Cancun and the Isla

It was with a mixture of excitement and fear that we sped by taxi from Cancun bus station to our hotel right on the beach on Wednesday evening. Excitement because after some hard travelling we were going to enjoy the world class beach here and luxuriate in the warm waters of the Caribbean, as well as the fact that we'd splashed out on a well-appointed sea view suite; fear because the decrepit wreck we found ourselves in appeared to be being driven particularly recklessly on account of our having beaten the driver down in price from $150 to $80 (pesos). Shock absorbers, bearings and, in this case, doors which swing open as you career around corners, appear to be optional components on cars of a certain vintage in Mexico. We were dead beat after a hard day, what with the buses from Merida and the hike around Chichen Itza, so all we wanted to do was get in the room, eat and then crash out. The fun could begin tomorrow. We were treated a little suspiciously as we entered the compound of the Salvia Suites bang in the centre of the hip and happening Cancun Zona Hotelera. I guess we don't look like your average Cancun holidaymaker to be fair, especially after a day on the hoof, but give us a chance to fling some creases out of our kit and we can do a passable impression. "You have reservation señor?" came the inevitable opening gambit from our sceptical receptionist. "Si, si" came my overly smug reply. My name and booking details followed but after some fanning about on his computer and some good old perusing of a manual ledger he determined that our booking had not gone through via Booking.com so there was no record of it. Thankfully my email confirmation sufficed and so we were finally invited to inspect the room for approval, in exchange for a knee trembling amount of pesos, almost twice as much as we'd paid for any other room up to now. By this point I may well have accepted a flea infested hovel but the door opened into a truly palatial apartment with kitchenette, sofa, dining table, large bed and best of all, sliding doors onto a corner balcony affording views both up and down the umpteen miles of beach as well as back over the lagoon and marina where the sun sets. A more perfect place you could barely dream of. It felt as though we had donned millionaires shoes or won the pools and the lottery. Kerry was beside herself with impish excitement, lying on the bed, sitting on the sofa and running her hands over furniture and ornaments in elation at being parachuted into the nearest thing to a home we'd seen for 3 months. Without wishing to deny her her inherent needs I reminded her of our need to eat, it was now around 2030 and there was a very real possibility of my needing to use my next belt hole if food didn't soon pass my lips. We went outside and offered the first of several hundred "no gracias" to the guy on the gate selling jetskis, parasailing and tours to goodness knows where before opting to eat at the first place we came to, a steak house called Carlos & Charlie's. As we have seen before, selecting a dining experience at haste can often result in tears and this was to be in that vein. Remember we're tired out and have been used to a very different Mexico than the one that Cancun offers. Cancun isn't Mexico at all really, it's a manic assault on every one of your senses; alcohol, testosterone and micro-bikini fuelled. Carlos & Charlie's was a noisy mad-house in a noisy mad-house of a town  with the waiters scribbling their names on the paper table-cloths whilst sporting shirts with the legend "People having a good time serving people having a good time" and "I don't speak English but I promise not to laugh at your Spanish". Most of the clientele were sporting hats made of balloons reaching around 4 feet in height and drinking from similarly sized neon plastic glasses. Waiters would periodically gather at tables for rousing renditions of Mexican songs to which the inebriated guests would whoop and clap and when the theme from Benny Hill came on there was an "hilarious" stop-start routine by the staff which wouldn't have looked out of place in a lunatic asylum. People were by now queuing to get in here whilst I wanted to melt away, or at the very least become invisible. Before we did leave a photographer came over and placed an outsized sombrero on my head and wanted to know if I wanted to pay for a photograph. I was considering how best to tell him that of all the things on this earth that I might need, a photograph of myself in a sombrero is a way down the list, between cat riding lessons and an invitation to dinner with Hannibal Lecter before Kerry saw my pained look and hurriedly injected with a "no.....señor.....por favor". Next morning I awoke early and made my first use of the lounger on the balcony. How wonderful it was to watch the first hour of the morning from 3 floors up whilst listening to and watching the aquamarine Caribbean crash onto the talcum powder beach below. Once Kerry was up and we'd eaten our scrambled eggs in a dingy backstreet cafe on the de rigeur red plastic patio furniture it was time to get in that sea but first we needed to carry out a few domestics. We needed some cash so therefore a bank and as we had a fridge in our gaff we bought in some cereal and tuna and avocados in order to keep our eating out costs as low as possible. In the supermarket we saw a couple of cheap airbeds too and couldn't resist the thought of bobbing up and down on those so we had those too. We had been in the sea approximately 10 seconds before Kerry's burst, either by her putting one of her talons through it or it coming into contact with one of the pieces of spiky seaweed that was floating about. We took it back to the shop an hour or so later and managed to blag a replacement out of them even though the centimetre long gash in the original had obviously occurred at the beach. The brass neck of some people! The next day was spent in much the same way. We tottered the 10 yards from our hotel to the sea and alternated between lying on the sand and floating in the sea on our airbeds. This time it was my turn to suffer a puncture and as there was no chance of a replacement more than 24 hours after purchase that was me done for. With a couple of our friends back home being relatively recent visitors to Cancun we were given a tip-off that we simply had to visit the Coco Bongo club here for the experience of a lifetime. We were a tad unsure whether to give it a go or not, after all, if Potters loved it then it probably wouldn't be for me. On top of that, an enquiry about how much it would cost caused me to exhale so completely that it's to the good fortune of the ticket seller that I don't suffer from halitosis. But then you get to thinking and you acknowledge that if you come away for nigh on a year and don't push the boat out once in a while then you might go home with regrets. Therefore, in an effort to be able to play Edith Piaf songs in our dotage we coughed up and began our preparation for the night ahead. The first thing to get our heads around was the fact that the club didn't open until 2230, a time that usually, if we weren't already asleep, we were at least safely tucked up in bed. Our evening routine generally consists of going for a meal before retiring to our room to write our diaries, uploading photos, planning our next move or just reading or relaxing in our own space. There's an element of minimising risk to our personal safety and of being bitten by mosquitoes by being in of an evening so these are also factors in our modus operandii. Obviously we would have to get in the party spirit so to help us we went to the supermarket and bought some loopy juice. It was lovely sitting on the balcony watching the sun set whilst listening to some music and before we knew it it was time to don our nearest thing to gladrags and walk two doors down to the club. Now you may have guessed, or already know, that I am not really a nightclub type of guy. Engaging conversation and/or footy on the telly over a few pints is more my thing, plus, I was very close to the back of the queue when dancing ability was being administered. However, the combination of pre-club lubrication and the amazing atmosphere inside saw me bustin' some crazy moves and having an absolute beano in there. It's a fabulous concept; dance music, or a discotheque to those fuddy duddy's among you, alternating with tribute acts or cirque du soleil type acts. One minute you're watching a Mexican Freddie Mercury miming expertly to Radio Ga Ga, then you're dancing to some thumping tune trying not to descend into epilepsy on account of the strobe lighting. This theme continued for hours and we saw Beyonce, Lady Ga Ga, Chicago, trapeze artists, the Beatles, Beeteljuice and several others.  It was a fabulous night out so thank you  Potters and Cha-Cha for the recommendation. The next day wasn't so good for me. I awoke at 1000 with a head so painful that the only option was to lie still as the slightest movement made it feel like I had an axe buried deep within it. I nodded off again and woke at midday but felt very fragile still. Luckily the beach was so close and it was all I could do to lie on my towel and take periodic dips to cool off. The day was largely a write-off but such are hangovers for the sporadic imbiber. On Saturday we moved on to a little known island called Isla Mujeres which lies about 5 miles off the coast. When I travelled around Mexico in 1999 we spent our final week here and I have always hankered after a return. I remembered the shoes I'd worn as we travelled had literally fallen off my feet here and I'd spent the last few days barefooted. I remember lying in my hammock between two palm trees whilst drinking a margarita and of India, my then 2 year old daughter, deciding to take a dump on the step of a shop to the understandable dismay of the proprietor. Most of all I recalled the crystalline waters of the Caribbean gently lapping at the most tranquil and palm lined beach that your mind can conjure up. It is heaven on earth and I wanted Kerry to see it. We caught a bus from the hotel zone up to the port of Puerto Juarez and invested £6 each in a return ticket to paradise. The hydrofoil was chock-a-block with day trippers from Cancun but we ignored them and enjoyed the wind in our hair as we sped over the turquoise waves. We'd done some research and were headed for an hotel with rooms backing onto the beach but on our way to it we happened across Sea Hawk Divers, a dive company who have a few rooms out back and with them being very comfortable and very cheap we opted to stay there. It was a good call as the owners turned out to be really friendly, English speaking and their business was a great place to meet people. We were only 50 or 60 yards from Playa Norte (North Beach), the aforementioned heaven, where we would spend the lion's share of our time. The first thing I did was buy a new air bed and, after lunch in a thatch-roofed beachfront restaurant, we assumed the positions that would characterise our stay. In the water that first day we met Nancy and Gina, two schoolteachers from Seattle, whose own propensity was to bob in the sea on their 'noodles', a 4 ft long tube of foam. They were the nicest people you could wish to meet and we had a long chat about our travels, their travels and how we'd all come to be floating around  in the Caribbean. After so many weeks travelling through Mexico where we felt we were personas non grata, or at least ignored, it was so lovely to have a conversation with someone. We would bump into each other a few times during our stay which contributed to our feeling of belonging and happiness here. Kerry was planning on taking advantage of our staying with divers to renew her acquaintance with the deep. Though PADI qualified, it had been nearly a year since her last dive so she tentatively set up a refresher for Monday. When Monday morning arrived though there'd been a change of plan and Sea Hawk were taking a boat out to snorkel with whale sharks. By the time we knew of this we had about 5 minutes to decide whether to go or not and in the spirit of acting in haste and repenting at leisure we elected to do so. It was exciting to head out to sea on our little boat with 11 people on board, especially knowing that we were about to snorkel miles from the coast and with monsters of the deep. Given that it is a "100% certainty" that you encounter the whale sharks too this would surely be one of the abiding memories of the whole trip. As we skipped across the water we saw lots of other boats doing likewise, our skipper on the radio to them as we all sought the pod. Three days ago they had encountered 200 of them so it was just a case of locating them. After 45 minutes I began to get a bit anxious about finding them but assured myself that it probably always takes an hour, maybe longer, so it was just a matter of time. After 2 hours I was getting worried, after 3 I was agitated and after 4 I was trying to work out which was best of my two options; continue to sit here pounding about on the waves in a lavatory free boat whilst listening to an attention seeking and tiny Speedo wearing Italian gabble incessantly or jump overboard. Our fellow prospective whale sharkers were a family of Italians headed by the questionably attired one. If the world cup of 1990 means anything to you then if I say he was reminiscent of a bloated and gone-to-seed Toto Schillaci then you can picture him. His son was another afflicted with an inability to sit still or shut up and his wife perpetually succumbed to the gravity generated by our forward propulsion to be constantly seeming to be invading my personal space. I say, don't you know we're English? We can't be having Johnny Foreigner in our personal space, what! It is fair to say they got right on my thruppeny's, and I'm still smarting from our pitiful showing against Italy in the Euros so that didn't help either. What did help was that we also met Sarah and Richard on that trip, an American couple so typical of their nation, friendly, genuine and open. We spent a lot of our time on the boat chatting and without them I think I may well have gone mad. To cut to the chase we never did see the whale sharks. For whatever reason they just were not about that day, probably down gorging on some delicious deep-lying plankton or something, which puts us in the unique category of having been on a dead cert only for it not to deliver. We are the aquatic "Devon Loch". To give Sea Hawk their dues they tried their best for us, but having failed gave us a couple of snorkels and a room discount in compensation. The rest of our time on the Isla we spent on our air beds and I think it was just what we needed to recharge the old batteries and prepare for our assault on Belize and the rest of Central America. I mentioned recently that we'd been a bit homesick but that's passed now and we're raring to go again. For all the wonders we've seen so far I don't think anything compares to this island paradise. At heart we are two beach bums and whilst we can suck up as much culture and embark on as many trans-continental bus journies as the next man a little piece of us will remain on the Isla Mujeres until we return. And we will.