After Belize our first stop was the border town of Chetumal. Well more of a city really, a huge urban sprawl, like everywhere else we’ve since seen in Mexico. On the plus side, the roads were good, accommodation was cheap, we found a good café, an interesting museum on Mayan culture, a duty free zone and we finally had access to skype via a fast, reliable and reasonably priced internet connection. On the minus side, the food was dismal, the duty free zone full of cheap tat and we had a howling dog chained up outside our hotel window at night. Still, this would be our base for several days while we caught up with laundry and of course our blog... we generally run about a month behind, sometimes more, for the observant amongst you!
Chetumal was our gateway to the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico where we would be spending two weeks seeing the sights with my parents (Mum and Dad Lee!). Later we would travel back through Belize to Guatemala. First though, we had a week to fill before our rendezvous at Cancun airport. So what do you do? You go shopping! I dragged Dan to the duty free zone back over the border in Belize in search of a bargain bikini. What a waste of time, there were thousands of T-shirts and jeans for sale, but little else. Shoppers were sparse and shop attendants waited to pounce on anyone who so much looked at their wares. We got out of there as soon as we could. The whole pouncing phenomenon was not unique to here though, it seems to be a Central American thing. You walk into a shop and straight away you have someone tailing you – even when you say you don’t need help. Dan and I have tried splitting up, you know so that they have to decide who to follow. It’s always me. I hate it. It’s saved us some money though because I always leave straightaway!
Besides the cheap shops, the food and the dog were getting me down; if I lived here I would have had to rescue the poor thing... For such a large place there wasn’t much of a culinary selection in the centre of the city. Like the shops (which like the duty free zone were full of tat), the food catered to the masses. The vegetarian snob in me was getting tired of greasy cheesy, eggy, tomato offerings. I was craving fresh greens and spices!! We later discovered (on our return trip) that for that you had to go out of town. Shopping malls have arrived big time in Mexico. For upmarket shops and a choice of food and fantastic supermarkets you have to head with the rest, out of town. We didn’t know that then and took the slightly more drastic action of leaving town altogether.
Playa del Carmen from the ferry
Our next stop was Playa del Carmen, a Mecca for North American tourists with money to burn. We too did our spot of money laundering. Our passports and money were soaked yet again by faulty plumbing. We finally decided to stop hanging our “pacsafe” under bathroom sinks. And just in case you wondering what that is, it’s an ingenious wire mesh bag with a thick wire drawstring and padlock and it keeps your valuables safe – as long as you hang it somewhere dry and attach it to a secure fitting.
Dan drying money, passports and out tourist cards
Playa was full of a different class of tourist: Gucci, Chanel, Diamonds International – you get the drift. This time I was window shopping. The novelty soon wore off, though not before I bought a bikini which I promptly wore to the beach. The main draw for me was food! My appetite soon returned over a mouth watering menu of Thai spring rolls and curry, umm. We were staying in the centre of things for a change in a hotel with a popular bar attached. This was fine in principle, but we knew something was up when we were ready for bed by 10.30pm and everyone else wanted to party on past midnight. After 2 nights we were ready to move on again, this time to quieter lodgings on the Island of Cozumel. In fact we were so keen to go that we skipped town without paying our hotel bill. More about that later.
Despite the current world economic crises or maybe because of it people were here in their hoards. Daily deliveries from cruise liners parked along the shore of Cozumel added to the traffic both there and in Playa del Carmen. This was the first time we ‘d seen so many people and knew that, for this small corner of the world, capitalism wasn’t dead yet. Having escaped the tour touting reps at the ferry terminal we made our way several blocks into town and found a pink monstrosity of a hotel, loud in colour, but amazingly quiet... and cheap.
That night we also found a good Mexican restaurant, defined simply by the freshness of its ingredients, the fact that they know what a green vegetable looks like, and not everything is fried. The service was good too.
Fantastic adobe church
Our trip to Cozumel had an ulterior motive too. Dan as ever keen to test his fins and tip backwards from a boat in scuba gear wanted to dive the coral reef. This is the same reef which stretches down past the Belizian coast and on to Honduras. Anyway, the sun was out and the sea was like a mill pond when we arrived, so I had high hopes for the following day. But no, get me on a boat and the wind and waves whip up a treat! The sea was heaving, but luckily I was drugged and prepared. There isn’t much you can do about the cold though except wrap up as much as possible. But then as you plop overboard, none of that really matters anymore.
Below the waves everything was calm, excellent visibility, and a deep, clear blue stretching into the depths. From the surface we released the air from our buoyancy vests (the thing you and the tanks are attached to) and sank 30 metres down into a different world. There is a sense of space around you, emptiness, but no fear of falling. We swam alongside a vertical coral wall the light playing off shoals of fish, at times ducking through small canyons, careful to touch nothing. The sea life was as diverse as Belize (we saw nurse sharks, stingrays, groupers etc), but a on a larger scale and a with sense of your own smallness in amongst it all. Even up and down seemed to have different meanings and every now and then I would wind myself upside down to view my bubbles rising towards the sea’s surface.
Rachel loaded up and ready to go
Back in the world of air and it was time to move on again, we had a flight to meet. Next day we took the ferry back to Playa, and made a short detour to our hotel there to pay our bill... after which we took the bus to Cancun. This was our true introduction to the Mayan Riviera, the highway which runs from Tulum to Cancun is almost non-stop hotel development from Playa del Carmen onwards. Then as you approach Cancun across the lagoon your eyes are arrested by the monolithic skyline of the hotel zone. High end, mass tourism, that took your breath away; this is what was fuelling the exponential growth all along the coast. It also made us wonder just what we were getting ourselves into...
Dan loaded up too!
