Noticias de Hoy

Aaah, sweet bliss. A white sand beach, a hammock and not a care in the world. Imagine running away to the Mexican Caribbean and never coming back. That dream became reality for author Jeanine Kitchel and her husband who traveled to the Yucatan in 1985 and a decade later left their Silicon Valley jobs to pursue a relaxed lifestyle in Puerto Morelos, a small fishing village on the Quintana Roo Coast south of Cancun. Kitchel?s travel memoir?Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya?is now available at Amazon on Kindle for $9. 99. Here?s the first chapter.  The Umbrella?Highway 307 on Mexico?s Yucatan Peninsula stretched like an asphalt ribbon before us. The Maya named this place Sian Ka?an, or ?where the sky is born. ? It was untouched, this open, desolate wilderness, except for the narrow strip of pavement beneath us. Standing there at the crossroads on the highway, more like a swath cut from the low scrub jungle than the major thoroughfare for the state of Quintana Roo, I wondered if the bus would ever come. The year was 1985. We were sixty miles from the sparkling new resort city Cancun. It seemed unfathomable that just an hour?s drive on virgin highway separated us from the traffic and noise of a city, and then, as if by sleight of hand, we were transformed into a world of sky, clouds, jungle. We were in the heart of the Yucatan, land of the ancient Maya and their pyramids. We had embarked on an extended vacation, escaping our city jobs for a few weeks to relax in the Mexican Caribbean. Another four hours south and we could be in Belize, but we had other plans that day. After spending the night in a rustic hotel at the Tulum pyramids we planned to explore the Gulf Coast and to visit the undeveloped island Holbox new Rio Lagartos. Someone had told us to catch a bus at the crossroads, where we now waited. The bus route would jog past the pyramids at Coba and then head north through the heart of Maya land. In a lackadaisical way, I suppose we were searching for something in this flat, wild territory that just forty years ago had been called the most savage coast in Central America. We had no idea in a few years? time we would be buying property and building a house in this foreign land. But at the moment, we were deep in the Yucatan jungle, on a side road to seemingly nowhere. Paul, my fianc