Car trouble

Here’s some free advice for you:

If you only have a quarter of a tank of petrol and want to drive to the Belize border, perhaps check to see if there’s somewhere to fill up along the way.

Yes, today’s the day we play our ‘Total Nobheads’ card. 

There’s a whole lot of nothing between the towns and villages on the Yucatan peninsula. Like, miles and miles of nothing so if you do run short of petrol you tend to be screwed. 

I’m literally driving at 10 mph to conserve the teaspoon’s worth of fuel we have remaining when Wend confirms via the GPS that the next town is 30 miles away.

There’s no traffic, it’s 32°C and we only have half a bottle of water between us. Realistically, cannibalism is the only way out of this but just as we start sizing each other up (Wend licking her lips just a little too enthusiastically), something wonderful happens.

We haven’t passed anything but trees, bushes and the occasional crow for an hour when suddenly one of those shaky mirage things appears on the horizon (come on, we’ve all seen it in the movies), we may be delirious but it really looks like a nice roadside restaurant. 

‘Lucky’ doesn’t begin to cover what happens next; No-one can speak English of course, and Wend’s Spanish ain’t great, but with a mixture of sign-language, desperation and me making cannibal noises while holding an imaginary knife and fork we manage to get our story across.

The owner’s son is despatched to the nearest petrol station on his moped with a canister while we sit down to the best meal of the entire holiday.

By the time he returns we’ve been fed, watered and pampered by the kindest folk we could wish to meet. As we resume our journey the whole family come out of the kitchen to wave us off.

We love Mexico and we really love Mexicans.

In the lap of the gods.

We don’t make it as far as the border but we do get to spend the afternoon at another Cenote and enjoy a dip in the vivid aquamarine water of Lake Bacalaler. 

Which I suspect beats cannibalism hands down.