Travelling to Central America, you have to say goodbye to the Scandinavian minimalism. No-one there has heard anything about white on white or a million shades of grey. Just like locals who are loud and smiling, the colour palette of this part of the world is just insane. People paint their houses in all the colours of the rainbow, and there is nothing weird about it.
For example, every house is yellow in the Mexican city Izamal. The houses of another town, Valladolid, are painted in the most elegant pastel tones. When you’re there for the first time, it’s hard to stop taking pictures of absolutely every house.
And it all seems to be just the surface of Mexican culture. In Valladolid, we visited a Mexican folk art collection. Looking at the colours and patterns of these fantastic animal statues makes you wonder what kind of hallucinogenic substances these people were using when they came up with those purple dotted deer or red lion bodies with human heads and long moustaches. And I’m not even going to talk about the endless fascination for skeletons.
But there is one colour that you cannot avoid in Mexico — pink. That is almost a national colour for Mexicans. It even has an official name: rosa Mexicano (Mexican pink). It’s not something they just admire in museums. In Mérida, when volunteering for two weeks in a language school, we painted one of the students’ rooms pink. Yes, pink is a thing here. Your next question is probably: where can I enjoy Mexican pink? Here they are, three fun pink things to do in Yucatan, Mexico.
1.Enjoy the brightly coloured houses in Mérida
Have you ever heard of a Mexican town called Mérida? I knew nothing about it before we took the bus there to stay for two weeks. Often the places you know nothing about are the greatest surprises in your trip, and sometimes they grow into your heart, and you fall in love and wish to never leave. That’s exactly what happened with us in Mérida.
Mérida is not just a city, it’s a state of mind. To us, Mérida equals Mexican cantinas which are bars where you can get free snacks. Sometimes they bring so many snacks with your Coronas, Pacificos or Sols that you are properly full. There’s also often a live band playing salsa and people dancing. Even on Wednesdays at 4 PM. But Mérida is not just beers and dancing. It’s also a lot of fun delicious food, small museums, different shows every evening and a bustling market that smelled like grapefruits and coriander. The best thing: everything is cheap.
But let’s come back to pink now. Where is pink in Mérida? The truth is— it’s everywhere! You just need to take a small walk around the city. Of course, you’ll find houses in every possible colour, but also pink! So let us know how many pink houses you found!
P.S If you want to see flamingos, but don’t want to pay for it, visit Mérida zoo. For free, you see many local animals and lots of local people enjoying their day.
2. It’s getting even pinker. Get ready for pink flamingos.
Let’s suppose that you don’t care about zoos and wish to see pink flamingos in the wild. Wandering around the city centre, you notice endless ads about trips to see flamingos. And if that’s your cup of tea, please, be my guest. But since we’re always trying to find better deals, we figured out that there is no reason why we should take a tour while we can just take a regular bus to Celestun and take a tour from there.
Celestun is a sleepy beach town. It attracts a lot of elderly white people and local tourists. When we reached the beach, a few local vacationers already awaited the boat. Locals always look overly touristic with their straw hats, huge sunglasses and white crocheted dresses, contrasting with European backpackers who usually look like they just got out of the bush.
The other thing that you will notice is how loud Mexicans are. Spending a couple of hours in a boat with them can cause a headache. They really have a different temper, they show their emotions by shouting and laughing. If you get to share the boat with locals, you will not have too much peace. Luckily, flamingos don’t mind the noise. In fact, their cackling is even louder than the loudest Mexican.
We kept our expectations low. That’s how we travel. If there’s a jungle hike through the habitat on Javanese rhinos, we don’t expect to see them. When a guide promises crocodiles, we are ready for the scenario of not meeting any. We can deal with our animal expectations. I guess it comes with experience. I remember walking over an hour in Washington DC’s slightly sketchy neighbourhoods to see pandas in a local zoo, only to find out that I was just too late. Workers had closed the panda cages at 4 PM. I reached there at 4 PM. Until the next time, pandas.
So we were actually pleasantly surprised to see flamingos. And no, we didn’t have to squint or use binoculars. There were a lot of birds everywhere. Flamingos liked to gather in the shallow lagoon and just stand there and try to find food.
“They are pink because they eat shrimps,” told the boatman.
Even the water feels pink in Celestun — that’s how many birds there are. Flamingos are like balls of feathers on two matchsticks. But they also have very tall and fat, almost orange necks with powerful beaks. And just like Mexicans, they like to gather in herds.
In a way, they look like dinosaurs with their big necks, beautiful but also bit clumsy.
If you ever thought that flamingos are beautiful elegant birds, natural posers for pictures, then I have to disappoint you. They are nothing like that. As mentioned, they are terribly loud, like crows. And, as if that’s not bad enough, they fight like schoolboys during the break. Nothing elegant in this bloodthirsty fight!
Despite their domestic dramas, they are beautiful birds for sure and well worth the beach and bird day trip from Mérida even out of the season. According to our guide book, the main action happens from March to September. Our very fruitful visit took place in January.
When we returned to the beach, we had a little walk and decided to go for a swim. The guidebook didn’t really recommend it because of the winds that whirl up the sand. And the book was right. It was more like floating in the sand-soup than swimming. But I’m not a girl who would pass the opportunity to swim, even when the water is full of cigarette butts, and there’s a weird pipe just next to the swimming spot. Oftentimes, I understand my mistake rather early and try to get out of there as soon as possible.
We ended our day gazing at the sunset on the beach and enjoying a beer. Activities that we don’t get to do that often while in Europe, but that are definitely part of our tropical trips.
3. Best place in Mexico: pink lakes and flamingos in the backyard
A lot of times people check the nice pictures of famous sights on Instagram and think: that’s where I want to go. Let me tell you something, visiting the Eiffel Tower, Trafalgar Square or Tulum ruins is most likely just going disappoint you. You are squashed between hundreds of tourists while trying to find the magic of the place. But the place itself is dead.
So, how can you find these authentic experiences, enjoy local life and culture? Our trick is simply to get off the beaten track.
It’s a risky business. Sometimes the place is not a tourist favourite for a reason— there’s nothing much to see. Other times, you will find a place you wouldn’t even have dreamt about. That’s exactly what happened to us.
On a fine January afternoon, we were discussing with the language school owner the options to see pink lakes. If you google it, the first thing you see is Las Coloradas, a place about a three-hour drive away from Mérida. But our host knew another not so well known places to see them. You didn’t have to drive that far and pay to see pink lakes in Mexico. Instead, you could take a bus to Progreso and another one to San Crisanto. That’s much closer, for free and you could be there alone.
The day we said goodbye to our beloved Mérida, Tom didn’t feel his best. The previous night’s pool party was only partly to be blamed. Besides the usual hangover symptoms, he was also feverish. So I was the only one enjoying the magnificent views to palm-tree forests on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico while Tom was sleeping next to me on the bus.
At the bus stop in a Chabihau village, we met Santiago, a Robinson Crusoe look-alike with a big dog. The man was a Honduran with a motorbike and a kind heart. Whenever he got some money, he fed all the stray dogs in the village. He showed us our room, which basically was a whole house with bed, kitchen, hammocks and a private rooftop. Tom fell straight to bed. Struck by inspiration, I sat behind the desk to draft stories.
For the evening we gathered our cool beers and chairs and set up a camp on the rooftop to enjoy the moon eclipse.
Waking up the next morning, the first thing I saw was a real flamingo standing in the puddle behind our house.
We waved to the flamingo and got ready to check out the pink lakes. Pink lakes are actually not natural— they are created by salt production. From afar or above they reminded me of rice fields. Because of how they look— shallow water pools with some paths to walk. The only difference is that the water is pink in these Mexican pools. Its because the red-coloured algae, plankton, and brine shrimp who all live there. The water itself is shallow and salty, and despite all the Instagram pictures you may have seen, it didn’t make us desire to lose all our clothes and dive straight in. So after a couple of hours wandering around the lakes in complete solitude and taking tons of pictures, we went to the little hole in the wall type of ticket office and asked what else there was to do in San Crisanto.
Turned out they offered boat trips through the mangrove. Of course, we took one. A young boy with a cap paddled us through the thick forest to a small open cenote aka a hole in the ground where we could swim with huge fishes. Again, the whole grey-brown mangrove forest with the aquamarine blue lake was all ours.
Later we wandered around the town, checked out the baseball match and let us be lead by the sign “Todos de coco”. This meant that whatever the shop sold was made of coconut. There were just so many coconut trees all around. So two slices of delicious coconut pie ended our day in our favourite place in Mexico— Chabihau.
Top tip: If you love unique experiences we recommend you to stay with Santiago in Chabihau.