Tink, tink, tink, tink.

Huh. As far as annoying sounds that pull you out of sleep in the morning, it barely qualified. Not after several years of be awoken by a murmuration of myna birds screeching their displeasure at mongeese raiding their tree for a morning snack of betel nuts. Compared to the obnoxious tweeting of cheap plastic whistles that every doorman at 3.5 hotels and above in Bangkok starts up at daybreak, it almost qualified as the sound of silence. The pounding in my head from a night of doing tequila shots was louder. Maybe this holiday’s accommodations wouldn’t suck as badly as I’d thought.

It was a short vacation, a impromptu holiday, a quick trip to Cancun with my friend Ann. Though she’d seen the world, Ann was still a small-town girl from rural Texas at heart and easy prey for the timeshare sellers that engorge themselves on the real estate savvy challenged at resort destinations the world over. Ann had fallen for the come-on of a free case of chocolate macadamia nuts years before, and was now the proud owner of: nothing. But for the large monthly payments and maintenance fees she paid, she was allowed two weeks of accommodation at a nice property on the Big Island each year. That exotic tropical holiday loses some of its allure when you live but a 45-minute flight away. The condo she bought into was a popular one among her fellow timeshare owners, and most years she bartered out her two weeks there for four weeks elsewhere. We were using one of them to holiday at Mexico’s version of Waikiki.

Ours was a four-star hotel masquerading as a condo masquerading as a time share. With rooms overlooking Playa Nizuc beach, I couldn’t argue about the price; my contribution to the cost of the room was a promise to buy dinner on our first night in town. Having arrived at 10:00 p.m., however, that wouldn’t officially occur until our second night. Our first was devoted to getting to the hotel and settling in. That went off without a hitch until we headed up to our rooms, walking along a corridor open to the tropic breezes blowing in off the Caribbean Sea. The front of the two room suite opened onto the beach. Cool. The entrance side of the room looked out over the hotel next door. Or what would soon be the hotel next door. It’s skeleton was there, rising above several acres littered with construction debris. Not cool.

Discovering your holiday accommodations are next to a major construction project is not a good thing. At least not if your holiday plans include peace and quiet. I served Ann up the appropriate amount of crap, and then with nothing to be done about the situation, we got busy toasting our vacation until the worm disappeared. Enter hangover. Enter early morning construction noise.

Tink, tink, tink, tink.

It wasn’t quite the blaring horns or warning sirens of trucks weighing several tons backing up I’d expected to rouse me from my sleep. I’ve heard wind chimes that were more annoying. As much as my head pleaded for me to stay in bed, curiosity won the day and I headed out to the walkway to drape myself over the parapet and see what was up. A few hundred Mexican workers were what was up. With the break of dawn. And not a gas-powered vehicle or electrical piece of construction equipment among them. They were busy building a thirty-story hotel by hand.

I spent more of that vacation watching the neighboring property being built than I did watching the waves come in. It was as easy to order cervezas to be brought to the room as to be hauled across the sand to your beach chair. The beauty of a hundred buff Latino men working shirtless was part of the draw. The strangeness of third-world construction standards and techniques though were the main event. And that has been a fascination of mine ever since, all over the world.

Bamboo scaffolding framing high-rises under repair in Hong Kong, old men pushing concrete filled wheelbarrows down narrow alleys in Bali – the cementitious mixture drying quicker than they were moving – laborers in Thailand with kerchiefs tied around their faces like bank robbers from the wild west disguising not their identity but that they are women, the laborers at construction sites in third-world countries add a tinge of local color to any trip. The only thing they have in common with construction workers back home is that there are always three times as many as required to do the job and the majority of the workers are never working.

I’ve watched a crew of ten spend a full week repairing a three-foot long portion of the sidewalk in Bangkok, finally completed it was in need of repairs again two days later. The scowl of a lady construction worker in Chiang Mai at her dozing co-worker transformed into a radiant smile when my camera came up. Painters balancing on bamboo poles encircling a five star hotel reacted to their Kodak moment by bouncing up and down on the flimsy footing, trusting in their good karma more than the stability of their perch. And the same crumbling buildings under construction at Angkor Wat in Cambodia since the 12th century are still being built and rebuilt today using methods and equipment that would not seem foreign to those who originally started the job. Maybe it’s an odd way to spend time on a holiday, but third-world construction practices always bring me to a screeching halt. It’s not that they are an accident waiting to happen, but rather the strangeness of construction and maintenance techniques employed, and admiration for making due with the equipment at hand. Even when that equipment is only their hands.

Construction going on at or near my hotel? No problemo. That just means an extra hour or two in the morning of kicking back and watching the workers play. Now if they could just do something about those damn doormen and their whistles, I’d be a happy camper.