Mexico in ten photographs

Mexico is two different countries that happen to share a name, and we went to both of them.

2021 was the Yucatán, in May, when it is hot enough that you plan the whole day around shade. Tekoh first. Then Muna, where the pyramid stands in a field with the sun directly overhead and nobody else anywhere in it — the ruins you have to drive an hour to reach are the ones you get to yourself.

Chichén-Itzá is the opposite of that, and still worth the morning. You share it with a few hundred people and it does not matter. The thing is bigger than the crowd in front of it.

Between the ruins is the part I remember better. An agave field outside Valladolid, rows of it running to the treeline, which is what tequila looks like for the eight years before it is tequila. A hotel in Umán at the end of a driving day, where the only photograph I took is our feet and a fire. And Chemax, where the pool had palms leaning over it and we did not get out of it for an entire afternoon.

2022 was Bucerías, on the Pacific, which is a slower country than the Yucatán. A coconut with a straw in it before noon. One evening we dressed up for, with bougainvillea over the wall and the ocean going flat behind us.

2023 was Bucerías again. The photograph I kept from that trip is the two of us as shadows on a pavement — the kind of picture you only take somewhere you have been enough times to stop photographing the place itself.

Three trips, three years, one badge. The pictures were always there; the sticker is what makes anybody open them.