Mexico 2011 - Part II

After our drinks, we headed to our room to check it out. It was nice, but it wasn't in the section we had last year, so we were sort of bummed. It was more expensive because it was a "single" in that there was no second floor, so you didn't have someone stomping around upstairs. The downside was that it was on the busy path leading toward the restaurant, and since it was single, it was on the ground floor. I'm not sure if the structure had settled since it had been built, or if they didn't level the ground first, but when you walked into the room the entire floor was tilted from left to right. Over the space of about 20 feet it must have been a difference of six inches. My wife kept running into things. You always felt like you were drunk even when you weren't, which really cut down on your bar tab, but you had to stay in the room a lot.

We slept there for the first night but the following day we asked to be moved to a room on the second floor and more toward the back of the resort. It was a cheaper room by 30 bucks a night, and they made us sign something that said we accepted the fact that they wouldn't be refunding us the difference. It was still worth doing from our perspective, since we liked to use the hammocks on the porch and it's much more relaxing and private when you're not on a main thoroughfare. I'm not a people person to begin with, and saying hi to everyone who walked by got old pretty fast. I started doing things like this, so they would just avert their eyes and walk by extra quickly:

The first couple of days we didn't do much of anything. We sat on the beach, walked in the sun, read books and basically just relaxed and tried to forget about the rest of the world for a while. Especially our little section of that world, which was still 20 degrees and covered in three feet of snow. I felt like all I did was eat, drink and read because, well, that is pretty much all I did. In fact, for the first three days, we considered the day a success if we managed to get up off the beach chairs long enough to eat lunch before we were too drunk.

After three days on the beach, you start to notice things. And people. For instance, every day, like clockwork, this guy would come out and stand there like this for about ten minutes:

Every time I'd see him standing there, I'd hear this music in my head. I'm not really sure what his super power was, but if I were a betting man, I'd say it was most likely the power to undress women with his eyes.

I guess I wasn't the only one who was wondering just what the hell he was looking at, because then this happened:

I was going to go stand next to them so my wife could get a picture of all three of us, but she wouldn't let me.

He might have been one of the yoga people. Our resort was hosting some sort of famous yoga guy program for the week. I saw one guy laying on his back outside his room doing jazz hands (and feet) over and over. I'm not sure what yoga position that is, (upward facing cockroach?) but he looked like he was trying to levitate but didn't quite have the specifics down yet.

There were a lot of crunchy people on display, and when I say "on display," I mean that literally.

In other words, there was a lot of the topless happening, even more so than last year. And again, it was really, really bad. This just confirms my suspicion that it's never the 25 year old hot chicks with the perfect bodies who are topless. It's always women like the ropey looking granny with orange hair, a face like Geddy Lee and boobs that are two feet long that are walking around all comfortable in their skin. I guess after a while you just get used to it, but I'm not sure. I knew it was bad when the wind actually caused her tits to flap a little. I kept waiting for her to toss one over each shoulder, catch some air, and take off like a flying squirrel. I made my wife promise that she'd never walk around topless on the beach, and in turn she made me promise that I'd never wear a banana hammock.*

On the third day, we also decided we wanted to Do Something. We didn't exactly know what, but we wanted to ease into it. Nothing too strenuous. We decided our first excursion was going to be to X-Caret the next day, just because it was close, the weather report was looking a bit iffy and we figured there'd be more places there to get out of the rain. Turns out that a 40% chance of rain in the forecast means absolutely nothing in PDC. The next day was crazy hot. Once you got away from the sea breeze, it was like you had a burning cinderblock sitting on top of your head.

Really, the only thing you can do at that point is get one of these:

Yep. It's exactly what it looks like. A 120 peso ice-cream headache with a face. Our lunch buffet was included in the ticket price, but drinks were not...so you guessed it. They push the drinks a little. But that was ok. This monster was like a 64 oz. Slushie except it was made with fresh fruit juices instead of syrup the flavor of blue. Yes, I know, I look like an axe murderer in that picture.

We didn't pay for any of the extras like the dolphin swim, the SNUBA or the sea-walk, but we did get to float through the "underground river" which I think was almost entirely man-made. It was a good snorkel intro for my wife, though, since she doesn't swim much and we were planning on going to Akumal the next day. Of course, they took your picture around every corner, then tried to sell them to you at the end for $13 each. I thought that was entirely reasonable, except they print them all regardless of whether you actually want to buy them, so the cost and waste is probably huge. They should just pop them up on screens like they do at the amusement parks.

As an aside, X-Caret is like a maze. The cartoon maps they hand out seem to serve no purpose other than to taunt you with things that you can't seem to get to. At every intersection, they have these stylized icon-type pictures that are supposed to tell you what is where, but they leave a bit to be desired. Maybe this is the heat stroke talking, but it shouldn't be that difficult to tell the difference between a butterfly and a freakin' BAT. We never did get to see the Bat Cave, which is a bummer. I told my wife I was looking forward to checking out the giant computer but she just looked at me like I was an idiot so I don't think she got it. On second thought, maybe she did.

Yeah, she probably did.

Eventually, we did get to see some sea turtles, although the map wasn't much help. I just kept following the shoreline and kicking giant iguanas out of my way until it looked like we were close, then we headed up toward the path again. Here's one that burped at me:

By about three pm, we were pretty much done. Everyone said that we needed to stay and "see the Mayan show" which was from six to nine, but both of us were about as dehydrated as a roadkill toad in the summer, and all we wanted to do was get back to the hotel, get some drinks and sit by the pool until it was time to shower up for dinner. So that's what we did. We took a taxi back, and got a few drinks and went to the pool.

Unfortunately, the pool had been taken over by a pack of wild 10-year-old girls, and they had all been snorting pixie stix or something, because they were hopped up. The were playing a kind of water tag where the person who is "it" has to guess what word the others in the pool were thinking of, based on category and letter, and when they guessed right, the person in the water would try to get to the other side before the person who was "it" could dive in and catch them. So needless to say, this was very loud. That's OK, though. Kids are loud. We understand that. And since we can't afford Adult Only hotels, we play the hand we're dealt.

What put us over the edge was how they determined who was to become it.

When I was a kid, a simple and quick "NOT IT!" uttered before anyone else was enough to make sure you weren't it -- whoever said it last was the one doing the chasing. Easy, right? Even a quick eeny, meeny, miny moe would do in a pinch. It appears that things have gotten a little more complicated since then, because here's the way it's done now:

Inky, Pinky, Ponky!

Daddy bought a donkey,

The donkey died, Daddy cried,

Inky, Pinky, Ponky!

The worst part? Whoever gets the last Ponky isn't "it." No. Instead, that person is "safe." The more astute among you will have immediately grasped the seriousness of this variation, in that if you have eight screaming ten-year old girls in a pool, in order to determine who is it for each game, you have to listen to that fucking rhyme at least seven times. Also, the girl doing the rhyme had a voice like she smoked a pack a day. I don't know how that's even possible, but there you go.

We decided to pack up our drinks and head back to our porch hammocks and see what sort of towel animals housekeeping had left for us. On the way, we stopped at the front desk and asked about getting a ride to Akumal. Instead, we ended up signing up for a tour to both Akumal and a cave - both in one day. That story I will save for the next post.

Also: You go, Ghandi.

Continue to Part III

*in public.