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DUDE - WHERE'S MY BEACH?

August 22, 2007 4:35 PM

I went running this morning along the main beach in Cancun – or at least, the narrow strip that is left of it.   Just as Hurricane Wilma did in October 2005, Hurricane Dean has stolen a lot of the sand and washed it out to sea… On Sunday night when I went running before the storm came close there was a broad 70 foot expanse of white sand stretching along an aquamarine shoreline as far as I could see.  Now that Dean has lashed the shore for a day and a half, in some places there is barely a couple of feet of sand left between the waves and the hotels’ sea walls.  And the level of the beach has dropped too – most of the hotels have steps down to the sand – now there is quite a gap between the last step and the beach.  In some places rocks that had been covered are now clearly visible.

After Wilma the local government and the hotel owners contracted with a Belgian company who specialize in “ beach recovery” to bring in an enormous ship that vacuumed up the sand from sandbars that had formed several miles out to sea, then bring it back to shore and pump it out onto the rocky shore to recreate the beach.

But a missing beach is a small price to pay from what has otherwise been a very lucky miss for Cancun.  Already the day after the storm the airlines were flying back in with tourists, eager to start their vacations in the “place that weathered a Category 5”.  One woman we spoke to at the airport said that her friends had spooked her about coming to Cancun, but now she was here “it didn’t look like there had been a hurricane at all.”  It was odd to watch tourists arriving Tuesday looking forward to having a good time here, when we had been at the same airport on Monday filming thousands of tourists all lining up nervously to leave.  What a difference a day makes…

Well, there was a hurricane, and when we went up in helicopter to fly down the coast we could see the flattened trees and flooded roads.   But by good fortune the damage seems to have been concentrated in nature’s own hurricane traps – mangroves and swamps that act as one big sponge and buffer from the fury of the high winds and the tidal surge.  By the time Dean had made its way across the Yucatan and headed out into the Bay of Campeche on the other side it had dropped from 165 mph winds as a Category 5 to 80 mph winds as a Category 1.  Mexico dodged a bullet.  Now we wait for the next big hurricane…

August 22, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

HURRICAN AWE

August 21, 2007 8:26 AM

Outside the wind is blowing sea spray like torn curtains across the sky.  Inside my Cancun hotel room the television is showing repeated satellite pictures of Hurricane Dean – it looks enormous, hundreds of miles across, a Category 5 monster.  The center is color-coded red.  Red for danger, I suppose.

I just opened the sliding doors onto my balcony and walked outside.  It is one o’clock in the morning.  The wind is blowing the palm trees sideways, and I can hear the waves crashing against the hotel’s sea wall, but it is too dark to see much.  Then lightning flashes across the sky, and I start to get a feeling of the enormity of what is happening out there tonight.   The eye of the storm is soon to hit the coast about 150 miles south of Cancun near the town of Chetumal.  The winds are now raging at 160 miles an hour near the center, the rain is being flung across the sky like water sloshed out of a gargantuan bucket, and the electrical energy in the atmosphere is sparking lightning like some outsized physics experiment.  It makes me stand and just watch for a while – this is way bigger than anything humans can do – bigger even than an atomic explosion.  On the television they are saying the storm is the size of the state of Texas.  That is, in the truest sense of the word, awesome.

We flew into Cancun on Saturday.  The plane was unsurprisingly empty - everyone was trying to go in the opposite direction as Hurricane Dean approached.  We checked into the Meridien Hotel – they were trying to get all their guests out on flights before the storm hit, but they gave us special permission to stay, along with a skeleton staff who would be looking after the property for the duration of the storm.  For two days their maintenance men hammered plywood over the windows, gathered up all the outside furniture and stowed it away, and all the time smiled pleasantly at us as we moved around setting up our satellite truck, cables and cameras that live television requires.  As happens in such extreme situations a bond of camaraderie quickly built up between us – they were delighted to find that they could get ABC on the hotel’s satellite TV, and the staff gathered around the televisions to watch our broadcasts from just outside on the terrace.

Regular food service stopped at midday on Monday, as most of the cooking staff had been sent home.  But a few people remained in the kitchen, and they still managed to put on a very tasty dinner of chicken, fish and salad in the evening.  We had to take our own satellite dish down before midnight when the gusts threatened to blow the satellite truck over, but fortunately by then we had got all of our stories out for the night.  We will see whether we can put it up again on Tuesday morning.  Lesson Number One from a Category Five Hurricane – this is something way to powerful to argue with.  We are not in control any more.  The hurricane decides what is and is not possible.  I am still in awe.

August 21, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

UNSMILING EYES

August 05, 2007 1:45 PM

It is unnerving to speak to someone for 45 minutes and have the feeling they are staring right through the back of your skull.  So it was when I sat down with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki for an interview this week.  He is more detached and shows less emotion than you might expect from a Zen monk meditating for several decades in a mountain monastery on a diet of green tea and gingko nuts. 

I started with a soft question to try to warm things up.  What did he feel when he saw the Iraqi team win the Asian soccer cup the previous Sunday?  It wasn’t so much what he said in his answer – a peroration about how the Iraqi team under Saddam never won such a tournament, but that under the new political regime of freedom they could win.  What was most disconcerting was the fact that he didn’t smile.  The entire country had spent half the night awake celebrating and firing their guns in the air.  Maliki, by contrast, deadpanned. 

About five minutes into the interview there was an explosion somewhere outside his office – probably one of the mortars that are increasingly being fired into the Green Zone.  He didn’t seem to notice it.  When I asked him how hard it was to work with so much violence around him, he said “there are difficulties, but they are within tolerable limits.”  I am not sure most Iraqis living in the Red Zone – the rest of Baghdad outside the Green Zone – would regard the car bombs and daily killings as within tolerable limits.  But I suppose if you become prime minister of Iraq, you need a pretty thick skin these days.

He has had a tough life.  In 1980, after joining the anti-Baathist Dawa party, Maliki, a Shiite, was sentenced to death by Saddam Hussein.  He fled the country, but many of his relatives were unable to escape, and some ended up in the mass graves that Saddam’s men filled with the bodies of rebellious Shiites and Kurds.  I asked him about that, and he said that he never once doubted that he would see the end of Saddam’s regime.  “I am a political survivor, yes, thank God I am still alive - and the dictator got what he deserved.” When the time came, he signed Saddam’s execution order last December in red ink. 

Perhaps three decades of opposition to a brutal leader like Saddam squeezed the joy out of Maliki. And I am sure the daily struggles with Iraq’s squabbling politicians, followed by lectures from US officials, doesn’t exactly make for a pleasant outlook on life.  But he sure was one tough interview. 

August 5, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)