In Pursuit of Romance — Across the Whole Caribbean

To propose to my girlfriend I have to pursue her across the entire Caribbean after Mexico refuses her entry

August 31st, 2019, 2:07pm — “They will not let me in, they make me return to Venezuela.”

I stare at the text from my girlfriend in disbelief. Excited tourists stream out the arrivals door of Cancun International Airport and eddy around me like a wave around a small rock. Nearby, buses disgorge great gaggles of tourists from the other end of their Mexican vacations. Sunburned and laughing, clutching bags of souvenirs, they stumble into the departure terminal doors. My girlfriend and I had had dreams of Mayan pyramids, but in that moment, as I stare at my slightly-cracked phone screen, the dreams turn to pyramids of sand, to be obliterated by a wave of political circumstance, sweeping her away from me like a piece of driftwood in the riptide.

Having arrived before her, I’ve been waiting in the tropical sun by the arrivals gate for hours. Beads of sweat trickle down my forehead. I could have gotten a flight arriving an hour after her instead of the flight I took with a huge overnight layover in Guadalajara arriving three hours before her, but I didn’t want to miss a minute of time together. In her first year of medical residency, she didn’t technically have any days off, but had begged and cajoled seven days. We hadn’t seen each other in a year, and had just these seven days.

“Señor, where is your girlfriend?” a taxi-hawker whom I’d met while waiting asks me. I picture a fetid holding cell in the airport basement. I clutch my backpack protectively — buried deep inside an engagement ring that sparkles with transformative potential.

“I… don’t think she’s coming.”

I’m faint with hunger but I’m determined that I’ll wait here until there’s a resolution. Every ten minutes I try calling Immigration on the courtesy phone, but after answering the first time they don’t repeat that mistake, and don’t answer.

Raking my mind for “why,” I remember President Trump, months earlier, slouching sideways at a podium as he does, his lips pursed like a dog’s sphincter, assuring his supporters that he had demanded Mexico more rigorously control migrants coming up from further south. I picture the Presidente of Mexico, sitting at a large mahogany desk flanked by two large Mexican flags, rolling his eyes and picking up a glossy black phone.

“Olga, we need to show more strictness on the southern border,” he tells the Interior Minister, who is sitting at a desk with a little Mexican flag standing on the corners. After a short exchange, she sets down the phone and then dials a subordinate…

…Ernesto, an immigration supervisor at Cancun airport is sitting with his feet up on a desk, a small Mexican flag pin on his lapel, when he gets a call from his boss. At the end of a long game of telephone, he’s told “we need to show more rejections of people from south of us. We gotta get those rejection numbers up!”

And so, when the immigration official looks up and sees a Venezuelan girl traveling alone, her brown eyes big and innocent, he smiles like a basilisk, thinking cheerfully about another rejection to tally up. This would make three Venezuelans and one Colombian from this flight alone.

“Meeting your boyfriend huh? Can you prove it?” he asks with a smug smile while ignoring the incessantly ringing telephone, which he knows is just some pesky guy asking for his girlfriend.

Hours go by. I haven’t eaten in 12 hours, I haven’t slept in 33. The sun is getting low in the sky.

“I know an immigration supervisor, let me call him for you” one of the hawkers tells me.

“Si! Por favor, gracias!” I eagerly and deliriously respond. He speaks for a bit and then hands the phone to me. Ernesto says he’s not currently on duty but he’ll be in at 9 am and they can do the interviews again and “sort something out.”

As if there was any question what that meant, his friend asks me

“How much did he want?” while making the international gesture of bribery, rubbing his thumb against his forefingers.

“He didn’t say”

“Oh,” the hawker looks embarrassed for a moment, and then changes the subject, “what will you do now?”

“I suppose I’ll go to the hotel we booked in Tulum” I reply. If she’s in until morning and we have a plan to resolve it then, I suppose I can suspend my impromptu hunger strike. Tulum is an hour away and for a second I consider booking a closer hotel, but in a disaster, my instinct is to not change plans more than necessary. I don’t need more complications, I am starving, exhausted, and emotionally drained.

The taxi-hawker’s eye glints like he smells blood in the water. There follows a veritable exhibition of all the ways to scam someone: misrepresentation of alternative transport options (“the [$5] bus is $40 but I can get you on a direct shuttle for $45”); ride-sharing cost-splitting fellow tourists who turn out not to exist; a manufactured urgency (the other tourists who don’t exist are about to leave!); and “accidental” misconversion of currency to my ten-fold disadvantage.

A seasoned traveler, I anticipated and had prepared for all of these — I know from my pre-trip research that the bus is only $5, but I just want to go straight to my hotel and if their shuttle is more direct I’ll take it. I had also double-checked the conversion rate in anticipation of his misconversion, and, though I was expecting it, almost storm off when he, smiling guilelessly, tries to tell me the incorrect value of my money, but I’m so, so very tired, and this is surely his last trick. Finally, I’m in a shuttle bus pulling away from the airport into the gloaming twilight.

A mile later we’re parking. What now?

“Since you’re the only passenger, we’re switching to a smaller car.” Okay, fine, that makes sense. My luggage is transferred and I get in a sedan car with a new driver. We proceed for half an hour towards Tulum along a straight broad highway, before he asks me where we’re going. I show him the address.

“That’s in Tulum, that’s far!”

“Si” I sigh tiredly. Surely he already knew that was our destination — we’d been driving directly there for half an hour already after all.

“It will cost more”

“I . already . paid.” I say through gritted teeth.

He pulls over. There is nothing but walls of jungle on either side of the highway, the purpling sky above and unforgiving concrete below.

“Show me your receipt.” I show him my receipt, he points out that the receipt I’ve been given, while looking official, has no identifying information of any kind. He swears he doesn’t know those guys and has no kind of business relationship with them. We are at a stand-off, I can pay him the amount I’ve already paid all over again, or be left in the jungle at dusk with the most expensive item I’ve ever owned in my backpack. I’m tumbling under another figurative wave. Seething, I pay him.

Finally, we arrive at the hotel, and I gratefully climb out of the taxi into the surreal steamy blackness, tendrils dangle into the headlight beams from all sides. I grab my luggage, slam the door, and hope never again to meet such shamelessly abased jackals as these taxi drivers.

The hotel consists of a number of different beautiful little cottages, thatched casitas and stylized huts set amid tropical shrubbery. I flop into a chair in the reception cabana, and the receptionist, a young man, sensing I have a story I need to unburden, leans back in his chair and says “So, tell me what happened?” with a friendly smile. With relief, I vent to this instant friend. After a short informal therapy session, he shows me to the accommodation I’d booked for Cristina and I, a large elegant hut-shaped structure with a view of the moon-lit sea.

After locking the ring in the room safe, I pad down the sandy path between cottages in search of food. The hotel restaurant is gracefully rustic, all bare irregular wood beams, the ceiling mere underthatch, the sides open to admit a cool breeze and the sound of crashing waves just beyond in the darkness. It’s all so … muy romantico. I picture Cristina on a bare metal bench in a concrete room and tears begin to well up in my eyes.

Just then I’m jolted by the sound of a text from Cristina:

“Yo estoy en Panama

Mi amor I am in Panama

Come to Panama”

Ignoring the shrimp tacos that had just arrived, I scramble on my phone to find the next available flight from Cancun to Panama (7am). I know she likely won’t remain in Panama, I don’t know where she’ll end up, she’s a piece of driftwood on the tide, and I’ll dive headlong into the sea after her. The first step is Panama.

At 3:30am, stress causes me to veritably leap out of bed like a jumping fish when my alarm goes off. Having been deeply paranoid about forgetting the ring in the safe, I immediately retrieve the precious little box and rebury it deep in my backpack. The hotel grounds are labyrinthine in the dark, every path I take seems to lead to the beach. but a night watchman with a flashlight finds and guides me to the waiting taxi (arranged by the receptionist, doesn’t try to scam me at all). I never did see the hotel by the light of day. As we zip up the highway through the slumbering Yucatan towards the airport, another text comes in from Cristina:

“I have arrived in Caracas” — Venezuela’s capital, where she began her journey. Exhausted, heartbroken, her face streaked with tears, she turns her thoughts to getting home from the airport, and, as she’d later informed me, hadn’t expected the next text from me:

“Book the next flight you can to anywhere” I urge her. As an American, if I enter Venezuela I am liable to be arrested and subject to all kinds of unpleasantries at the El Helicoide political prison until I confess to being a CIA agent, and I have a particular dread of having my fingernails pulled off … so meeting her there is not an option. I enter the departure terminal not laughing with bags of souvenirs like yesterday’s tourists, but scurrying like a opossum in the thin predawn light. As I stand in the check-in line, another text comes in from her:

“I found a flight to the Dominican Republic leaving at 11.”

“Excellent, book it!” I text back. But it’s not so easy — since the Venezuelan currency has suffered from hyperinflation and they don’t have credit cards, we need to find a way to put it on my card. By the time I get to the check-in desk, we have not yet succeeded in booking her ticket. As I check in for my Panama-bound flight, I ask the yawning airline employee to also book me an onward flight to the Dominican Republic. On mere hours’ notice, the ticket is blisteringly expensive, but I take a deep breath and buy it. It is a leap in the dark. If we don’t succeed in buying her ticket, this will just be money thrown to the wind.

We succeed. I fly to Panama City, she takes off for the Caribbean island nation of the Dominican Republic. As my own Dominican-bound flight is taxiing down the Panamanian runway, and, having waited until the last possible second to turn off my phone I’m now about to do so, a notification comes in: she has just touched down in DR. As I watch the shallow Caribbean sea slide by down below, I wonder in anxious suspense whether or not she has been allowed through Dominican passport control.

When I anxiously turn my phone back on after touchdown there are messages from her that she’s successfully arrived, and her post on my Facebook wall saying she arrived already has 70 likes from my friends who have been following the gripping journey, and they all knew she was there before I did!

But now we’re in a country we didn’t plan on being in, and there’s that little matter about a proposal to make, but that’s all for next week!

TO BE CONTINUED!

[I apologize for the lack of photos in this story, as you can perhaps imagine I had a lot more on my mind than taking photos]