Leave the Lipstick, Take the Iguana

by Marcy Gordon

  Once in the city, we boarded a packed bus to the Sistine Chapel. Watch it, mom said as we squeezed in and stood pelvis-to-pelvis with a crowd of Italian men. We exchanged worried glances the whole ride, but once again nothing happened. As we entered the chapel, I became aware of a gnawing question, which I kept to myself. Where were all the aggressive Italian men? I wondered. Was there something wrong with us?

  Not ten minutes later, a young Italian man in glasses and too-short pants approached us with a look of faint desire. Mom braced. Finally, I sighed. He addressed my mother with the utmost politeness, a pure gentleman: Your daughter is beautiful. Can I ask your permission to take her on a date?

  A few days later, we boarded a train to Milan where we’d catch our flight back to the U.S. Mom must have been feeling a bit desperate because she stood close to the conductor and flirted with him. By the time the train pulled into Milan, she’d secured us a date. He has a friend, she whispered. We followed him off the train, and he led us to the employee cafeteria where his friend, a fifty-something named Giovanni, waited. We split a bag of chips four ways.

  All that worry and preparation and not a single catcall. We didn’t even get to use the lines we’d rehearsed so studiously. My mother and I left Italy deeply offended.

  Years have passed since our trip to Italy, and on some level I still haven’t forgotten the wounding indifference of Italy’s men. But recently, I’ve been spending my mornings in a café in Sausalito, California. The place is frequented by Italians and each morning as I pass the sidewalk tables I hear a chorus of Ciao Bella, and Beautiful Smile. When I step to the cream counter with my coffee, the men glance up from their newspapers, and my ego swells like a popover. It’s as if all the ogling men that were supposed to be in Italy had gathered in this small Sausalito café.

  One morning, I was standing at the register paying for my espresso. An older Italian man was at a table behind me, his eyes about level with my buttocks.

  Ciao Bella, he said. I braced and returned a stiff Hi.

  How are you? he asked.

  Fine. You?

  Well … I love this point of view he answered. His watery eyes leered at the back of my jeans.

  I felt heat rise under my shirt. How inappropriate I gasped. How politically incorrect. Where was this guy in Italy, I wondered, when I was prepared, guarded, and equipped. Now, standing there at the counter, I couldn’t remember a single one of the comebacks my mom and I had prepared. So I turned and said the first thing that came to mind:

  Thanks.

  Christina Ammon is a travel writer with work published in Orion Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Oregonian, Eating Well and other publications. She is the winner of a gold SOLAS award for family travel and recipient of an Oregon Literary Arts award for creative nonfiction. She is currently traveling the world in a truck made of garbage. Visit her blog at www.vanabonds.com.

  KIM MANCE

  Any Bears Around Today?

  She didn’t anticipate becoming prey.

  There is no road to Churchill. To reach this community of 900 on Hudson Bay in Manitoba, Canada, travelers must fly, sail or ride a train. The nearest town is about 170 miles away. I made the forty-eight-hour rail journey from Winnipeg, past prairie farms, through foggy forests, and eventually over subarctic permafrost.

  When the train finally eased into Churchill’s station, I had one thing on my mind: polar bears. It’s the first thing I think of when conjuring images of the Canadian north. Having grown up in Colorado, where I was immersed in adrenaline-inducing activities, I’m a sucker for adventure. Combine that with the possibility of spotting a threatened species in the wild and this, for me, was a trip I couldn’t resist.

  I was soon jostling over rocks along a dirt road in an enormous and boxy thirty-eight-passenger vehicle called a “Tundra Buggy,” outfitted with monster truck wheels and rectangular sliding windows. Our guide, Dave, gave riders a polar bear safety briefing as we ventured through the wildlife preserve outside town. Polar bears are the world’s largest carnivorous land mammals and nearly 1,000 of them are found in the region, so I listened more attentively than I do to, say, airline safety spiels. “Don’t put your hands outside the windows,” he warned. “Last year a guy wanted to get a better picture and snapped his fingers to get the bear’s attention. The bear ripped his arm off.”

  Noted.

  As our massive white buggy lumbered through muddy paths, Dave scanned the horizon. Suddenly, he pointed to a white dot about 200 yards across the boggy tundra.

  “Look, over there,” he yelled, “by the waterfront!”

  Sure enough, a polar bear lazily stretched out on its back, at the edge of the Hudson’s lapping waves. It rolled over and plunked a paw on its brown stony bed, unaware of the thrill it was providing us. I stood on the buggy’s back deck watching through binoculars, marveling at each rise and fall of the bear’s chest as it breathed in crisp, cool air.

  On the way back to Churchill, Dave offered more warnings, urging us to stay away from side streets in town and areas with trash cans—and to avoid sitting on the bayside boulders because bears could be sleeping under them. “Don’t worry, the twenty-four-hour Bear Patrol will send off ‘bear shot’ warnings to try and keep them away,” Dave said. “If one gets into town and you’re not near your hotel the patrol truck will come by and pick you up.”

  The population of Churchill swells with visitors each year as bear season draws near, but I began to understand that there was more to my visit than just my hunt for bear sightings. I’d come to the bears’ home. And I was prey.

  I felt a palpable awareness of the bears. In a local diner, rather than remarking on the weather or sports scores, friends greeted each other with the question, “Any bears around today?”

  Each person I met added his or her own advice on how to handle a bear confrontation. Flipping his monocle down over a pair of glasses, eighty-year-old town jeweler Ed admonished, “If you see one, stand completely still. They can’t see very well, so if you don’t move at all you have a better chance of not being noticed.”

  Walking to dinner, I found my eyes darting left and right—not in search of traffic, but bears. Simply crossing the road to the edge of town was an adventure. “Oh crap, what is that?” I said to myself. And just as I was about to run, er, stand completely still, it was revealed to be only a white minivan on the horizon. Whew.

  At dusk one night (the sun sets late in the subarctic summer), the center of town was quiet except for laughter and chatter wafting from a pub called Tundra. Inside, it was packed with beer-drinking Churchill residents and I soon met a bearded man in his 20s named Chris Cooke, or “Cookie,” as others around the table called him. He smiled and rolled his eyes but answered my questions about growing up around bears. Cookie spoke of close encounters, learning to stay aware, and how many Churchillians had been killed before the Bear Patrol was established in the 1980s (the last one being a guy who fell asleep on his porch in ’82 and was eaten). Cookie often kept a rifle handy, but he said being around the bears was now second nature.

  After a few drinks, I asked if he’d ever had to shoot at a bear. His eyes fell and his shoulders slumped; Cookie grabbed his bottle of beer and described the time a bear unexpectedly showed up in his backyard, blocking the path between him and his house. “I didn’t have a choice,” Cookie said. “He began charging me.”

  Lifting his hand to his shoulder, Cookie mimicked the bear stopping its charge and grasping a bloody wound. “People don’t think of the bears having a shoulder, just like we do,” he said. “It still haunts me, him grabbing it when I shot him. We all live up here together, us and the bears.”

  All in all, I spotted eighteen polar bears during my weeklong stay. But as it turned out, the bears weren’t the highlight of the trip. It was the jovial and friendly people who choose to weather the elements and live in this unforgiving environment a world away from everyone else—who commute by exceedingly slow trains to shop for clothes or consult wit
h a medical specialist. These residents happily give bear safety advice to visitors. They are people who live an adventure every day and put my own adventures to shame.

  By my last day I’d become more confident walking the streets, just as the town began to buzz with news that the Northern Lights would appear that night.

  As I craned my neck at 2 A.M., mesmerized by the presence of the fabled Aurora Borealis, a custodian came out of a nearby building and began staring up alongside me. The ethereal greenish mass swirled above. Though I’ve never been one to make small talk about weather, this magical phenomenon tempted me to break the silence and ask if he, too, thought it was amazing, even though he lived here.

  But then, pulling a cigarette from his mouth, he spoke first.

  “Any bears around tonight?” he asked.

  Kim Mance is a travel writer and TV host based in Brooklyn. She is a contributing blogger to Conde Nast Traveler’s website, and has written and blogged for outlets like Marie Claire, World Hum, and Huffington Post. Kim is also editor of GoGalavanting.com.

  LAUREN QUINN

  Packaged in Puerto

  A maverick discovers the great equalizer—the swim-up bar.

  It wasn’t the humidity that had crushed our spirits. It wasn’t the trendy juice bars, dodgy tattoo shops or trinket stores selling frayed ponchos and luchador masks. It was the men of Puerto Vallarta that had gotten us down. Their barrage of hoots, honks, hollers, kissing noises, and dramatic, teeth-sucking inhalations had sent us over the edge.

  Melissa was the first to crack. “The next motherfucker to hassle us,” she declared, “is getting it right back.”

  Sure enough, twenty seconds later, a car passed, its driver leaning half his torso out of the unrolled window in order to better look at us. Melissa made kissey noises and wiggled her fingers at him in a ball-fondling motion.

  Confusion and disappointment quaked across the driver’s face as he sped away.

  “You asshole,” Georgina said to Melissa. “That was a cab driver.”

  Things were not going well for us in Puerto Vallarta. To be fair, we hadn’t done our research. My three girlfriends and I had just spent a week in the Michoacán town Pátzcuaro, home to one of the most traditional Dia de los Muertos celebrations in Mexico. We’d shopped the craft market for Catrina dolls, eaten cabeza tacos at street stalls, spent a night with local families in a candle-lit, altar-adorned cemetery. Amidst the celebrations, our tattoos, piercings and gender had gone largely unnoticed—who cares about a bunch of rock-and-roll white girls when there’s sugar skulls to be eaten?

  Experiencing authentic, traditional culture with locals is great, but we were still in Mexico—it seemed a waste to come all that way and not get in a few good beach days. So we’d chosen the closest, most accessible sun-and-sand destination from land-locked Pátzcuaro; one day of dubbed movies on rattling buses and we arrived in Puerto Vallarta.

  Had we done our homework, the sudden demographic shift wouldn’t have been such a shock. In contrast to Pátzcuaro—as difficult to reach as it was to pronounce—Puerto Vallarta was thoroughly on the tourist path. Direct flights from the U.S. soared in daily, and cruise ships docked regularly, spilling out hoards of people who weren’t seeking traditional culture with locals—they wanted a cheap, easy vacation. And maybe a smoothie.

  We traversed sidewalks lined with English-language signs, swarmed with the running shoes, khaki shorts and baseball caps of Middle America, under a battery of verbal assault from what seemed every man in Mexico. Sometimes they opted to translate their solicitations: “Guapa, you want sex?” In Puerto Vallarta’s touristy center, not even the catcalls were 100 percent authentic.

  We’d scoffed at the all-inclusive resorts we’d passed on the way from the bus station. We were independent travelers—private beaches, piped-in music, and watery margaritas weren’t our scene. But one day spent wandering Puerto Vallarta, and one unsuspecting cabbie harassed, and we wanted in.

  Alicia scoured our Lonely Planet and found a resort that purportedly offered day passes. We piled in a cab and headed out of central Puerto Vallarta, through wide avenues lined with strip malls and corporate chains: Pizza Hut, Starbucks, OfficeMax, Outback Steakhouse. It felt more like an american suburb than a Mexican vacation paradise.

  We stepped out of the cab onto a deserted, windy sidewalk, and scurried up the manicured walkway to the resort’s foyer. Our sneakers squeaked across the polished floor as we approached the reception desk.

  A woman in an ill-fitting navy blazer looked out from under her crow’s feet at us. “Yessss,” she said slowly.

  “Hola,” I began confidently. “Queremos comprar ….” I trailed off, my Spanish vocabulary extinguished. I hung my head and whispered: “day passes.”

  “$25 each.” The receptionist answered in English. And in dollars.

  “Dude,” Georgina hissed, “the guidebook said it was only ten bucks.”

  I smiled an impotent smile, leaned in. “Y cuantos para cuatro?”—my Spanish reignited.

  The receptionist blinked once, twice, then answered, “$100 for four. No discount.”

  We held a hush-voiced meeting, in which it was agreed that a fee equal to a night in our hotel room was too high. We’d suck it up, pay for a taxi back into town, and suffer through the assault of catcalls on the city beach. Or stay in the hotel room with the shades drawn.

  Defeated, sweaty, and a bit annoyed, we wandered towards the sidewalk. A groundskeeper in a little golf buggy slowed as he passed. “Hola!” he exclaimed merrily. “Perdidas? Are you lost?”

  “Oh, we’re just trying to catch a cab,” Alicia explained.

  “You’re not going to the pools?” he asked incredulously, raising eyebrows that looked like spider’s legs. “Perfect day.”

  “No,” we chorused sadly.

  “But you are from the cruise ship, yeees?” he nodded to the gray monstrosity docked in the distance, visible between the cement towers of oceanfront hotels. The way he elongated the “yes” inspired me to nod vaguely.

  “And you lost your wrist bands. Is O.K. Get on, I will take you to the pools.”

  We didn’t wait for further explanation or invitation. We leapt on the little white go-cart.

  As we toddled through the generic shrubbery and 70s block buildings of the resort, we pieced it together: a cruise ship had docked for the day and its guests were given complimentary day passes to the resort. Our driver, pausing now to beep and wave at a fellow employee, had for some reason decided to “confuse” us with cruisers.

  We didn’t care what had inspired him, or how much the surroundings looked like a cross between a retirement community and a failed attempt at a Club Med commercial. It was peaceful, free of honks and whistles. We chatted idly with our benefactor-cum-smuggler about California and where his relatives lived as we made our way through the complex.

  We pulled up behind a cluster of thatched umbrellas. “The pools are there,” he pointed. Then, with an assuring nod, “Is O.K. you lost your wrist bands.”

  We hopped off the buggy, exchanging back-pats and high-fives; forever the waitress, I slipped the driver a sizable peso note as I shook his hand. He waved, and trundled off into the landscaped distance.

  I felt a twist in my stomach as we surveyed the pools. I was afraid of being caught—bum-rushed, I imagined, by a SWAT team of hotel management. With our sleeves of tattoos, dyed hair and septum piercings, we’d surely stand out among the suburban-American resort-goers.

  But I was equally afraid of being mistaken for one of them.

  I led the way through a maze of lounge chairs, arm floaties and sunburns. Women in one-pieces, hats over their faces, lay napping in the sun. A balding man with a potbelly splashed with a child, wearing those silly, reptilian swim shoes. Two boys with spiky, frost-tipped hair flexed their adolescent pecs at eyelash-batting female counterparts.

  No one paid us any mind.

  We plopped our bags down next to a couple of weathered chairs and began rubb
ing white sunscreen into multi-colored skin. Instead of a chorus of whistles and honks, Top 20 hits from the last twenty years pumped out of stereo speakers hung from poles and fashioned to resemble coconuts. It was the same basic soundtrack of every middle school dance I’d gone to, and I felt, in that moment, just about as awkward.

  Ace of Base blared out suddenly over the speakers. “Ooh, this is my song!” Melissa cried sarcastically. She began lip-synching and shaking her tiny hips in a Macarena-style fashion to “I Saw The Sign.”

  We entered the pool—either by gingerly sliding (me) or cannon-balling (Melissa)—and began wading through the bath-water-warm construction of bridges, slides and fountains that dripped with children’s limbs.

  And then we saw it.

  Or Alicia saw it. Her neck did a whip-lash double-take and she blurted out a pointed, “Oh hell no.”

  We followed her stare. There, like a yeti espied in its native habitat, was a swim-up bar.

  “I didn’t know those actually existed!” I cried.

  We floated up to the thatched roof and blinking lights of the bar, half-giggly, half-amazed. We soon had a row of tall, neon margarita slushies adorned with twisty straws and paper umbrellas before us.

  “Nice tattoo,” a sun-spotted woman beside us said. She pointed to the laughing skeleton across my chest. “It’s a Posada calavera?”

  I grinned. “Yes!” Then, with a sly smile, “A lot of people think it’s a Grateful Dead tattoo. In the States, at least.”

  The woman laughed and shook her Golden-Girls ‘fro. “Well, we are in Mexico.”

  She was right. It may have been the Chevy’s of beach resorts, but we were still in Mexico.

  She offered to take our picture—four girls embracing, holding out Slurpie-colored drinks in waist-deep pool water. It was a simple gesture between tourists, and in that moment, I didn’t feel Other Than. I didn’t feel like The Intrepid Independent Traveler, not The Ugly American, nor The Feminist Gringa Being Harassed. I had nothing to prove and no one else to be.