colombian dental crowns for my beautiful acting career.
(note to self: write about seductive Colombian dental nurses in the next blog).
Anyway, the next day with colorful spray paint on my face and hands and my Colombian white crowns intact – I took the 8-hour bus journey to colorful Oaxaca.
Ingrid surprisingly suggested that I also visit Mazunte in the state of Oaxaca, which is a beach town on the Pacific coast. I say ‘surprisingly suggested’ because when I arrived to Mazunte – nobody was wearing covid masks and no one cared! After all the lecturing, advising and persuading from Ingrid to get a covid test and be extra-careful – she sends me to a place where covid must be rampant! No masks whatsoever! An epicentre of covid spreading!
But…
No one had covid in Mazunte!
Why!? Then the penny dropped…
Everyone there was a fuckin’ hippie!
Then my Nobel Prize revelation came to light!
Hippies don’t get covid!!
(cue: Beethoven’s 9th)
I’m still writing my report to the World Health Organisation about this Mexican community that doesn’t get any corona! But let me continue on with this travel blog first.
My friend Elena, in London, talked about El Árbol del Tule, one of the oldest trees in the world, 30 minutes outside of Oaxaca. So I jumped in a colectivio (that’s a mini van or taxi jammed with passengers) to El Árbol del Tule to hug this 2,000-year-old cypress tree (some say 6,000-years-old). But the tree and its park were inaccessible because of covid lockdown! What!!?? This is the absurdity of lockdowns. I can sandwich myself into a packed taxi but I can’t enter a park to hug a tree! Imagine I jumped over the fence and ran to hug the tree. Would they arrest me and throw me into jail?
El Chapo: What are you in for?
Trevor: Hugging a tree during lockdown. What are you in for amigo?
During the Oaxaca to Mazunte 8-hour drive across the stunning Sierra Madre mountains, we stopped at San Jose Del Pacifico, the only town in Mexico where magic mushrooms can be consumed legally. A young lady, Leela from Connecticut, got on and needed to sit in front, beside me, because she vomits sitting in the back, not from the mushrooms, but from the fast driving on the winding mountain roads. She told me backpackers call these colectivios ‘vomit buses’. Leela had been travelling around the world for 7 years as a photographer. Another digital nomad! (I must write about digital nomads in my Colombia blog). She specialised in ritual photography and erotic photography. I had a quick browse of the photos on her phone, as I don’t have Instagram, while she talked about her lovers in different parts of the world. Magic mushrooms, erotic art, ritual art, polyamorous lovers.. yeap.. I’m heading to hippie-land. But then suddenly Leela stopped talking to me during the remaining 3-hour drive. Probably because of her nausea from the 80 mph zigzagging downhill, or maybe because one of her past lovers brought back a sad memory, or worse… maybe she saw… my socks and sandals.
Ok, I probably made some of you nauseous right now mentioning my socks and sandals. I guess this is like my ‘coming out’ moment…
I am a socks and sandals person, ok! And I walk with pride! And I will start my own fucking march down Plaza de la República with my spray paint and my hammer if needed!
But the main reason I sometimes wear socks with sandals is because mosquitos can’t bite my ankles! And wearing socks with trainers make my feet too sweaty in the tropical heat! Judge me, I don’t care!
When we arrived in Mazunte, Leela recommended a great local restaurant. On the bookshelf, I picked up the book ‘Lonely Planet Mexico’ and I saw a picture of my friend Anna, the main contributing writer, on the inside cover. I met Anna near Lake Baikal on my backpacking trip to Russia and Mongolia back in 2013. And now to see her picture in a book that I pick up in my first 5 minutes in Mazunte was a lovely moment, a sign! Don’t we love signs when travelling?
Another sign – a few days later – an old volkswagen beetle drove by, with loud speakers playing The Rolling Stones ‘I’m Free’ and I swear to God the driver looked exactly like Hunter S Thompson. If he faked his death in 2005 – he would end up here, for sure, on the Mexican Pacific coast.
I want to write about the joys of solo-subjective travelling. Many friends questioned me on why I would take this trip, especially alone, during a global pandemic. I wonder if they wondered that: I’ll get kidnapped, or corona sneezed-on in a colectivo bus, or that I must endure incredible loneliness when travelling alone, but on the contrary, I connect faster and more intimately with people travelling than I do with people in London. My neighbours in London live 5 feet away from me and we still haven’t introduced ourselves.
In poorer communities, in small towns, conversations start so easily with locals. Why backpackers and hippies love it. But in affluent areas or expensive hotels everyone is so alone, on their phone. Makes me think of Edward Hopper paintings. Social experiment – sit alone in a restaurant in West London or Upper West Side NY and see if anyone decent will invite you to their table. Then do the same in a village in Latin America or Africa.
It reminds me of Moshi village near Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, back in 2009. If you asked for table for 2, the waiter wouldn’t allow it. He made all strangers (tourists and locals) sit at the same table. The confusion and awkwardness of western tourists sitting with strangers was funny. And 20 minutes later all the tourists and locals were happily conversing and dining together. That waiter should get a Nobel Prize.
Graham Green wrote in The Quiet American, one of the books I read on this trip: “A man becomes trustworthy when you trust him.”
But I also love the occasional solitude when travelling. A Danish backpacker friend, Kris, said – ‘the further you travel away from everything and everyone that defines you, the more you learn about your true self’. It awakens something in you. It really does. Like great art. Jesus! – am I sounding hippie enough yet? I haven’t even started that..
I had a romantic notion that I’d meet many actors in Mexico. I assumed actors were the bohemians, the edgy and provocative type that would escape our Orwellian lockdowns and go live on beaches in Mexico or India for a year. But.. sadly no. I was the only actor.
I think of a line from a Joseph Arthur song (Speed of Light):
Hello Mexico,
You’re where I was told to go,
If I don’t want to be found.
Maybe that’s why actors didn’t go to Mexico. Because actors actually want to be found, desperately waiting for the limelight and fame to bless (or curse) them.
I met many other artists in Mazunte – who provided paintings, music, Spanish lessons, bongo lessons, yoga (everywhere!), personal coaching, tarot card readings, whole-ing, fruit fasting, tantra massage, loto massage, ayahuasca, shamanic rapé (pronounced “ha-peh), jeela mystical music retreats, spring equinox rituals, Indian palm leaf reading, women’s grounding meditation, kambo (ritual that involves the poisonous secretions of a giant monkey frog), bufo alvarius medicina (another frog), xanga, yopo plants, but my favourite was… ECSTATIC AWAKENING CEREMONY DANCE!
Ecstatic dance! No drugs needed. People gather and connect to the music, we express ourselves in the most individual and rawest way, no one judges your dance! (that’s liberating for an Irishman!) and you don’t talk! (ok, that’s difficult for an Irishman). Everyone lets go of their masks and allows their true selves to shine. I was in hippie-land! Dancing! Free!! On a beach!!! During a global pandemic!! I didn’t want to be found!!
I had to go to Zipolite beach, Mexico’s only legal nude beach, to get cash, because the atm machines in Mazunete never worked. I was informed that the atm was inside Hotel Nude. So I got naked, felt great!, went to the Hotel Nude and stood in line at the atm by the swimming pool. But security approached me asking me to leave, stating I have to be nude to be here. I replied: I am nude! And then he pointed at my socks and sandals.
Ok joke, that wasn’t true. Except the atm was in Hotel Nude on a nudest beach.
To escape the crowded Mazunte and Zipolite beaches for solitude – I walked an hour to the rocks and cliffs at the far end of the very quiet Mermejita beach. One day I lay on the rocks and fell asleep. When I woke up, maybe 30 minutes later, a woman, probably 20 metres away, was lying alone on a rock. It was just us two, nobody else. One knee raised and her other leg lay flat. From the corner of my eye, I kind of got fixated observing her raised leg – specifically her thigh, lit by the ideal afternoon sun, not too bright, not overcast, aesthetically near-perfect, against the backdrop of ochre rock and loud crashing waves trying to consume her, the vast ocean in the background. A Greek siren. No other human in sight. I was hypnotised for those 15 minutes. Am I falling in love with the thigh of a woman? But then she dropped her knee, and in that instant, I lost interest, and fell back asleep.
Just before sunset I walked back along the beach and met all the hippes from Mazunte and Zipolite arriving with bongos and guitars. I got talking to a very amicable and wise Canadian retired schoolteacher, Amagi, and a lovely lady, Estefanía, a painter from Mexico City. They invited me for dinner, and that evening was the first time in a year, that I really hugged people (convinced by then, that hippies don’t get covid). But I forgot my socks! I could feel the mosquitos biting my ankles. But I didn’t care! Was it a born-again-hippie in me saying: “a mosquito also needs some love man.”
Late next morning, I sat alone at a beach bar, and again, deliberately didn’t use my phone. A very handsome long haired Cambridge raconteur, Ned, arrived after a swim in the sea – it looked liked he came from the Guinness Surfers commercial. We talked for hours. His mother was Irish (where, he said, he gets his loquacity from), his father English and he now lives in Boston. I told him he should be a Shakespearian actor. And he mentioned that his friends in Boston all said the same! I was tempted to start my hippie acting commune right there and then.
I wasn’t always hippy-happy-go-lucky on this trip by the way. My western mindset would occasionally disturb me. Some days when I’d sit in the Zócalo (plaza square) back in Oaxaca town, I’d observe vendors selling everything from clothing to arts to lots of colorful helium balloons. But few tourists. This made me feel sad. One vendor grabbed my attention every day. She was a very elderly indigenous lady, probably in her 90’s, her face was so wrinkled, full of character. Maybe she was close to 100 years old. She sat there every day for 12 hours or more. She had one very small table, selling only a few items. I never saw customers buying from her. The first day I felt guilty. Why? Well, why did this woman, in her 90’s, have to sit and try sell things? Is she that poor? Shouldn’t she be retired? Also she kept nodding off. Her head would tilt slowly to her right and remain at an 80-degree slant for a good 10 minutes. I sat on a bench, around 20 meters away, trying to read Graham Green, but I couldn’t stop observing her. I wouldn’t dare try taking a photo of her (and posting it online, looking for likes). Then I thought… imagine telling her to go home and isolate from covid. She’d probably die at home with boredom and no motivation. Then I thought maybe she actually enjoys her job. What else would she do? She would probably prefer to be here for 12 hours a day with life all around her than in a nursing home with death all around her. And then I wondered.. did anyone consider her for International Women’s Day?
Travelling to other countries often makes me wonder about economic, social and gender inequality. Tourists are currently allowed to travel here as it’s vital for their economy (but not hug trees!). And tourists are currently not allowed to travel to the UK, I guess it’s not vital. Interesting… makes me wonder about the world’s mixed underlying attitudes to covid. And where we get our opinions and perspectives from.
Imagine I stopped listening to the hippies and watched Sky News on my phone at the beach bar instead..
(cue: gunshot)
(that’s my gunshot btw, not El Chapo’s)
Pause, rewind. Keep listening to Ned at the beach bar.
(cue: Rolling Stones ‘I’m Free’)
Closing shot: Hunter S Thompson, El Chapo, Johnny Depp and me in a volkswagen beetle driving on the Oaxaca coast road. Fade out.
PS – before my Colombia blog – you may see me at the next Downing Street press briefing. Boris in the middle, Chief Medical Officer on his right, and me on his left, dressed in an alpaca poncho and haram pants holding a giant monkey frog. And ‘Let It Flow’ signboard replacing ‘Stay At Home’ on my lectern.
