It’s hard to write about colors without falling into a trap of superlatives. Which is unfortunate, because there are few greater joys for a photographer than seeing a world ablaze in colors.
In the Yucatán, rich, wonderful colors span every surface the sun touches. Which is to say, the stuff is everywhere.
Color was in our food. The brilliant pink and myriad greens, reds, and yellows of pickled onions and hot peppers served alongside lunch tacos, spooned onto small tortillas specked with sunspots of brown. The earthy, almost black of omnipresent frijoles, a sharp contrast against the finely grated queso sprinkled on top.
Merida’s market stalls are like so many offerings of color tickling my eye: bright shades of fruits and vegetables, and glistening fat dripping off of whole hung roasted puercos reflected in the warm light of a single lightbulb.
Color was also in our drink. The milky texture of horchata, spotted with particles of cinnamon brown. The thicker brown of chocolātl, frothy hot cocoa served in a hollowed out shell, staining your upper lip till you lick it. And the intense red of a refreshing agua de sandia (frozen or not!) to cool off in the hot afternoons.
Campeche
Whole colonial-era towns are painted in gold and pastel tones. Each home in Campeche, a regional capital on the Gulf of Mexico, is a different color. Each facade is separated from the next by a thin border of dirty white plaster. I wonder who chooses these paints, and how they chose. I wonder the same thing about San Francisco. Campeche’s town center was freshly painted when we visited, which is unfortunate: the new coat of paint on all the constructions around the central zócalo feels like it has smothered the stories told over centuries by successive onion layers of color. But step outside the city center, and the walls are still rich with stories. They tell them through tags, pockmarks, creeping vines, and snarling wires. The light and dark tones, the peeling scars, and the heavy wood doors and shutters produce a symphony down every street — and that’s before you add in the hustle of hundreds of passerbys, bikes, and eager honks.
IZAMAL
Izamal’s single-minded harmony felt like a direct response to Campeche’s rainbow collage. Campeche was the first of the two towns to be rebuilt by conquering Spaniards, but both towns were Mayan settlements centuries earlier. Colonial-era Izamal, now a town of 15,000, was built on the ruins of ancient Mayan temples, earning it its earliest nickname as the “City of Hills.” All but one of the temples were disassembled stone by stone to build the massive Franciscan monastery that now marks the town’s center. Today, and with good reason, Izamal is nicknamed the “Magical Yellow City.” The town is a constant backdrop of egg-yolk yellow and plaster white on scenes of everyday life: In the monastery, the yellow frames old wooden doors with only bits and pieces of rust red paint remaining. In the zócalo, the same yellow is in communion with the bright red of an equally ancient VW Bug, countless bicycle frames, and men sitting with their newspapers and conversations. Everywhere, the colors of town contrast a deep blue sky scattered with cotton clouds.
The best time to see Izamal might be at sunrise, when the fiery streets play host to hundreds of children in clean pressed white uniforms hurrying off to school, most on foot, some on the back of zipping mopeds. Or it might be in the cooler evening hours, when the sun is low on its race down to the horizon and the colors seem to drip thick under their own weight, melted after the day’s heat, right into my camera’s lens. It’s a photographer’s dream, that last hour before sunset.
PS: Read more about our trip on Sanaë's blog: http://goo.gl/Mh2XKl
