TULUM, MEXICO. 22:20 EST, MONDAY 6 FEB.

Y’know that feeling when you can’t tell if a building is being demolished or under construction? That bombed-out ‘halfway-house’, where a building could be going either way, like a set in Tenet.

There’s an HSBC branch on the high street here like this - you can’t  tell if it’s coming or going as the build quality is so poor.

Given the appetite for cocaine amongst the locals however, I expect it’s coming. The gents toilets at a nearby watering hole is just a communal snorting room with a urinal bolted on (‘powdering your nose’ is meant literally in these parts), and there’s no way HSBC could pass on an opportunity to support such a dynamic, thriving environment. 

(Few know this, but there’s a hidden clause in HSBC’s mission statement that branch managers in LatAm are contractually bound to accept any deposit delivered in a Samsonite case.) 

It’s time for me to leave Mexico. This hit home for me when the guy next to me in a cafe here ran a guided meditation over Zoom for an elderly woman about to give a TED talk on being sexy in your sixties. 

This hit home for me as I listened to a millennial in a cafe run a therapy session over Zoom for an elderly woman about to give a TEDx talk on being sexy in your later years.

Blue skies beckon. I didn’t make it to Chichen Itza, but I don’t have time for Mayan sacrifices at the minute. 

Tomorrow: Havana. And then on to the old pirate citadel, Nassau.

The Path of the Neo-Cuban begins. I’ll explain what it all means once I’ve completed it.

Jim Hawkins

PS
Tenet was a great movie. One of the only upsides to WuFlu (besides the stimmy cheque crypto boom) was that people wearing masks looked like they were travelling backwards in time, while people who weren’t, forwards. I hope Nolan makes a sequel with better audio. 

Also, did anyone play that Soviet time-travel FPS in the early 2010s called Singluarity? Looked good but I never got around to it.