Mind the Gap

For the first time in recent memory I found significant empty spaces — retail and restaurant — on almost every block along Quinta Avenida in Playa....gaps which are less Madonna than Mike Tyson.

One has to presume that the economy is now facing challenges from the sargassum inflow, plus the wider international awareness of it.

Nowadays Playa is a city of over 300,000 inhabitants. Coming in from the NW one gets a sense of just how vast the place has become on that side of the 307 highway.

Tourism may not be the essence of all these people's daily lives, but like the sun's rays on planet Earth, it is certainly the starting point of everything.

When I first came Playa was little more than a collection of thatched huts around the dock. in my lifetime I have had no other experience of such a place becoming a major urban sprawl.

V has compared it to a game we used to play in the noughties called Tropico in which, as a bemedalled dictator, one was tasked with developing an palm-lined island as fast as possible without creating the sort of unrest which would likely lead to one's downfall. The rounds were set to a background audio track of the endless TAP TAP TAP of construction work, and for years that was the essential soundtrack of PDC.

Around the turn of the millennium Playa had around 40,000 inhabitants. This, in my opinion, was probably the ideal moment to visit, an insight which cohanits with the more general notion I hold that in general the five years either side of 2000 were the best time to be an independent traveller in one's twenties in Central America.

The earlier period of my own experience had some obvious downsides of its own. For a start, below the Yucatan most areas were an active war zone until the mid to late nineties.

But perhaps the greater inconvenience was one of communications. There were hardly any phones — and I mean landlines, let alone mainstream online connections — so keeping in any kind of touch with the outside world was a complete chore.

I loved Antigua back then, but it would be fair to say that there was not much on offer in terms of basic entertainment and catering infrastructure for foreign visitors around town.

By the turn of the century this had hit something of a sweet spot, not just here, but also up in Playa, which was entering its heyday as the Saint Tropez analogue of the 'Mayan Riviera'. It was hard to imagine just how badly over-commercialisation would subsequently bodge things up. There really are but a handful of destinations in the region which have continued to improve in terms of overall experience since around 2010. (Mérida being the most obvious one.)

And if one wanted to get from place to place, the ADO network (and related terminals) was starting to take proper shape. Transportation had generally been a lot more iffy in the previous era.

The problem Playa now faces is that the annual sargazo plague is worsening year on year and it coincides neatly with the traditional peak periods, such as Spring Break.

Herod(s)

There's almost a surfeit of Herods in the story of Jesus.

The Biblical tale locates Christ's birth during the reign of Herod the Great, who ruled over all of Israel at the time.

This aspect of the timeline is extremely awkward for Luke's Christmas story, which features Romans and a census operation which in turn requires Joseph, supposedly a descendant of King David, to hurry back to Bethlehem (his own and David's hometown) along with his pregnant wife, in order to be counted — at a moment rather like Easter here, where everybody shows up simultaneously and there are not enough hotel rooms to go around.

Some elite liberals are inclined to characterise this extremely inconvenient situation as akin to being 'a refugee'. But as the devout Catholic author GK Chesterton (OP) once remarked: 'An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.'

Anyway, it is fairly safe to assume that during the time of the ministry and 'rebellion' of Jesus, Herod's son Herod Antipas was the relevant Jewish ruler, but not in Nazareth in Lower Galilee up north, then a fairly mixed society of Jews and Greeks, where the 'Nazarene' was most likely actually born.

By this time the Romans had assumed direct control of a significant part of Judea and so were in a position to start with their census nonsense, but it is very unlikely that they would have needed everyone to suddenly rush back en masse to their birthplaces in order to conduct one.

There's one more Herod for us to worry about: Herod Agrippa, a nephew, who had St Peter imprisoned and did away with the apostle James, aka Santiago, an important figure for the citizens of Antigua, believers or otherwise.

As a Gallilean, an area outside of direct Roman control, Jesus was not at first handed to Pilate after his arrest, but instead to the middle of the three above-mentioned Herods.

This one wanted his captive to perform miracles for him on demand and when this didn't happen, he decided to make the self-proclaimed Messiah a Roman problem, for the circumstances were more visibly and dangerously political than religious at this stage for the King and his subject community.

Right now getting the EFF out of here is exactly what Antigua's roughly 1.3m extra inhabitants — such is the annual population superabundance for the 7-week stretch of Lent and Holy Week — are accomplishing, albeit gradually.

Any foreign guests still lingering inside the Casa Santo Domingo who haven't yet done so are probably wishing that they had.