Recently I watched a video which I found online about a small Mexican coastal town. The vlogger is a young British person currently operating his online “travel” video channel out of Mexico.*
During the really badly filmed walkabout of said small Mexican coastal town, he encounters a brown pelican - common Mexican coastal birds. The trouble is, the vlogger doesn’t know what this bird is. Instead of researching and adding details in post production edits, (or better yet having done research ahead of time) his ignorant exclamations, mostly around size but with some dinosaur references too, only make it worse. At that point I clicked out of the 24 minute video, even though I really want to find out everything I can about this small Mexican coastal town.
I travel to invite the unknown into my experience. Researching ahead of, and post travel informs and enriches, feeds as much as do novel cuisines, which yes, I do also enjoy.
It is hard for me to imagine someone who is living, albeit temporarily, in Mexico, making travel videos of its coastal towns, not knowing what a pelican is, but there we have it. Anyone can upload anything online, then tout for subscribers with a goal to draw advertising revenue regardless of quality or veracity of content. There has to be more to Mexican travel journalism than tortillas and menudo from sidewalk eating houses frequented by locals.
Of course I am lucky enough to live in a place where pelicans overwinter, to have watched brown pelicans fishing on the Mexican Pacific coast and to have access to the eclectic, and decidedly not mediocre or brown Pelican just down the road, where I can soak away the disappointment which stains through me, after encounters with ignorance and mediocrity.
Nothing like a hotsprings soak to ameliorate the stupidity.
Even better when every room is available when I arrive sweaty and bug bitten after weed whacking the front side walk into a semblance of bureaucratically approved tidiness. It’s the annual weed ordinance citation fiesta - speaking of stupidity.
Of course I choose the red room to think about pelicans and release my metaphoric coyote howl - albeit at new moon not full - against the dark night of ignorance.
*I am not linking to this vlogger’s “business” as I do not want to endorse or contribute materially to this level of uninformed, hugely unresearched and horribly mediocre travel journalism. It’s quite easy to find the video on YouTube though, if you know the small Mexican coastal town currently on my radar.
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