Welcome to the Jungle!

Welcome to the Jungle!  is courtesy of guest contributor Randy Fry (RandysPlanet.com). Photos courtesy of Susan Fry.

It was happy hour at Lol Ha, and our good friend was doing the introductions.  “This is Susan and Randy,” he said.  “They live in the jungle, but we bring them to Akumal periodically to re-civilize them.”

If you live on this coast for a while, you start to get the impression that the demographics of this place are bifurcated by Highway 307.  There are two ways to live around here, it seems.  You can be a beach person, or you can be a jungle person.

When Susan and I retired, sold everything and made our run for the border, we initially lived in Akumal for several months, renting a wonderful little casita from our friends Dave and Nancy, as we looked for a place of our own.  Since we’re both water people to our cores, and knew little about jungle life, we had sort of assumed that we’d end up on the beach.  But as the search progressed, we kept finding ourselves drawn to the jungle properties, and it was for an interesting array of reasons.  We thought it might be useful to share with folks the various considerations that might suggest that you could cast your eye across the highway as you make your decision on where to buy or rent.

Here are some indicators that might suggest you would do okay as a jungle person:

• If you are not rich, the jungle might be for you. You can get a lot more for your purchase or rental money if you’re not on the beach.  If Susan and I had bought a place on the beach, it would have been a condominium, and a fairly small one at that.   Condos work great if it’s a part-time place and you need to rent it out or leave it vacant for periods, but Susan and I are here full time.
• If you love solitude, you will find that in the jungle. You will not find it in towns like
  Tulum or especially Playa del Carmen, and even Akumal, which is a lovely and quiet town, but still a town.  If you want to see and hear nothing but nature when you’re at home, look into living in the jungle.
• If you love wild creatures, you will be rewarded by toucans, foxes, incredible bird life, clouds of butterflies and maybe even monkeys.
• If you love wild creatures no matter how many legs they have or how hairy they are, that will also help.  I won’t sugar-coat this:  In the jungle, your love of wildlife has to be a pretty unconditional love.  I’ve taken to emailing photos to friends and family titled, “Insect of the Week.”

  

• If you like to have a few acres around you that you can putter in, spread your arms in, and do a some serious landscaping in, the jungle is probably where you want to be.
• If you can’t be bothered to put on a swimsuit before jumping in your pool, the jungle might be for you. I’m joking, but only sort of.  There’s a lot to be said for privacy, and though a lot of condominiums have huge and drop-dead gorgeous pools, they are community areas.  This goes back to the financial bang for the buck you can get in the jungle:  For the same price as a decent condo with a beautiful public pool, you could probably buy a nice house with a small pool of your very own.  That’s what Susan and I have:  A nice house, a small pool, five acres of jungle and complete privacy.  It doesn’t stink.
• If you think that the most dysfunctional way to organize human beings into a group is the homeowners association, the jungle might be for you. Susan and I actually do have an HOA here, because it’s a gated community, but it’s pretty low-key and pretty inexpensive since we don’t all share the same roof, walls or even property.  We find it a perfect compromise.  If the gate and the guard wasn’t there, I’d be paying a lot more attention to those sounds at night—yet we don’t pay a fraction of what HOA fees can amount to in some condominiums.
• If you’d rather spend your spare time fighting the jungle back than replacing all your salt-corroded doorknobs and light fixtures, the jungle might be for you. On this one, you just have to choose your fight.  In the salt air of the beach, nothing made of metal lasts very long.  In the jungle, on the other hand, you’re constantly fighting back growing, crawling and flying things, and enforcing human-only zones with great zeal and militancy.  It’s a different-strokes kind of a decision.  Our realtor was very straight with us about it.  He put on his best gravelly voice and said, “The jungle will eat you”
• If you don’t like mosquitos, the jungle will be a little better. The reason for that is unique to the Yucatan Peninsula:  The whole thing is a giant slab of limestone, and it’s all pervious, which is why all our lakes and rivers are underground.  There is very little standing water on the Yucatan Peninsula for mosquitos to breed in—until you get into a town, where there is lots of pavement and miscellaneous junk that holds water.  (This is also why your swimming pool is a real hit with the wildlife.  From insects to frogs to bats and birds, and even large mammals, everyone loves your pool—standing water is simply precious stuff in the jungle.)
• If you want to live a more eco-friendly lifestyle, a jungle property will probably give you that—so be sure that’s what you want. Most jungle properties are not on the electrical grid, so you’ll be maintaining a solar electricity system and marshalling your power use.  Susan and I are eco-freaks, and have always wanted to live this way, but it’s not for everybody, and it hasn’t even been that easy for us.  The education about our own past wastefulness has gone from illuminating to astonishing.  It now feels like a crime to use a clothes dryer when the sun is shining—yet we used to do it without thinking.  And it’s interesting which habits and appliances crush your system and which aren’t that bad.  Refrigerators have gotten better.  Blow driers and microwaves kill you.  Most pool maintenance guides say things like, “Be sure to run your pool filter pump for twenty-four hours afterwards…” and I’ll be rolling my eyes.  I might run that sucker for two hours a day, and that’s only if the sun is blazing.  (And by the way, I get away with it.)  And then there’s the next issue:
• If you’re not married to the concept of air conditioning, that’s the only way an off-grid jungle property will work for you. We have all the other amenities—phone, internet, television, refrigerator, freezer, propane stove and water heater—but very few solar electrical systems can handle air conditioning in the quantities gringos are used to.  Ours can’t.  Susan and I have gone native.  We’ve become connoisseurs of light clothing and ceiling fans.  Generally speaking, the towns are the hottest places—there is dark pavement everywhere and little shade.  The jungle is cooler, because the whole place is shaded by a canopy, and the transpiration of billions of leaves is constantly cooling the air with water vapor.  But the beach really is the best, because of the sea breezes.  If you have a condo that truly does face the beach, all you have to do is open a window.  We have friends in such condos.  They have air conditioning and all the electricity in the world, but they never use it.

To summarize, it’s not for everyone, but it might be for more people than realize it.  Condos are wonderful in a whole range of ways, especially the way you can lock them up and walk away.  But if you find condo living a bit constraining and don’t have the dough for an actual house on the beach, you might consider the jungle.  If you’re reading this and contemplating a move, you’re already an adventurous soul, so hey, don’t rule it out.  There are lots of folks back here on the outskirts of civilization who can show you the ropes.