There are no rivers on the Yucatán. The soft limestone ground swallows them whole. On a long, hot, humid day there are no streams in which to paddle your feet and provide relief. So it is a wonder to enter one of the many cenotes that drain the peninsula. These caves or sinkholes sit beneath a scratchy earth and hold hanging roots, protruding rocks and deep pools of turquoise water. They are magical, and the swimming endlessly refreshing, despite the mosquitoes…
Kate Rew on discovering the pleasures of swimming in the wild.
It’s past dawn in the English mountains. Past the time the birds woke up and sang in the thin air, past the time we rolled over in our tent and heard the hiss and static of mizzle against canvas. We are on the top of a Glaramara, next to a tarn and camped in a cloud. I yellow slug my boyfriend in my down sleeping bag and say ‘shall we go for a swim?…’
There’s something about a market that is utterly engaging, partly because of what’s on show. For starters, the food is so much more enticing than anything you’d find at a supermarket and vegetable stands sit so close to cheese stalls and fruit sellers that you can’t help but allow your imagination to roam…
Here, to download, is our recipe for the simplest version of Ceviche, very fresh and delicious, as prepared on their boat and eaten for breakfast by the fishermen in this film. Any firm fleshed, white fish will work well (the fresher the better) as would prawns, squid, swordfish, tuna… The fishermen use whatever they have to hand, straight from the sea…
Men and boys on horseback at Hacienda la Noria, walking, standstill straight to gallop, turning on a penny, loping canter. The horses completely at ease with the boys, the boys showing off their skills but entirely, intuitively, consummately at ease with their horses. In the background: the old ranch buildings, shabby, still inhabited; the church whose tolling bell had earlier that afternoon called the villagers – family groups walking slowly to worship, showing neither reticence nor particular enthusiasm; the hills beyond, fresh, green, hazed after the recent rains.
Isabella Tree.
“Looking for something fishy, something nice and slippery, gringa?” A mountainous woman, her arms elbow-deep in a basket of prawns, accosts me with a mischievous grin as I make my way along the overflowing food stalls of Juchitan, a small but vibrant market town on the Pacific coast of Mexico. “Perhaps she’s after one of these”, the fruit-seller joins in, screaming with laughter and holding up a bunch of gigantic bananas, known as ‘plátanos machos’. I feel a flush burning my cheeks but can’t help grinning. They are amazing, these women – built like Sumo wrestlers, biceps like footballs, breasts like the Sierra Madre. When they laugh – which seems to be most of the time – they dazzle you with sunbursts of gold-capped teeth…
Flying in over the Yucatán, over miles upon miles upon hundreds of miles of flat, nondescript, grey-green scrub – until Mérida comes into sight, a large, white city… in the middle of nowhere. Why, one asks oneself, is this here?
Disembarking the plane, the heat hits one like an oven door opening – over 40ºc and breath-catchingly humid. The bush is packed tight, dusty, low, thorny. Come dusk or shade or damp, the whine of mosquitoes. Despite the humidity, the land is dry – highly porous limestone. All the rivers run underground…
A long, hot, working day on the Yucatan peninsula. An earthy meal of chilli chicken and sour oranges to sustain us. Earthy because it had been cooked on charcoals in the ground, yes, but also for the inclusion of Achiote, a paste made with the red seeds of the Bixa orellana shrub.
From Hacienda Petac to the backstreets of Bethnal Green, London in the snow, searching for one of the very few (that we could find) British stockists of Achiote. Once found (with the help of Mr Denny at Casa Mexico), home to try and recreate the food of that humid October day…
From Edmund Dulac’s illustrations for Au Royaume de la Perle and several cases of cloth samples from two or three continents; through sketching, pattern cutting, stitching and fitting; to flying far west in search of some tropical depth and glory…
