A World-Class Dive: Travels in Mexico

Copyright © Mark Moxon 2024

All rights reserved

This version was compiled on 30 March 2024

This work has been released under the Creative Commons licence Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). This means you are free to distribute this work to others as long as you retain this copyright notice, do not use the work for commercial purposes and do not alter, transform or build upon this work. For more details please read the full licence.

Front cover: Overlooking the beach at the Fusion bar in Playa del Carmen

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Preface

This book is a collection of writing from the road, covering a one-month trip I made to Mexico in 2013. This was part of a larger, six-month journey that took me through Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama and Colombia during 2013 and 2014.

The travelogue for all these countries and more can be found on my personal website at www.moxon.net, where you can also find travel tips, recommended journeys and further free books for you to download.

I’ve released this book and its companions via a Creative Commons Licence, which means you are free to distribute it to everyone and anyone, as long as you distribute it on a non-commercial basis and make no changes to it. If you know someone who might like this book, please pass it on; I make no money from it, but I do enjoy the thought of people reading it and recommending it to their friends.

Finally, please be aware that this book attempts to be humorous every now and then, so there’s a slight chance that it might cause offence to those who think my sense of humour is as amusing as a puddle of mud. On top of this, some parts will be out of date – which is why each article is dated – and others will betray the naivety of a traveller who discovered his way in the world by throwing himself into it headfirst. It is, however, an honest account of how I felt as I travelled through Central America for six months, and as such, I hope you enjoy it.

Mark Moxon

June 2014

The Yucatán

About Time Too

Written: 30 October 2013

Forgive me Father, it’s been... well, far too long to keep count, but it’s certainly been a while since I did any travel writing. If you’re talking about proper, no holds barred, tell the grandchildren-type travelling, then I guess we’ve got to go back more than a decade to when I found myself sheltering in Ghana after being ground down and beaten by West Africa; and my last travel writing of any kind was over six years ago, when Peta and I spent a couple of weeks exploring Kerala in southern India. To say that I’m rusty is an understatement.

So this new project is all a bit of a shock. Sure, we’ve talked about going travelling for a while, because that’s what you do when you’re stuck inside on the sofa, huddled up in front of the fire while the winds howl through the telephone wires outside. ‘We could be on a beach right now,’ you can’t help pointing out. ‘Look, the weather app says it’s 37 degrees in India, and we’ve got to tackle the bloody Tube in the morning.’ And life goes on, as it should.

But we’ve finally managed to convert words into action, and we’re now staring into the abyss of a year travelling through Central and South America, starting in Mexico and finishing in Brazil a year later. Today is our first full day in the tropics after yesterday’s 20-hour marathon from London to Playa del Carmen, and the warm tropical winds here on the eastern shores of the Yucatán Peninsula are starting to blow away the cobwebs of six hours of jet lag. The sun is out, the mercury is brushing 30 degrees, the humidity is solid enough to spread on toast and the white sandy beaches are therapeutically soft.

But don’t get excited, because this isn’t yet anything like travelling; truth be told, we’re on holiday at the moment, easing ourselves gently into the travelling mood. This isn’t an indulgence, it’s essential; I had no idea that ditching your workaday life in your mid-forties (for me) and mid-fifties (for Peta) would be quite as much of a shock as it’s been – particularly the last four weeks – and we need to take a breath before doing, well, anything. On our last night in London we popped round to my brother’s for a farewell supper, and it’s fair to say that by that point we both looked like death warmed up. This followed on from a concentrated few weeks of packing up all our worldly goods and sticking them in storage, saying a permanent goodbye to our rented home of seven years, sorting out the reams of paperwork associated with changing addresses and putting my contractor company to sleep, and randomly bursting into tears every time I realised I was doing something for the last time. Hell, I even started welling up when I packed the dishwasher for the last time, and they weren’t tears of joy. Uprooting yourselves when you’ve really grown into a place is harder than you think; those roots wrap themselves into every nook and cranny, and it’s inevitable that it will hurt when you yank them all out.

But looking through my toes at the blue horizon of the Caribbean Sea as it slips into azure and turquoise waters just off a white sandy beach... well, it’s amazing how quickly it all starts to make sense. Yesterday, as months of build-up collided with 20 hours of transit and a six-hour time difference, I could feel the panic rising like hot mercury in my lungs; today, that chilled bottle of Sol tastes like the future, and the future tastes good.

We might not have started travelling yet, but we’ve certainly started something, and that’s enough for now. It might be a long way to Rio and the road will no doubt have plenty of ups and downs, but at least we’re on our way. And about time too...

Man Down!

Written: 31 October 2013

Jumping feet first into planetary exploration is a scary proposition at the best of times, but most travellers soon develop their own coping strategies. I’ve tried war cries, running up mountains, treating myself and opting out, but perhaps one of the most effective has been to pack the right kit.

You see, it doesn’t take long for the contents of your pack to become your friends. For example, I’ve travelled with the same Balinese sarong for 15 years and we’ve been through some really tough times together (I’m sure I paid over the odds for it in Kuta, but I still got my money’s worth); I’m still using the same waterproof document wallets that I took on my first trip in 1995, and they’re stained with ink and dirt from six continents, just like me; and although it’s on its third incarnation, the Australian bush hat I’m wearing contains the same guiding spirit as the one I received as a Christmas gift in Melbourne in 1995. They’re perhaps less of a mental crutch now that I’m no longer travelling solo, but there’s no doubt that some of my travelling possessions are psychologically important.

One of my favourites over the years has been my water filter. I bought my first one in 1997 in Queensland just before I headed off to Southeast Asia, and although I didn’t use it all the time, it gave me the freedom to head off anywhere without worrying about where to find drinking water. It could filter out all known viruses and bacteria using no more than elbow grease, and I loved it, only retiring it after six years once the cracks literally began to show. In preparation for this trip, I was at work, checking out the price of a new filter online, when the guy sitting opposite me casually mentioned that he’d once seen someone purify water simply by shining a torch at it for a minute. I didn’t believe him at first, but a quick internet search led me to the Steripen website, and a whole new world of possibilities suddenly opened up.

The Steripen, which comes in a handful of models that all work on the same principle, is essentially an ultraviolet light that you dip into a bottle of suspect water for about 90 seconds. The UV doesn’t kill the bacteria or viruses, but instead it scrambles their DNA, so they can’t reproduce; this makes the water safe to drink, all in 90 seconds. Compared to 20 minutes for sterilising tablets and a fair amount of pumping effort for a water filter, this sounded almost too good to be true, so I worked out that the best model for me was the £50 Steripen Traveler and clicked ‘Buy’ without a second thought, added some high power rechargeable batteries and a charger to the pot, and settled back to wait for the postman.

When it popped through the door, I immediately tested it on a litre of tap water, and sure enough the little light came on and shut off 90 seconds later, leaving sterilised water in its wake. It was amazing; this little gadget suddenly meant we could safely drink tap water for our entire trip, as the UV lamp is good for 3000 treatments, which easily covers a year’s worth of travelling. Sorted!

Except it hasn’t quite turned out that way. The first thing I did when we arrived in Mexico was to fish out my Steripen and test it out on the local water. I pressed the button, immersed the light in the water, and... hey, that’s not right, the lamp isn’t coming on and the LED’s gone red, not green. So out it comes and goes back in for another try after I’ve dried off the contacts, and this time the LED starts flashing a message: three red flashes followed by one green flash. Hang on, there’s a little manual here that tells me what that means... let’s see, three red then one green... oh. ‘Lamp failure; replace lamp,’ it says, and no matter how many times I try, it does the same thing.

So what might have been one of the coolest and most useful travelling items I’ve ever had has turned out to be completely and utterly useless before we’ve even got started. It definitely worked in the UK and it definitely doesn’t work now, and there’s nothing I can do because the only people who can fix the UV lamp are the manufacturer or a ‘licensed technician’, neither of whom hang out in Mexico. I carefully carried it in my hand luggage from London, but presumably it died somewhere in transit, from a severe case of manufacturing mediocrity.

So there you go: the Steripen Traveler. It clearly can’t travel, and it’s now Mexican landfill, less than an hour after our arrival. We’ll just have to enjoy the fun of drinking bottled water for a year, and in the meantime I’m kicking myself for not buying a replacement for my good old water filter. We had some good times, and now I feel like an erring husband who’s gone off with the secretary, only to find that it just isn’t the same as life with the wife.

Sorry, water filter. I miss you, and so do sarong and bush hat...

Playa del Carmen

Written: 1 November 2013

As a gentle introduction to a long trip, Playa del Carmen fits the bill nicely, though you could argue that we haven’t actually started travelling yet. For the centre of Playa, much like its northern neighbour Cancún, is pretty un-Mexican, despite the unmistakable lilt of mariachi bands that floats through the thick, humid air.

It’s obvious from the minute you arrive. After landing at Cancún airport, where I had my bags searched by a friendly customs official who seemed more interested in flicking through the books that I’d packed than rifling through the year’s worth of malaria drugs I’d stashed in the side pockets, we hopped on the ADO bus to Playa. About an hour later we pulled into the bus terminal in the southern end of town, where we blinked our way through heavy 1am eyelids into the 7pm twilight of Avenida Quinta (Fifth Avenue), the pedestrianised road that runs parallel to the coast, forming the backbone of Playa’s social scene. Tired but functioning, we decided to walk to our hotel, some 20 minutes along the road and past all the restaurants, nightclubs and shops that Playa has to offer.

Over the years Playa has ballooned from a small fishing town into an international tourist destination, and as you walk north along Avenida Quinta, it’s like walking through a potted history of Playa’s development into one of Mexico’s hottest holiday spots. The town stretches out along a lovely north-south beach of golden sand and blue-green sea, and Avenida Quinta heads north, parallel to the beach, starting at the attractive and sparklingly white Nuestra Señora del Carmen Catholic Church, which was originally built in 1960 but was recently remodelled into a charming church that’s all the stranger for being surrounded by such unholy racketeering. For crowding round the church are rows and rows of cramped shops selling tacky tourist wares and tickets to the ferry to the island of Cozumel, and just to make sure you know that they’re there, each of them seems to have its own dedicated team of announcers.

‘¡Hola amigo!’ they shout. ‘Best shop, I have the real silver, you can take it in the sea and everything. Come in, yes you, over here, I see you.’

At first you can’t help reacting; despite the crowds, the touts have an unerring ability to project their voices straight at you, picking you out from the crowd, so that you just seem to know that they’re talking directly to you. ‘Hey, Mr Australian, over here!’ they shouted at me, and even though I’m not Australian and wasn’t wearing my bush hat, I knew they meant me. ‘Hey, over here, I’m a nice guy,’ they continued as I gently ignored them, but that didn’t work. ‘Hey, Mr Lennon, I see you, you want tours?’ they blabbed, and once I’d made the mistake of acknowledging them, I just knew they’d shout out the same thing every time I walked past. So I am now Mr John Lennon of Australia, I apparently walk so fast that I’m going to get a speeding ticket, and no, I still don’t want to buy a tour or any of the real silver that I can take in the sea and everything. Still, at least we’ve worked out our relationship; they hassle me and I ignore them, and to be honest the level of hassle is extremely polite and pretty tame compared to some parts of the world, so we’re even.

After a few blocks, the shops start to feel less cramped and the side streets open up a bit, letting the breeze in and calming the touts down somewhat. After seven blocks, when Calle 14 crosses Avenue 5, there’s a dip in the road and suddenly things smarten up, and the tacky trinket shops give way to jewellery shops, designer shopping malls and restaurants that aspire to fine dining. Here, when you peruse a menu, the touts will gently guide you through what’s on offer without sounding forceful, and some will even pop out and offer you a bite of parmigiano and a sip of Mexican zinfandel while you look through the menus. It’s a different level of salesmanship altogether, and as you continue north the restaurants get bigger, more relaxed and more sophisticated, before the strip finally peters out around Calle 40 into future developments and hotel foyers.

The tourists change as you mooch along the road, too. Down at Calle 2, bright young things sport tourniquet-tight denim hotpants that are so ergonomic you can tell whether or not the camel has cleaned under its toe nails, but further north it’s more about flowing beach dresses and gentle promenading. The dividing line seems to be Calle 12, home to the town’s legendary nightclub scene, though I can’t speak from experience, as jet lag has been sending us into a coma well before that part of town starts jumping.

Down on the Beach

Talking of jet lag, Playa’s beach is a perfect spot to unwind through the time zones. As with Avenue 5, the beach changes as you move north, morphing from a wide and more public beach down near the ferry terminal, into a more beach-club-based affair further north. You can tell how far north you are by the quality of the sun-loungers, which become less tatty as the prices rise and the bars become more sophisticated.

Another sure-fire way of telling where you are is in the price of the massages that get pushed at you from every corner, which seems to increase the further away you get from the ferry; the sales pitch is far less rabid than on the main street, but the patter is the same. It’s certainly a pretty good spot for relaxation, with the waves lapping against the boats just off the beach, while pelicans and frigate birds hover overhead, so you can hardly blame then for trying.

Sure, the peace gets shattered every now and then by planes flying at low altitude along the beach, and some of the beach bars have a fairly liberal attitude to their volume settings, but Playa’s beach clubs are perfect spots to kick back and drift off while the scorching tropical sun melts your bones into the sun loungers. There are far worse places to see in the start of a year on the road.

Day of the Dead

Written: 2 November 2013

The Day of the Dead is a three-day Mexican festival that starts on 31 October and lasts for three days. On the surface it might appear that El Día de Muertos is nothing more than a stretched out Halloween, but the two festivals are fundamentally different: while Halloween celebrates everything that is scary about death, the Day of the Dead is about getting together with family and friends to remember loved ones who have passed on, and to send up a prayer for them. As a result, the Day of the Dead is much more of a festival and a celebration than the rather darker and more gothic Halloween.

We were lucky enough to arrive in Mexico just in time for the festivities. As we stepped groggily off the bus in Playa del Carmen, we were greeted by shops and restaurants sporting smiling skulls and skeletons dangling from the awnings, though we were a bit too concerned with our own personal take on the day of the dead, after 20 hours of non-stop transit. It was only as we warmed to our surroundings that we started to see references to the impending celebrations absolutely everywhere, and the difference with Halloween is obvious: the Day of the Dead is all about welcoming in the spirits of loved ones whom you haven’t seen since last year’s celebration, while Halloween is more obsessed with malevolent spirits who are out to get you. The streets are lined with colourful altars strewn with flowers, food, paper decorations, glittering skulls and even beer bottles, and even the ubiquitous skulls and skeletons have a slightly cartoonish air to them, like Jack Frost in Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. There’s an impressive sand sculpture down on the beach of an entire skeletal family, but this isn’t about scaring people, it’s about having fun.

The first evening, All Hallows Eve, is all about the children inviting the spirits of dead children to visit, and in Playa del Carmen this takes the form of families promenading down Avenue 5 and showing off their children’s wonderful Halloween costumes. There are skeletons, witches, corpse brides and all manner of ghosts and ghouls walking along the street, though our particular favourite was a tiny toddler dressed up in a pumpkin costume that was so big his hands and feet only just made it out through the orange skin, as if the pumpkin had fallen out of a tree onto his head and swallowed him almost whole. The children all carry little pumpkin-shaped bags that they hold out, looking for sweets from passers-by, so Peta grabbed a handful of one-peso sweets from a shop and handed them out in exchange for photographs; it was a trade that went down well.

Day two, All Saints Day, is when the adult spirits come to visit, and day three, All Souls Day, is when families decorate the graves of their loved ones. Each evening the children continue to bounce along the main drag in their costumes, politely pestering the tourists at their restaurant tables, though by the third evening it does rather reach the point where the novelty has worn off. And then it’s all over for another year, and the spirits retreat back to where they came from, while life in the realm of the living gets slowly back to normal.

Panic in Paradise

Written: 2 November 2013

I’ve written before about how scared I am of travelling, and it’s probably down to the fact that I’m intrinsically unsuited to this way of life. Peta pointed it out the other day in worryingly accurate detail: I get seriously homesick and always have, my stomach is sensitive to the slightest hint of microbial activity, my brain melts in the tropical heat, I have a painful lower back problem that’s triggered by carrying a backpack, my favourite place in the world is our sofa by the fire, and I burn in the sun even when I cower away under an umbrella. On paper, I’m the last person you’d expect to see on the road.

This comes to a head at the start of every trip, and in particular when the plane lands. My mind starts to whizz and whirr, imagining the worst possible things that can happen. We won’t be able to find anywhere to stay; we’ll get into the wrong taxi at the airport and will end up in the middle of nowhere; our bags will go missing; we’ll be slammed in the face by the language barrier and unconcerned locals; the list goes on. It never turns out that way of course, but for some reason, this time things have really hit the fan, because I’ve been getting serious panic attacks ever since we started packing up the house a couple of weeks ago, and they have only just gone away (though thankfully I’m now through the other end and ready to start exploring).

It makes sense, in a way, because as I’ve already mentioned, we really put ourselves through the wringer in the month before we left on this trip. I thought it would be nice having a month off before hitting the road; it would be a chance to learn some Spanish and to relax before packing up the house and hopping on the plane. But in the end it nearly broke us; after seven amazingly happy years in our rented cottage in Ealing, the emotional wrench of packing the whole lot up and leaving the house forever proved too much, especially when combined with a diary groaning under the pressure of seeing practically everyone we know before we hit the road. It feels churlish to complain about the stresses of what on the surface appears to be a year-long holiday, but I never again want to go through a month like that.

It really hit me on the first night of the Day of the Dead, the three-day-long Halloween-esque celebration that the Mexicans throw themselves into with characteristic gusto. As families wandered down the main drag in Playa del Carmen dressed as pumpkins, brides, skeletons, witches and zombies, I felt the panic rising in my chest and had a full-blown panic attack, right there in the street. Peta saved the day by guiding me to a cold beer and a quiet table just down a side street, but there is no doubt that the combined stresses of October, the oppressive humidity and the jet lag have fried my brain. I’m not a rootless young man any more and I clearly can’t cope with the physical and emotional strain in the same way that I used to. It was all a bit of a shock, to be honest.

A doctor would probably have prescribed a nice long holiday to get over it. The trouble is, it was a year-long holiday that was the main cause of the problem; the panicking part of me freaked out and got scared witless about the next year, and it was totally illogical. Deep inside I know that this year will end up being excellent and legendary, and that we’ll look back on my initial panicking in Playa with raised eyebrows and a shrug, but at the time it felt like we’d just tipped over the top edge of the roller-coaster, and my stomach shot into my mouth and stayed there for about three days.

I guess that’s one of the points of changing your life, but I can’t believe it freaked me out so much. Everyone said to us before we left, ‘I bet you must be excited.’ Truth be told, we weren’t excited, we were unnerved, but it makes it all the sweeter now that we’re ready to hit our stride and the panic has subsided. If that was the illness, bring on the cure!

Cozumel

Written: 2 November 2013

To be fair, we didn’t even try to do Cozumel justice. Mexico’s biggest island is world famous for its scuba diving and snorkelling, but we figured we’d take it easy and simply pop over for a day trip on the ferry from Playa del Carmen, as there’s no point in rushing things when you’ve got so much time to do it in. Besides, a trip on the ferry sounded like fun, and it turned out to be a better idea than another day on the beach, as the weather suddenly switched from the pure blue skies and 30 degree humidity of the early morning, to a mid-morning of overcast and ominously thundery skies.

Of course, it chose to do this just as the ferry set off on the 45-minute crossing. We’d grabbed a seat on deck at the back of the ferry, where Peta struck up a conversation with a very friendly local family whose matriarch insisted on smilingly talking to us in Spanish, despite us obviously failing to understand a word (our Spanish is basic, to say the least, but we’re learning something new every day, particularly in the area of optimistic sign language). Luckily one of her daughters spoke French, having spent eight months living there, so we spent the first half of the journey chatting in basic French while the mother kept jabbering on in animated Spanish, punctuated by loud laughs and giggling fits.

The torrential downpour struck us without much warning, though perhaps we should have taken more notice of the bruised skies hurling towards us as we boarded the ferry. Peta and I retreated under cover while the hardier locals braved it out for another ten minutes before they too ran laughing and screaming under the awnings. The rain kept pummelling the sea until we eventually bobbed into Cozumel harbour, and after a quick dash from the open-air gang-plank into the terminal building, we stood there wiping the drops from our eyes while torrents of water flowed down the main drag in San Miguel de Cozumel, the main town on the island. We’d long since abandoned any plans to go sightseeing around the island, and figured we would head for the only bona fide tourist attraction in San Miguel, the Museo de la Isla. The only problem was getting there, as the roads were now little more than fast-flowing rivers.

It was certainly entertaining, river-hopping along the sea front from traffic island to traffic island, while taxis ploughed through the rapids, pushing wave fronts in front of them and over the shoes of the befuddled tourists in the taxi queue. We eventually reached the museum and drip-dried ourselves among a number of interesting exhibits about Cozumel’s history and underwater coral kingdoms, while the storm slowly abated, leaving a steaming Cozumel behind to be explored. We headed into the backstreets for our first meal in a proper, local Mexican restaurant, where we stumbled through the menu in our faltering Spanish and enjoyed a lovely meal for a pittance, and at last it felt as if we’d actually started travelling, albeit in a rather minor way.

We even made friends in the main square with an American couple who’d seen us in the restaurant and thought it worth mentioning, as not many tourists made it that far off the main plaza. They told us all about the diving in the area and pointed us in the direction of a pretty decent coffee joint so we could stock up on caffeine before braving the return journey to Playa. And after bumping into the giggling family of locals once again in the main square, we smiled our way back on the ferry, happy to have made our first excursion of the trip. After all, you have to start somewhere, and start we have...

Diving Rain

Written: 7 November 2013

When I first tried to sell the idea of this trip to Peta, it’s just possible that I might have mentioned the tropics a little bit too much, because if there’s one thing she hates, it’s cold weather. ‘How do you fancy a year in the tropics?’ I’d say. ‘Don’t worry, we can skip southern Chile and Argentina, let’s just stick to, you know, all those tropical paradises. The ones with all that warm, tropical weather. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Being tropical and toasty all the time? Anyway, turn the fire up, would you, it’s freezing out there...’

And it does sound good, but there’s one thing about tropical weather that I didn’t press home, and that’s how insanely wet it is. The tropics are hot and steamy for a reason: it rains biblically. If you want hot and dry, you need the desert zones of Africa or Asia, but you probably want to steer clear of the blustery end of the hurricane season in the Caribbean, because when it rains, it absolutely buckets down.

‘Never mind,’ we thought as the first few sunny days of our trip sank into dark skies and thunderstorms so severe that they turned roads into rivers and hopeful restaurant owners into resigned hermits. ‘We’re going to be on a scuba course when the weather turns sour,’ and indeed we were, though Mexico’s stubbornly wet season would turn out to be too wet, even for scuba. Which I didn’t even think was possible...

Learning to Dive... Again

Learning to scuba dive in the azure Caribbean Sea was another carrot I dangled in front of Peta, though to be honest I think I probably had her at, ‘How do you fancy a whole year of tropical weather?’ So before leaving home we tracked down a reputable dive operator who offered the PADI Open Water course and booked a place for Peta; in the end we chose a company called Dive Mex based on their excellent ratings, and they turned out to be a good choice. We also booked me on a refresher course, as it’s been some 16 years since I last did a scuba dive, and despite owning my own dust-laden scuba gear (which we didn’t bring because there’s no way we’re lugging that around), I’ve forgotten everything I ever knew about diving.

The first day of the course consisted of a long afternoon in the pool, but the driving rains from the night before were so heavy that one pool was closed because there was too much water, and the backup pool was so full of water from the surrounding roofs that visibility was about a foot. This would have freaked me out if I was scuba diving for the first time, as it took me a good two days to get through the PADI course’s three pool dives when I learned to dive back in New Zealand; I’ve always been scared by water, so I had a whole suitcase of phobias to overcome when I did it, though thanks to a patient instructor in a one-on-one environment, I got through it in the end. Not so Peta, who used to go snorkelling for hours at a time when she was a kid; she burned her way through the exercises, from breathing underwater to clearing flooded masks, and all this in a swimming pool with the visibility of lemon barley water. By the end, when we’d stirred up the bottom sediment into a whirl of milky mess, we couldn’t make out the instructors at all, but if you can learn to dive in murky water then the sea is going to be a breeze, so the instructors happily signed her off. Rain didn’t quite stop play, but it was a close call.

Unfortunately the next day it was genuinely too wet to scuba dive, as the crazy weather had stirred up the sea into a tidal frenzy that was too much for the dive boats, so with a ban on all diving in place for the next 24 hours, we finished off the written exams (or rather Peta did, as I’d already ticked those boxes back in 1997) and waited for her first sea dive the following day.

Peta, of course, did brilliantly. We set off in a small dive boat with another group who were doing the nitrox course (nitrox allows you to stay underwater longer, but you need special training to use it safely), and after they rolled backwards off the boat into their dive, we bumped our way along the coast to our dive spot, where Peta managed all her practical exercises with ease (‘You’re a natural,’ said her instructor for the day, which was patently true).

I didn’t fare quite so well. I’ve always had a tumultuous relationship with the sea, not least because of the long-term seasickness I suffered when I sailed non-stop to French Polynesia back in 1997. These days the problem is partly pavlovian: I know I get seasick, so I start to worry about it, and because seasickness is all in the mind, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I deal with this by studiously avoiding the sea unless it’s absolutely necessary, but it’s a bit hard to avoid dive boats if you want to go diving, and given that over the next few months we’re skirting round one of the top areas for diving on the planet, it’s an issue that’s at least worth trying to tackle.

By the time we got to the dive site, I was having to concentrate on the horizon a little to avidly; we’d dithered about for some time while dropping off the nitrox gang, and the exhaust fumes from the boat’s twin engines had blown up my nose and directly into the memory centre of my brain, where the peculiarly nautical smell of marine diesel brought back memories of me cowering in the bottom of an ocean-going yacht, sobbing uncontrollably after hurling my dinner over the side yet again. Luckily a quick and effective way to stop seasickness in its tracks is to get into the sea, so I scrambled into my scuba gear as quickly as my trembling muscles would allow, and we all sank gently into the tropical seas.

All of a sudden the scuba took over, and my brain was too occupied with the mind-bending experience of breathing underwater, equalising your ears every few seconds, drifting with the current, controlling your breathing to rise up and down over the reef, and all the other aspects of scuba that are freakish at first, but which soon become second nature. I did have a bit of a moment where I burped some 30 feet down and it turned out to contain a little bit more of my breakfast than I’d anticipated, but even that didn’t bring on the seasickness; I just removed my regulator, spat it all out and popped it back in as if nothing had happened. ‘Like a pro,’ I thought as we headed back to the surface.

Ah, the surface. As my head broke into the sunlight, the fumes from the engine blew into my face, and boom, up came coffee and orange juice in a brown slick that propelled me to the front bow, where I had one more heave before feeling well enough to get back on the boat. There I threw myself over the side and emptied my guts with the nonchalant air of the well-practised professional. ‘God, are you OK?’ asked the instructor, surprised at how violent my breakfast was proving to be, and I just smiled and said I was fine. Hell, there was nothing left, so I figured we might as well head off for the second dive, which Peta passed with flying colours and an iron stomach.

Back on dry land I sank into a funk of dehydration and severe weakness that finally passed after an hour of gingerly supping Coke and nibbling on salty cheese biscuits. Peta, it turned out, didn’t get off without her own injuries; at the end of her first dive she’d come out with blood streaming down her left forearm, and by the end of the second dive her whole arm had come up in little red welts that felt like she’d had a fight with a kettle and lost. We fled to the hotel to nurse our wounds, and as we relaxed into the stability of Mother Earth, the sore throat that had been nagging me since the pool dives – which I’d assumed was a simple result of breathing dry tank air and sleeping with the air-conditioning on – broke into a full-on head cold that blocked my nose and effectively put my scuba career on hold, as you can’t dive with congestion (with a blocked nose it isn’t possible to equalise the pressure in your ears as you descend, which can lead to excruciating pain and pretty serious damage to your ear canal).

So I spent the next day playing hide and seek with the thunderstorms on the beach while Peta successfully finished off her final two sea dives, where she earned a big thumbs up from the instructor for using the same amount of air as he did, which is no mean feat as most novice divers (me included) plough through the air far more quickly than seasoned professionals. That said, she also came back looking like she’d been in a fight with a creature from the depths: her welted arm still hurts, caused, it turns out, by brushing against some all but invisible fire weed on the guide rope on the way down to our first dive; she has bruises on her chin and shoulder from a face-plant into the boat when it unexpectedly hit a wave; there are a couple of evil-looking rope burns on her forearm, and a painful bruise on the underside of her foot from a bizarre ladder-related accident when climbing back into the boat; her right ear is swollen and suffering from a painful case of swimmer’s ear; and she has a small but bright red bruise on her elbow from when she had to remove her scuba kit during one of the exercises and the tank hit her. She may have been first in her class of one, but she had to fight her way to the top, and she’s got the scars to prove it.

We’re now both ready to go diving in the Caribbean, though, and after seasickness, painful welts, congested sinuses and rain stopping play, I suspect that things can only get better. This is the tropics, after all, and I made a promise, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed...

Making the First Move

Written: 9 November 2013

Making the first move is always a bit scary, whether you’re travelling or trying to meet your future wife, but sometimes you just have to bite the bullet. After ten days of being on holiday in Playa del Carmen, which we spent getting over jet lag, learning to dive and trying to acclimatise to the tropical fug, we finally decided to hit the road for the first bit of real travelling on this trip.

As this was our first step into the unknown for a very long time, we took it very slowly, particularly as Peta’s bout of swimmer’s ear is really getting on her nerves (though it’s now under attack from some Mexican antibiotic ear drops, so its days are numbered). Just down the coast from Playa is the town of Tulum, which is home to some famous Mayan ruins perched right there on the shore, so we thought we’d give ourselves an easy checklist for the day: get out of Playa, get to Tulum, find somewhere to stay and pat ourselves on the back, leaving the ruins themselves for the following day.

I’m not doing that well at acclimatising to the thick blanket of tropical air that smothers this part of the world, so while tossing and turning in damp sheets last night, I got myself in a bit of a nervous twitch about leaving the cocoon of our Playa hotel, even though deep down I knew there was nothing to worry about. In the event the hardest thing about getting started was packing everything up again after a week and a half of slouching in our room, but we managed to get it together and checked out of the hotel at a reasonable hour, before taking a slow stroll down Avenue Quinta towards the bus station, weighed down by full packs and scorching sunshine.

By this point we’d simply started ignoring the touts, who’d been getting on our nerves for a good week or so; some of them had started turning a bit nasty, I felt, which is rarely a good trait in successful salesmen, and indeed, they hadn’t been remotely successful, because our reactions had morphed from politely saying ‘No gracias, no quiero comprar un sombrero’ (‘No thanks, I don’t want to buy a sombrero’) to us glaring at them as they tried to claim that hey, they’d already met us and didn’t we remember them (they hadn’t and we didn’t) and would we like a ferry ticket to Cozumel (no, we wouldn’t) and why were we ignoring them (so we stopped ignoring them and told the muppets where they could stick it).

So it was a relief to turn into Calle 2 and up to the colectivo stand, away from the imbeciles on main street. We’d decided to go local and try getting a shared taxi instead of the bus, as this is how the locals tend to get around. Colectivos are the spiritual cousins of Indonesia’s bemos and West Africa’s bush taxis; they are small minibuses that wait around until they fill up with passengers, and then they head off to their destination, dropping people off as they go and picking more people up en route. In Indonesia the bemos are an exercise in wide-eyed madness, with the ticket boys screaming out the destination at anyone and everyone as passengers pile on top of each other, while the driving skills make your eyes pop out on stalks, and not just from the G-forces. The West African bush taxi, on the other hand, can take hours to fill up, and may only make it a few minutes into the journey before the first tyre blows, followed by the second, and eventually followed by the whole thing careering off the road altogether.

Mexican colectivos, though, are amazingly civilised (or they are in the Yucatán, anyway). Instead of sharing our minibus with the world and his wife and his chicken and his goat, we enjoyed an air-conditioned ride in a smoothly running, almost new vehicle, with one person per comfortable seat, gentle opera on the music system and an almost instant departure: we simply walked up to the colectivo stand, said ‘Tulum’ when the man looked at us, and followed his finger when he pointed out two empty seats in an almost full minibus. During the 45-minute journey a few people yelled out when they reached their stop – colectivos will stop anywhere, you just have to shout – and then the driver slammed on the brakes as hard as he could, throwing everyone into the back of the seat in front, but that was about as adventurous as the driving got. Sure, the journey from Playa to Tulum is a simple straight line down the highway, so perhaps it isn’t the best route for the driver to show off his video-game skills, but I was still impressed at how safe it all felt. We will, no doubt, look back on this journey with dewy-eyed fondness once we’ve been through the ringer of Latin American chicken-bus journeys, but for now it’s a rather civilised thumbs up.

We arrived in Tulum to find that the hotel we’d earmarked in the guidebook had moved a few blocks along the road, and after a rather hot and sticky walk we also found out that they were full, but there were plenty of other hotels along the main road in Tulum, so we picked another from the book that was nearby, found a nice little room for 500 pesos a night (about £25) and dumped our bags. ‘Mission accomplished,’ we thought, and settled down to do pretty much nothing for the rest of the day, while Peta’s ears healed up and I silently celebrated leaping over the first psychological barrier of our trip. It might only be a short 45-minute journey, but we have demonstrated that we can independently move from one place to another, and that’s essentially all you need to do if you want to travel from Mexico to Brazil in a year – you just have to keep doing it.

So that’s one small step in the bag; only another hundred or so to go, though first we’ve got some Mayan ruins to explore...

Tulum Pueblo

Written: 10 November 2013

I have discovered the first place in Mexico that I really don’t like, and its name is Tulum Pueblo. It’s important not to confuse Tulum Pueblo – a drawn-out town along the main coastal highway of the state of Quintana Roo – with the ancient Mayan ruins of Tulum Ruinas or the area of hotels along Tulum Beach, as the three different Tulums are quite separate from each other and are only connected by taxi rides. We came to the area for the coastal ruins, which are spectacular, and we thought Tulum Pueblo would make a decent base, as it has more affordable hotels and restaurants than Tulum Beach.

Things started well. We arrived and found a hotel, and Peta took a siesta to help rest her swimmer’s ear while I pottered around and did a little writing. The hotel, L’Hotelito on the main drag, was charming, and our room had powerful but silent fans, mosquito nets and pretty decor overlooking a green and lush courtyard, and I started to relax after our early start from Playa del Carmen. Sure, there were some strange noises coming from the main road, where cars kept driving up and down with blaring loudspeakers that sounded eerily like the off-world adverts in Blade Runner, and when an almighty thunderstorm clapped itself into constant and insistent rain just after the sun went down, it did start to feel slightly off-kilter, just like Philip K Dick’s dystopian novel that inspired the film... but hey, even when we discovered two sets of earplugs in the complimentary toiletries kit and a big bag of weed in the bedside drawer, we didn’t suspect anything untoward was up. Why would you?

So we went out for an evening stroll, where we watched the locals playing football and basketball before settling in for an Italian meal on the main drag. We made friends with a white-haired German on the next table called Johannes, who looked uncannily like Rutger Hauer, and later on in the evening a seriously stoned and drunk American strolled by, sloshing a glass of beer in his hand as he locked eyes on Johannes and declared that he looked exactly like a picture of an Italian film star on the hotel wall behind us, before slouching off down the road into his own personal oblivion. The fact that the American had the same pinched face as JF Sebastian, the Blade Runner character who has premature ageing due to Methuselah Syndrome, was surely just a coincidence, but these constant flashbacks to Ridley Scott’s finest were starting to get strange.

The restaurant kindly plied us with complimentary tequila after the meal, which fuelled more pleasant conversation with Johannes, and by ten o’clock we were starting to fade, so we bade him goodnight and headed off into the night, where the bars along the main drag were just starting to turn up their music, even though they didn’t have any customers yet. It all looked a bit forlorn, to be honest, not unlike the futuristic netherworld of Los Angeles, 2019.

Half an hour after putting out the lights, all hell broke loose in our room. The noise of the bars from the main drag had been fairly loud when we turned in, so we finally understood what the earplugs were for, but it wasn’t too bad until the band in the club right next door plugged in and started playing the loudest set of exuberant salsa music you’ve ever heard. Peta and I literally had to shout to each other to be heard, and the set continued without taking a breath until 3am, at which point the noise from another club at the end of the block took over and continued to pound until 5am. That’s when the behemoth trucks that pound the coastal highway started up, shaking the hotel walls as they roared past into the dawn light. Peta managed to get some sleep; I, however, stayed awake through every single beat, and I’m still shaking. My earplugs didn’t stand a chance; the repetitive ding, ding, ding of the inevitable cow bell went on for hours, drilling into my mind and wiring my eyes wide open until the dawn broke. If androids dream of electric sheep, I figured, then they were a darn sight luckier than I’d been, having to put up with the endless industrial strength of the neighbours just the other side of what felt like a very thin wall. The club, it turned out, was called Curandero, and it peddles ‘live music and DJ beats every week’ in ‘one of the hottest spots after the sun goes down’, according to the Tulum Living website. It also has ‘open wall windows’ that keep ‘the dance floor cool while party goers dance the night away’; perhaps that’s why it felt like we were trying to sleep in the middle of a nightclub, because effectively, we were.

Bad Italian Coffee

The next morning the Italian owners of the hotel managed to serve lukewarm and astonishingly insipid coffee without the hint of a smile – a sure sign that these citizens of a country obsessed with quality coffee had given up hope of ever leading a normal life with such a wretched noise next door every weekend – so we checked out and wandered away from the main road to find a quieter hotel that we hoped would withstand the aural armageddon that was apparently going to be repeated on Sunday night. We dumped our bags and turned back to our original plan for the day, to visit the comparatively wonderful Tulum Ruinas.

After enjoying the atmospherics of the coastal Mayan ruins, we grabbed lunch on the main road, where the wide-eyed American from the night before had set up shop with his dog, where he was trying to persuade visiting tourists to buy him a beer, or failing that, to give him some money because apparently his dog was ill and he couldn’t afford to buy him any antibiotics (though the dog was, of course, fine, it had just been trained to lie down and look docile). His feeble patter didn’t work on the pasty collection of white people in the restaurant, who seemed to mainly consist of twenty-something Australian girls who were smothered in huge and frightening tattoos that they would absolutely loathe in ten years’ time. We didn’t hang around long enough to see if it worked on anyone; instead we left him to keep on supping at his ceramic mug of moonshine, or whatever it was that he sipped in the tell-tale style of the alcoholic.

(On the subject of tattoos, I’ve been amazed at the number and size of tattoos on the westerners that I’ve seen in this part of Mexico. Every now and then you see a tattoo that’s not too bad, but the vast majority look like they’ve been done by people practising to be tattoo artists, and with some way to go until they graduate. It’s a bit unnerving, to be honest, seeing this bizarre desire to turn oneself into a complete tit; it reminded me of the depressing westerners I saw in Thailand, and that is not a good thing, believe me.)

Tears of a Clown

After another wet and humid night that felt like armageddon had come – made much more bearable by the new hotel we were in, which was a lot quieter and more pleasant – we booked a ticket on the midday bus for our next destination, Valladolid, and settled into a restaurant on the main drag for a Mexican omelette and a coffee. And it was here that something happened that sums up Tulum Pueblo perfectly.

There we were, minding our own business, when an American woman, who must have been about sixty, wandered along the street wearing clown make-up and dragging along a dog who was also dolled up in weird face paint. She interrupted our meal to introduce herself as a clown with a mariachi dog, and would we like to hear the dog sing for us? I just raised my eyebrows and looked down at my omelette with a sigh, but she locked eyes with Peta and started telling us depressingly lame jokes with the dejected air of someone who is going through the motions to an audience who doesn’t care (which was pretty much spot on). Eventually we pointed out that no, we didn’t fancy any more jokes thank you, and when she asked whether we’d be interested in seeing the dog sing and, oh, by the way, whether we could perhaps come up with five or ten pesos for her performance, we said we’d rather not hear that, thank you, and I coughed up ten pesos just to get some peace (I didn’t have five pesos, or it would have been less). She said thank you and moved along, dragging the dog behind her in her search for more tourists to trap.

Tulum: it’s where screwed-up white people go to beg for pesos from other white people, and that’s about as appealing as it sounds. Never mind, the guidebooks describe Valladolid as having ‘quiet streets and pastel walls’; I’ll take that over dystopia any day.

Tulum Ruinas

Written: 10 November 2013

In contrast to the dire and depressing nearby town of the same name, the Mayan ruins of Tulum are an utter delight. Their main attraction isn’t the architecture as such (though that’s pretty good) but the deeply atmospheric location, perched on top of a cliff overlooking the blue Caribbean Sea.

Of course, being a picturesque ruin near the most tourist-friendly corner of the Yucatán Peninsula has its disadvantages, and the large number of tourists can seem a little cattle-like, especially at the weekend. But the mark of a good attraction is whether you can still lose yourself in the moment while surrounded by hordes of cameras and crowds, and we found it pretty easy at the Tulum ruins. It’s great.

The ruins date from the 13th to the 15th century, and although they are roped off and a fair distance from the walkways, you still get a good feeling for the layout of this important port town, which was only abandoned some 70 years after the Spanish arrived in Central America. The most impressive building, which is perched right on the cliff and dominates the site, is the Castillo, from where you can walk down a wooden staircase to a lovely little beach. When we visited on a Sunday, the beach was pretty busy; one interesting side effect is that this must be one of the only archaeological sites on the planet where young girls wander through the ancient ruins wearing nothing but bikinis, posing on the cliff-tops and the beaches in that hip-thrusting way that the Latin Americans have made their own.

The views from the Castillo across to other buildings – particularly the Templo del Dios Viento, which lies on the other side of a beach that’s closed to tourists due to the turtles who use it to hatch their eggs – are as pretty as postcards, so it’s no surprise that the outlooks are rammed with couples pulling selfies and young men photographing their posing other halves with ancient Maya in the background. Instead of ruining the ruins, I thought it all rather fun and surprisingly apt; the temples of Tulum were dedicated to the worship of the setting sun (which is why most of the building entrances face west) and there’s nothing more romantic than holding hands as the daylight gently sinks into the sunset. Sure, brazenly Brazilian bikinis were probably pretty rare in the days of ancient Maya, but in some sense, the same worship still goes on today in these pretty ruins by the sea.

Valladolid

Written: 12 November 2013

It’s a cliché for a reason, but everything looks better in the sunshine. Soon after our arrival in Valladolid, an old Spanish colonial town a couple of hours’ drive west of Tulum, the by-now-familiar clouds rolled in and the heavy tropical rains kicked in, just as we’d headed out to explore the main plaza. Luckily the Spanish built their plazas with colonnades around the outside, so we dashed under cover as the plaza flooded in seconds, and the traffic started driving wakes against the pavement like over-zealous motorboats by the beach.

This didn’t exactly help us fall in love with Valladolid, as it’s getting a bit tiresome having to duck into yet another restaurant for yet another cup of coffee while the storms blow themselves out. Everything is wet all the time and everyone cowers indoors while their thunder gods get things out of their system, and as we poked our heads out into the gloom once the torrents had dried into a light drizzle, it really felt like a Monday afternoon. According to the people who live here, this year has been wetter than normal, and it feels like it; walking around Valladolid in the gloomy rain, you can’t help noticing the black mould that’s reclaiming the whitewashed walls as its own. Everything’s getting a bit damp and rotten, even the architecture.

Thank goodness for the sun, then, which came out the next day and managed to keep shining until well into the afternoon, giving us the opportunity to wander round Valladolid in a much more amenable atmosphere. We’d decided to take a rest day before tackling the area’s main attraction, the Mayan ruins of Chichén Itzá, and it was such a relief not to have to spend it cooped up inside, especially as Valladolid is a charming place to explore on foot. When the rains disappear, roads lined by hitherto cowering doorways open up to show a whole world of shops and human activity tucked away in the thick-walled colonial buildings; when shuttered up, the roads are a bit claustrophobic, with their high but very thin pavements (they’re high to stop the buildings from flooding in the tropical rain, of course), but once the weather improves, things look up.

Once the sun puts his hat on, the shutters come up and lo and behold, there’s humanity to see in all its glory, whether it’s the weird shop that sells TVs, computers, mobile phones and, of course, motorbikes all in the same display; or the large number of chemists with their drugs stacked up to the ceiling behind their counters, and the small doctor’s surgeries whose waiting rooms sport cheap plastic chairs, peeling paint and little else; or even the tiny restaurants that specialise in chicken dishes, or tacos, or things that you probably have to be Mexican to understand. In the sun, you can peer into the buildings of Valladolid, and all of a sudden it’s that much more interesting.

Off to Church

The town centre is clustered round the airy green space of the main plaza, and in particular the Parque Francisco Cantón Rosado. This luscious park contains a surprisingly large number of loveseats, where two stone seats face towards each other but offset to the side, much like business class sleeper seats on modern aeroplanes. If you wander through the park at night, it’s easy to see why they’re there, for this is where couples come to canoodle, no doubt to get away from prying family eyes.

Overlooking the square, like the beady eyes of the mother-in-law, is the two-towered Cathedral de San Gervasio, which in keeping with the overall vibe of the town has trees growing out of the top of the towers, themselves (like the rest of the town) slowly mouldering into black in the oppressive humidity. It’s charming, and this is probably why the main square in Valladolid is one of those must-see stops on those godawful coach trips that plague the touristy north of the Yucatán Peninsula, and in the afternoon the square clogs up with two or three air-conditioned buses at a time, each of them spilling out their pasty tour groups into the church; in the rain, the tourists all carry the same pink-themed umbrella of the tour company, making the exodus look more like a works outing from Willy Wonka’s factory than a cultural exploration of Mexico’s colonial religious history.

Inside the church, in time-honoured style, donation boxes ask for help in maintaining the church roof, though the gory and bleeding nature of the Christ effigies that they use to leverage Catholic guilt in the visitors are a bit of a shock to those, like me, who learned their religion from the rather more liberal Church of England. There are beggars in the church doorway too, which on first sight looks like one of those tired old scams from Tulum, but I saw the same beggars plying their trade in the morning in the food hall across the square, and the locals all gave money to them as they passed by the tables, so I suspect they’re the real deal (and shame on me for thinking otherwise, I thought guiltily).

We also ate well in Valladolid. On our first evening we ate at an atmospheric restaurant called Conato 1910, which was tucked away in the backstreets, away from the plaza; the building used to be used by revolutionaries as a meeting place back in the early 20th century, and the decor was suitably ancient. The food was excellent – in particular, the guacamole was the best that Peta had ever tasted – and simply wandering through the streets at night, by now bone dry after the day’s soaking, was a delight.

The other place with great food couldn’t have been more different; for breakfast we wandered over to the food hall just off the square, where a busy little food stall sold an amazing range of breakfast and lunch dishes for a pittance. We went up to the counter, where a huge man sat, waiting to write down the orders; I put on my best Spanish accent to order coffee, fruit juice and huevos a la Mexicana (that’s scrambled eggs with chicken, tomatoes, onions and peppers), and Peta had a huge fruit bowl with yoghurt and granola, and we took a numbered ticket from the man and sat back to listen out for our order number, 15, or quince (pronounced ‘keen-say’) as they say round these parts. Amazingly we did manage to recognise our order number being announced through the melee, and I wandered up to the counter to fetch a huge feast of Mexican delight that came to exactly 101 pesos, or just under a fiver. It made the ridiculous prices in Playa del Carmen look as offensive as Playa’s touts, which is saying something.

So we might not have done a lot in Valladolid, but it was just what we needed. With the fiasco in Tulum, we were starting to get a bit sick of moving hotel every night, and a rest day in lovely Valladolid was just what the doctor ordered.

With this Ring

Written: 12 November 2013

There are some parts of the world that take their religious morals really seriously, and although the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico isn’t one of them, there are some countries in Central America where you have to be careful not to cause offence... and we’re planning to visit some of them.

Consider the case of 19-year-old Glenda Xiomara Cruz in El Salvador, who went to hospital with abdominal pains and severe bleeding back in October 2012. It turned out she was having a miscarriage, but she didn’t even know she was pregnant, as her menstrual cycle and her weight were practically unchanged and she’d had a negative pregnancy test six months before. She lost the baby, and four days later she was charged with the murder of her unborn child; abortion is illegal in El Salvador, and the legal system in a number of central American countries – including El Salvador and, surprisingly, Mexico – is that you are guilty until proven innocent, so it’s easy for the authorities to believe claims that miscarriages are intentionally induced when they aren’t, and there’s not a lot the defendant can do about it (in this case, it was claims by Cruz’s abusive ex-husband that swayed the judges). Cruz started a ten-year sentence for murder last month. Welcome to Central America.

With this in mind, we’ve been looking for wedding rings, so that we don’t accidentally offend any overly zealous sensibilities when booking into hotel rooms with double beds. We left our proper rings back in England, as the combined value of them comes to around twice the per capita gross domestic product for El Salvador, according to the 2012 IMF figures; translated into western figures, this would be the equivalent of walking around London with £57,000 of bling on your fingers, but in a country with a rather more liberal attitude to taking what you want without worrying about the niceties. That’s probably asking for trouble, so we left them at home.

We first tried to get cheap wedding rings in Argos back in London, but we’d left it too late as they didn’t have anything in our sizes (interestingly, we met a girl at the same counter who was buying a wedding ring for exactly the same purpose; perhaps it’s travellers who buy wedding rings from Argos, as I’ve often wondered who does). We also looked around in Playa del Carmen, but they don’t sell cheap tat, they sell expensive tat, and they claim that everything is ‘the real silver’ when it’s clearly not. Hallmarking is a technology that has yet to reach the touts of Mexico, so after trawling through a few shops, we figured we’d do better elsewhere.

We weren’t expecting to find the answer to our prayers in Valladolid, but we did. There in the foyer of the Hotel Zaci – Zaci being the ancient Mayan name for the town before the Spanish wrestled it from their hands – was a small display of books and jewellery, and there, at one end, was a collection of bone rings that looked pretty wedding-shaped, and which were retailing at the princely sum of 15 pesos each, or just over 70p. We tried them on and they fitted, and the woman couldn’t believe her ears when we said I’d like to buy one for my wife and, yes, one for me too.

And so we’ve effectively renewed our vows under Mayan skies, and we can both stop absently feeling the ring fingers on our left hands, wondering where our lovely little bands of platinum have gone. They’re back, and although the surrogates are just a little cheaper than the originals, they’re still completely priceless to us.

Chichén Itzá

Written: 13 November 2013

There are some people on the travelling circuit who grumble about Chichén Itzá, usually because it annoys them that it’s one of the most popular tourist sites in Mexico, and they’re the kind of people who just don’t do populism, man; or perhaps they’re travelling on a tight budget, and they complain about the price of a ticket, which at 182 pesos (about £9) is considerably more than, say, Tulum’s 57 pesos (though it’s hardly a big ask for such a world-class site). But there’s a reason why 1.2 million people visit the ruins of this ancient Mayan city each year, and that’s because it’s amazing. And even if you don’t like crowds, I wouldn’t worry, because it’s such a big site that it’s easy to look past the hordes of tour groups and Mayan hawkers, and just enjoy staring at the magnificent architecture instead.

We kicked off our exploration of the many Mayan ruins of this part of the world with the gentle coastal site of Tulum, but where Tulum is all about the location and less about the architecture, Chichén Itzá is definitely about the buildings. They date from the second century AD to around 1200 AD, and after the site was abandoned in 1224, it lay in ruins, slowly mouldering under the encroaching forest until the hacienda containing the ancient city was bought at the beginning of the 20th century by Edward Thompson, a Harvard professor, for a whopping 750 pesos (that’s about £35). He started excavating and exploring, and the result is one of the New7Wonders Foundation’s ‘New Seven Wonders of the World’, if you’re the kind of person who likes internationally compiled and hugely subjective lists (the others being the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Christ the Redeemer in Rio, the Colosseum in Rome, Machu Picchu and Petra, in case you were wondering).

But before you get to see anything, you have to negotiate the insanely busy entrance hall, which is made all the more complicated by the fact that you have to buy two separate tickets from two separate booths – one for the federal government and another for the state agency that administers the site – so that’s two separate queues that are kept moving at a snail’s pace by two separate teams of equally dozy ticket sellers; at the state agency booth, the man serving me kept staring at his phone throughout our transaction, which meant he had to feel around for the change like a blind man, which only added to the sense of apathy. But once we got our tickets and joined a third queue to get through the gates, we were in, and boy, is it worth the Mexican bureaucracy.

Pyramids, Ball Games and Skulls

After a short walk along a path that’s lined with Mayan stands selling all manner of tourist tack, from models of Mayan pyramids to skull masks, the first building looms up in front of you, and it’s absolutely immense. El Castillo – which is what the Spanish called the Pyramid of Kukulcán – is a 25m-high pyramid with steps up each of the four sides, though unfortunately you aren’t allowed to climb them. It dominates a large grassy expanse with a number of other large buildings dotted around the edges, most of which had ritual or administrative uses in the life of the ancient city, not unlike the centre of a modern town. It’s an atmospheric sight, but there’s a lot more to Chichén Itzá than the much-photographed central area, where the biggest groups of tourists gather round their guides in the shade of the few trees that dot the perimeter.

Not far from the pyramid is the Great Ball Court, where the ancient Mayans used to play the Mesoamerican ballgame. The rules of the game aren’t known, but a modern version of the game is played that bears a resemblance to racquetball, and the court at Chichén Itzá is one of eight such courts in the ancient city; the game was clearly an important part of Mayan life. For modern visitors, the most intriguing aspect of the court is that you can stand at opposite ends of the arena and have a normal conversation, despite being some 135m away from each other; Peta and I tried it width-wise as it was a bit too crowded to test a length-wise conversation, and sure enough we could easily hear each other talking at a normal conversational level. It’s clever stuff.

Next door is the Platform of the Skulls, which was used to display the decapitated heads of sacrificial victims; the fact that it’s smothered in carvings of skulls and eagles tearing the hearts from men’s chests is a bit of a giveaway. After the skulls there’s a shady path that’s lined with yet more Mayan hawker stands, where they claim that everything is either ‘a dollar’ or ‘almost free’, though that’s clearly just a tactic to get you looking and negotiating; to be honest, the hawking is pretty tame, and they don’t pester you beyond simply announcing their existence, which is a relief. Anyway, the path peters out at the Sacred Cenote, a huge hole in the ground with a murky lake at the bottom, where excavations have turned up lots of human bones from the unlucky people who were cast into the cenote as human sacrifices (the cenote was supposed to be the entrance to the underworld, and it’s pretty easy to see why when you peer down into the 35m-deep hole).

Back in the main square, you come across the Temple of the Warriors and the Group of the Thousand Columns, where rows and rows of carved columns stretch into the distance. These columns once had a roof over them, which would have made for an impressive building, but now all that’s left are the columns, gently mouldering into the surrounding jungle. It’s a shame that you can’t climb to the top of these buildings, as by all accounts most of the good carvings can be found up there, but I guess you can’t have 1.2 million people a year pounding away at these already fragile structures.

More paths and more hawkers take you past the High Priest’s Grave (another pyramid) to El Caracol (‘the snail’), which looks for all the world like a tumble-down astronomical observatory; indeed, it turns out that the doors in the domed structure lined up with certain stars at specific times of the year, so it was a kind of observatory after all, and from the dome priests would announce when to plant and harvest crops, as well as times for celebrations and religious rituals.

The final clump of buildings, just past the observatory, is the Nunnery, so named because the conquering Spanish thought it looked like a European convent; it’s now thought to have been a place where Mayan royalty lived, and the carvings on the smaller buildings next door to the imposing 20m-high nunnery are exquisite. And just past them is Akab-Dzib, where the oldest ruins on site can be found, dating from the second century AD... and that’s pretty much the core of the Chichén Itzá experience.

Wandering Around

Chichén Itzá is packed with history and archaeological detail, absolutely everywhere you look. El Castillo, for example, is not only an impressive building that hides within its shell an even older pyramid dating from 800 AD; but the building’s design also represents the Mayan calendar, with four stairways of 91 steps each, plus the platform at the top giving 365, the number of days in a year... and each face of the pyramid has 52 flat panels, which correspond to the 52 years in the Mayan calendar... and each of the nine levels is divided in two by the staircase, giving 18 separate terraces that correspond to the 18 months of the Mayan year (each of them 20 days long). Oh, and at the equinoxes, the sunlight shines through the steps to show an illusion of a moving serpent on the staircase. It’s fascinating stuff.

But you can get bogged down in all this detail, avidly turning the pages in your guidebook to reveal yet another fact about yet another building, but I found that the best way to enjoy it was just to wander through the site, thinking that a thousand years ago, this was a bustling city, with high priests, human sacrifices, markets, and at the height of its fame, some 90,000 inhabitants going about their daily lives. The jungle might have reclaimed most of the original 30km^2 city, but what’s left is impressive and moving, and if you can’t see the beauty for the crowds, then you’re really missing the point.

Even with the endless stalls of Mayan chess sets and model Castillos, and group after group after group of sweating tourists with glazed looks and video cameras, Chichén Itzá is astounding. Just imagine what it would have been like a hundred years ago, when the whole thing lay buried under the canopy of an overgrown hacienda. Now that would have really been something...

Hotel Illness

Written: 14 November 2013

I’ve stayed in some pretty screwed-up places in my time, but I think I may have just discovered one of the scariest. When I say ‘scary’ I’m not talking about high crime rates, or ghosts stalking the corridors, or even 24-hour piped Justin Bieber, all of which would be pretty hard to handle. I’m talking about insanity, madness and an atmosphere so eerie it could give The Shining a run for its money.

To be fair, we were warned, but we figured it would be interesting to take a punt. ‘You will either love this wacky place or find it disquieting,’ says the Lonely Planet of the Hotel Trinidad Galleria, and when we first walked into the lobby, we figured it could be fun. The proprietor is a collector, of sorts, and the hotel is crammed with – how shall I put it – eclectic objets d’art, from paintings to modern sculpture to endless piles of bric-a-brac. It’s a rambling place with corridors and rooms and hallways and outdoor patios galore, and every single nook and cranny is home to something... well, something intriguing. That’s ‘intriguing’ as in, ‘Would you like to lie on the couch and tell me about it? Let’s start with your mother...’

It was only after we’d checked in and paid for the night that I started to look more closely at things, and frankly, this place has seen better days. The objets d’art are dusty, mouldy and faded, and the entire hotel is coated in the creeping black mould that this part of Mexico seems to exude like ectoplasm. And then you start looking at the exhibits in even more detail, and my god, it’s like a glimpse into the brain of Salvador Dali’s evil twin. By the swimming pool, itself a walled-in and drab affair that you wouldn’t touch with your little toe, there’s a whole collection of evil-looking busts on the wall – the kind that, in the film world, would come with a fast zoom shot over the opening bars of Carmina Burana – and what can only be described as dream-catchers with rat skins stretched across them. And look, on the wall next to them is an iron face mask that looks like a torture device, and next to it... hang on, that is a torture device, or at the very least it’s a rusty man-trap with evil-looking teeth.

In the corridor is a modern artwork made up of parts of shop dummies, with dislocated arms and headless torsos swirling in a mess of red, white and blue paint. Then there’s a statue of a woman brandishing a sword and shield in a most unwelcoming way, and another statue that stares into your soul from empty eye sockets. And on top of a column in an overgrown and object-strewn courtyard in the middle of the hotel is a bust of a man that’s painted blood red for no apparent reason other than to send a shiver down your spine as you gingerly walk towards the back of the hotel, down the damp corridor, past the fish tank where fish miraculously seem to survive among the rotting leaves, and along the mould-blackened back passage to your room, where the shower has just three working needle-thin nozzles – yes, three, I counted them twice – and a toilet that makes an eerie drip, drip, drip sound that goes on for ages after you flush it.

As if this weren’t welcoming enough, there are rules posted up absolutely everywhere. Some of them are ancient and some more modern – our room’s rules said we were only allowed to use radios between certain hours, which is fair enough, except the wording made it sound like the latest in cutting-edge technology, which I suppose it was compared to the rusting gramophone in the corridor – but some make absolutely no sense at all. Rule number 8, in particular, made us think: ‘In case of death, the autority [sic] will be notified,’ it says, though rule number 9 clearly tries to prevent this unfortunate turn of events by stating that, ‘The hotel will rescind the rooming contract and will request the vacancy of the room if a guest has any contagious sickness or illness.’ Presumably insanity is not classed as contagious, though after spending a night in the Hotel Trinidad Galleria, I’m not so sure.

And everywhere feels and smells damp, a sense that was only compounded by the fact that, yet again, the heavens opened when we checked in and the rain just kept on pouring down, only clearing up while we were away eating our evening meal. This is a theme that we’re discovering in Mexico; the country is so wet and humid and rain-soaked that, frankly, it’s like living inside someone’s sock. As the initial relief of dropping our bags on the bed started to wear off, I realised that yes, that smell was dark, dank, musty and rotten, and the Black Crowes took over from Carmina Burana in my head. ‘This room smells like Hotel Illness,’ they sang, and that’s when I realised that perhaps we’d made a mistake in choosing the wacky option after all.

Temporary Respite

I perhaps should have spotted the subliminally frightening effect that the hotel was having on us a bit earlier, but it really hit home when we’d gone for a short wander around Mérida, grabbed an evening meal and ended up in the Parque Santa Lucia, a pretty little plaza just down the road from our hotel where a Mexican band were tuning up for a free concert, something that the cultural city of Mérida is famous for. Unfortunately the rain had drenched the seats in the plaza, so we stood there a bit stymied by what to do – sit in a puddle and wait for the band to start, or go into a bar and possibly miss a bit of Mexican culture – but as soon as the band struck the first chords, we exchanged glances and headed straight into the bar for a beer. It was a cacophony of instruments detuned by the humidity, and frankly a cold beer in an air-conditioned bar sounded rather more enjoyable.

What a good move that turned out to be. The bar was unashamedly western and looked over a kitchen where the glowing fire of a pizza oven lit up the busy chefs putting together dishes for the clientele outside in the plaza. Above the kitchen was a huge TV showing American football from the NFL, and finally, we weren’t damp. The draught beer was tasty, the ambience was modern and cosy, and I realised that I really wasn’t relishing going back into our depressing and downright scary mental hospital of a hotel room. So I grabbed another beer and Peta had a glass of Argentinian wine, and we enjoyed pretending that we weren’t in Mexico, just for a while.

That night, I found it hard to go to sleep; the atmosphere in the hotel gave me the shits. What we hadn’t realised was that it had given Peta the very same thing, and at 3am she leapt out of bed and ran for the ablutions, feeling nauseous and faint before exploding in the classic travelling manner. The toilet drip, drip, dripped through the rest of the night as she tossed and turned through multiple visits, and by morning she was completely washed out. We’d eaten exactly the same things the day before, and it was highly unlikely to be the glass of wine, but when Peta went to clean her teeth and turned on the tap, out splattered a whole lungful of black goo into the stained basin. ‘Ah, I did my teeth in that last night,’ she said, and suddenly it made sense. Hotel Illness was living up to its name.

Just to kick us when we were down, the included breakfast was one of the most depressing I’ve ever had, consisting of cold toast and a cup of instant coffee that was presented in a chipped and stained mug without milk, but with faded plastic containers for powered milk and sugar. Powdered milk? Really? (It turns out that the Mayans aren’t big on drinking milk; they prefer yoghurt, so I guess I’ll be drinking my coffee black from now on.) The staff looked as shell-shocked as we did, and as soon as breakfast was done we headed round the corner, found a lovely hotel run by a very friendly family, and splurged out on their most expensive room so we could dry out, get better and take stock.

Our New Golden Rule

Accommodation-wise, things haven’t gone so well recently. We’ve stayed in three places since hitting the road – Tulum, Valladolid and Mérida – and in two out of three places we’ve had to abandon our hotel after one night. This is untenable, wearing and downright distressing, and we’ve realised that if we don’t improve the quality of our hotel rooms, we’re going to end up coming home early, which would be stupid (I’d rather spend twice as much and travel happily for half as long, than spend less and get sick). So we’re going to check out more rooms before deciding which to take, we’re going to go with our gut instincts and walk out of a hotel if it doesn’t feel right, and we’re going to spend more on our accommodation if that’s what it takes. There’s no sense in being so budget conscious that we end up staying in places that make us depressed and ill; this is supposed to be fun, not fatal.

So the question is: would we be happy to stay put in our room all day if, say, it rained all day? If the answer is ‘yes’, then we’ll take it; if it’s ‘no’, then it’s not good enough. Hopefully that will prevent Hotel Illness from spreading.

Mérida

Written: 16 November 2013

Mérida is a pleasant place in which to look after someone who’s not very well... or it is once you’ve left your terrible hotel behind and booked into a charming little spot like the Álvarez Family Guesthouse on Calle 62. Peta stayed in bed all day on our first full day in town; we did try to pop out to Parque Santa Lucía, one block from the hotel, where we thought a nice gentle orange juice in the shady colonnades would help bring some colour back into her cheeks, but a couple of sips down she suddenly went pale and announced she would have to lie down, right now, so while she gently collapsed on the plaza’s sun-warmed steps, I paid the bill and mentally ripped up any plans we had for exploring the rest of the Yucatán. When Montezuma’s revenge strikes, you have absolutely no choice but to stay where you are and sit it out (or something similar-sounding, anyway).

To be honest, this isn’t the end of the world, because the only other destinations I’d earmarked for this neck of the woods were Campeche, a colonial town on the west coast of Yucatán, and Uxmal, another world-class Mayan ruin. Although they both sound excellent, I think we’re probably going to have our fill of Spanish colonial architecture and Mayan ruins on this trip – much as I expect us to be heartily sick of corn-, tomato- and cheese-based food before too long – so it looks like Mérida will be our last destination of note in Mexico. We’d like to head back to Cozumel to do some diving, as it’s supposed to be amazing, and there may be time for a visit to a cenote or two, but with the wind taken out of our sails, I suspect we’ll be heading to Belize slightly sooner than planned.

So while Peta lay in bed, making a slow but steady recovery from the shock of Hotel Illness’s tap-borne bacteria, I headed off into town to stock up on the usual suspects when it comes to curing the runs: bottled water, bananas, plain biscuits and natural yoghurt. Luckily the market area of Mérida has a couple of supermarkets, so it didn’t take long to stock the fridge with weapons of mass bacterial destruction, and with Peta safely tucked up in bed – the best place to be when you’re little more than an empty shell – I set off to explore the centre of town.

Museums and Plazas

The main attractions in Mérida are its plazas and its museums. Mérida is the capital of Yucatán, both administratively and culturally, and even a quick wander around the centre is a treat, especially if you like colonial architecture as much as I do. The main centre of town is the Plaza Grande, which contains a pleasant public park from where you can survey the surrounding buildings, of which the biggest and most impressive is the Cathedral de San Ildefonso, whose twin 42m-high towers dominate the eastern side of the plaza. The cathedral dates from 1598 and is the oldest cathedral in Mesoamerica – that’s the area of Central America stretching from central Mexico down to the northwest border of Costa Rica, where a number of culturally related agrarian civilisations flourished before the Spanish came and did all their high-handed rearranging. Symbolically, the cathedral was built on the site of an old Mayan temple, and stones from the temple were incorporated into the new building, as was the case for a number of other colonial buildings in central Mérida; a block north of the Plaza Grande, for example, is the Iglesia de Jesús, and in the church’s western wall there are two blocks that still bear Mayan carvings.

At the southern end of the plaza is the ancient-looking Casa de Montejo, which dates from 1549 when it was the home of the conquistador Francisco de Montejo y León, who founded colonial Mérida in 1542; it’s now a museum of art. Along the northern side of the square is the Palacio de Gobierno (Governor’s Palace), which contains some impressive mural paintings, while the western edge is dominated by the red tower of the Palacio Municipal (City Hall), which pokes above the trees in the park and contrasts delightfully with the green trees and blue skies (well, it does if you’re lucky with the weather). The best way to soak it all up is to simply plonk yourself on a seat in the park and watch the people roll by. If the sun is shining, as it was when I wandered down there, it’s a hive of gentle activity; wait for it to rain, though, and it’s suddenly a ghost town.

The city’s founder also gives his name to the Paseo de Motejo, a wide, tree-lined avenue some seven blocks to the northeast of the plaza, which Peta and I visited on our first afternoon in Mérida, before things started going wrong. The buildings along that road are really rather wonderful, though they’re not as old as those in the historical centre; the Paseo de Motejo was built at the turn of the 20th century, when Mérida was doing exceptionally well from the local production of henequén, a rope that’s made from the agave cactus of the same name. Indeed, for a short spell around the start of the 20th century, Mérida was said to have more millionaires than any other city in the world, and looking at the buildings on the Paseo de Motejo, you can clearly see what they did with all that cash.

There are lots of museums in Mérida, but it’s perhaps no surprise that the museum that everyone recommends most highly is on Paseo de Motejo. What a pity, then, that when we visited the Museo Regional de Antropoligía, we found that it didn’t contain any of the Mayan historical exhibits we’d been told were well worth the effort, but instead found it full of photographs of the various Mayan ruins in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras, and only a handful of Mayan artefacts. Apparently the exhibits have all moved up the road to the new Gran Museo del Mundo Maya, but they don’t tell you that at the Museo Regional de Antropoligía, and they’re still more than happy to take your money at the door. Thanks guys.

But, to be honest, Peta wasn’t up for any more exploration and I was quite happy to sit around the hotel all day, enjoying the feeling of not having to pack up the bags and go hunting for a new hotel. So although we didn’t do Mérida justice, it turned out to be a pleasant spot for a bit of recuperation, and perhaps this will help us to slow down and take things slightly easier. After all, that’s how the locals cope with this weather, and they should know...

Five Day Rule

Written: 18 November 2013

To be honest, things haven’t really been going to plan on this trip so far, and it’s starting to get to us.

First up, both of us have been suffering from niggling but annoying health problems. Two days in, I suddenly got terrible cramps in my left forearm that lasted for a good four days, and which literally made it a pain to type; I then got hit by a really violent bout of seasickness on the first sea dive, followed almost instantly by an insistent head cold that prevented me from diving the next day (and which is still making me cough annoyingly). I’m also a daily target for clouds of mosquitoes and sandflies – unlike Peta, whom they seem to ignore – and I have an entire Braille library of stories to tell from insect bites on my ankles and arms. Peta, meanwhile, picked up my cold just after she’d qualified as a diver, and she’s only just getting rid of it; she had a serious migraine visual that knocked her out when we got to Valladolid; and did I mention the two days in bed in Mérida recovering from classic traveller’s tummy? None of this is serious, but it is pretty wearing.

Second, the weather has been astonishingly oppressive. Even Peta, who loves hot weather, is finding the daily downpours and unremitting dampness of Mexico a bit draining, and I’m all over the place. My mind seems to stop working in hot climates, like an over-clocked processor in a badly ventilated computer, and I stream with sweat every time I do so much as lift a finger. The last time this happened was in a heatwave in Kerala, when we had to hide from the midday sun; this time it’s the afternoon and evening humidity that’s the problem, so it’s a lot harder to avoid.

Third, we’ve managed to pick some truly dreadful hotels so far: we had the noisiest hotel in the world in Tulum, and the scariest hotel in the world in Mérida, and the effects of bad hotels last for days. The others have been OK, but it really doesn’t help you fall in love with a country when you keep having to pack up your bags within a day of arriving somewhere, just because we said, ‘Yes, we’ll take it,’ instead of looking the hotelier in the eye and saying, ‘Oh, come on.’

The Five Day Rule

Clearly, one way to try to solve these problems is to stop rushing around. When I look at the kind of travelling I did in my 20s and 30s, I see a madman on the loose; every day I’d be moving on, visiting this place, dashing off to that place, never staying anywhere for very long. This is what you do when you’re young; heck, it’s almost a metaphor for youth in the first place. But when you reach 40, things suddenly get harder, and rushing round in the oppressive heat and staying in hotels with concrete beds gets quite a bit harder. You get backache, you risk twisting yourself into oblivion if you pick up your backpack at the wrong angle, you take a lot longer to recover from illness, and you basically have no choice but to take it more slowly than those half your age.

It doesn’t help that the guidebooks all come with suggested itineraries, and they too are aimed at the young; they race along at the pace that I used to go when I was full of youthful vigour. I’ve been looking at those itineraries for months and, without thinking, I loosely based our planned schedule on them, but it turns out they’re just not for us; if we try to get around that fast, we’ll be coming home before you can say ‘NHS’, and that would be a terrible waste of a year off.

So, we’ve come up with a rule that we’re going to try travelling by, and it’s this: we’re going to try spending five full days in each of the places we travel to. This means that we’re going to have to pick decent destinations with enough going on in the vicinity to keep us occupied for that long, or places that simply have a pleasant atmosphere, so that sitting around and watching the world go by is enjoyable on its own. It’s a simple rule, and it should stop us trying to rush around while also encouraging us to stop and smell the roses (something I didn’t do enough of when I was a young traveller).

Practically speaking, this means that if we’re thinking of spending 30 days in a country, then that would mean choosing five destinations with five days in each, with a day’s travelling between them. It’s only a rule of thumb, and obviously it will sometimes take more than a day to get between these prime destinations, and there will be places that are worth visiting en route without staying a long time, but the basic approach still stands: we need to pick fewer places and spend more time in them.

This backpacking lark is a young person’s game, and I think we have to become seasoned travellers instead: you don’t gulp down a fine wine, you sip it, and that’s what we’re going to do. It’ll be good for me, I suspect, in more ways than one.

Cenote Diving

Written: 19 November 2013

‘Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod, DARK WATER! ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod, NOOO!’ is how it normally goes when I’m faced with my nemesis. I’ve long had a phobia about murky depths, and a phobia it most definitely is, because it even affects me in the bath. I kid you not; if I’m in the bath and someone turns the light out, I completely freak – that’s a phobia, no doubt about it. Peta once brought along a selection of scented candles on a skiing holiday so we could have some nice, romantic candlelit baths after a hard day on the slopes. It didn’t end well; I don’t tend to relax when screaming.

So the thought of coming back from Mérida to Playa del Carmen to go scuba diving in a cenote wasn’t exactly top of my list, but cenote diving is one of the unique experiences of this part of Mexico, and it would be silly not to at least try it. A cenote (pronounced ‘seh-no-tay’, from the Mayan for ‘water-filled cavern’) is a flooded limestone sinkhole that’s formed when the roof collapses on an underground river. Being made of limestone, this part of the Yucatán is riddled with underground lakes and rivers formed by rainwater seeping through the ground, and this porous geology has created a collection of some 6000 cenotes, surrounded by forest and connected to each other by endless miles of flooded caves and river systems, most of which is still unexplored.

The most accessible cenotes aren’t quite so mysterious, and every dive operator in the area promotes cenote diving alongside the more traditional reef dives off the island of Cozumel, so when we turned up in Playa, fresh from the five-hour bus ride from Mérida, and found we couldn’t get space on a Cozumel dive for a couple of days, we figured we’d try a cenote dive in the meantime. So we signed up with Dive Mex, the people who’d taught Peta to dive, and rolled up the next day to meet our guide, Dario, and another paying customer, an affable American from Oregon called Roger, who’d been diving since the 1970s.

Dive One: Kukulkan

Now, bear two things in mind. First, this was Peta’s first real dive following her course; sure, as part of the PADI Open Water course you have to do four dives in open water (in her case, the sea), but these are part of the course rather than independent dives, so this was Peta’s very first dive as a qualified scuba diver. And second, I’m deeply phobic about dark water, I get claustrophobia, and I hate large cavernous spaces, like aircraft hangers. It turns out that cenote diving needs you to be in control of your buoyancy – one of those skills in scuba that takes time to learn, much like stability on a bike – and it also consists of a lot of enclosed, dark water and, um, cavernous spaces. As a team, we couldn’t have been less suited to cenote diving.

The first dive didn’t go well, it must be said. Dario, a middle-aged Italian man who thought (and probably wished) he was a lot younger and more handsome than he actually was, drove us out to the Chac Mool cenote, on the way south to Tulum. Here, in the shade of the forest, he talked us through the two dives we’d do and showed us the dark and menacing-looking cenote entrances – one called Kukulkan and the other called the Little Brother – before taking off his groovy yellow aviator sunglasses, stripping to the waist, sucking in his chest like Val Kilmer in that famously homoerotic locker room scene in Top Gun, pulling on his wetsuit, and jumping into the cenote entrance, which at this point was little more than a rock pool. We struggled into our suits in the heat and waddled down to the entrance with our tanks on our backs, and there was Dario, trying to rush us into the pool. ‘Come on, jump in,’ he shouted, while we flapped about on the side, trying to make sure we hadn’t forgotten anything vital.

Cenotes in Mexico can be busy places with lots of divers, so there’s an element of crowding that the guides obviously want to avoid, but rushing a total novice and a diver with a phobia is going to end badly. When we were doing our buoyancy checks to ensure we had the right amount of weight strapped to our waists – you let the air out of your jacket and sink into the water, breathing normally, and when you have the correct weight your eyes should be level with the water – I had a panic attack at the dark water beneath me, and had to tell Dario to go and check someone else first, while I calmed down. He looked at me in the way that Italian men do when they encounter a member of the male sex who might be showing feelings – it isn’t an enjoyable look to be on the other end of – and went to help Peta while I spluttered around and tried to calm myself down.

‘It’s OK,’ I thought. ‘We’re only qualified as open water divers, so we’ll always have open water above our heads, so if it gets too scary, we can just go straight up. It’ll be fine.’

And so once Peta’s weights were sorted out, and I’d calmed down enough to breath underwater – well, to gulp air in short, panicky bursts, if I’m going to be honest – we set off on our first cenote dive.

Closed Water

If you look at the PADI website, then it talks a bit about cavern diving. Flooded caves have two zones: the cavern zone is the area where you can still see the cave entrance, and you’re no more than 40m down (the limit for decompression diving); if you get into trouble, you can cover your torch and can see where to swim to. The cave zone, meanwhile, is cut off from the outside world, and you can’t see daylight, so you need proper equipment and training to go this far. If you’re a cavern diver and you veer into the cave area, you risk your life; just to clarify our minds, it turns out that two Brazilian honeymooners and their guide died in Chac Mool in April 2012 when they went past the safe limit (through they were the first divers to die from human error in this area since the early 1990s, so it is a pretty safe thing to do).

If you want to go diving in caverns, then PADI has a course for that (they have a course for everything, being a money-making machine). Once you’ve got your Open Water, you can move on up through Adventure Diver and into Advanced Open Water Diver, and then you can take the speciality Cavern Diver course, to teach you all about diving in caverns. By this point you’ll have learned how to control your buoyancy so you can make the fine movements up and down that you need when negotiating underwater caves; you’ll also have learned about the special safety procedures you need, how to navigate through cave systems, how to use underwater torches and reels, and so on. It’s pretty involved.

They don’t teach you any of these things in the Open Water course, but that doesn’t seem to bother the Mexican diving community, because Dario seemed perfectly happy to take a total novice and a phobic into Chac Mool without so much as a pause for breath. It was only when Peta’s buoyancy spun totally out of control that he started to wonder whether this was a good idea, and like all strutting Italian men, he started to get impatiently annoyed, which only made things worse. He tried to signal to Peta what she should do to correct her spinning, but following his instructions only seemed to make things worse, and after ten minutes or so we surfaced. Here he decided that criticism would be a more effective way of helping Peta out, rather than gentle kindness, so Peta and I swam out of the cenote and stomped back up to the truck, while Dario took Roger off to see the depths of the cenote.

It turned out that Peta had kept rolling over onto her sides, which tends to be a sign that the weights aren’t equally distributed around the belt; Dario had been telling her to fix this by inflating her jacket, which only made things worse, so while Dario and Roger explored Kukulkan, we had a bit of a team talk.

‘I really don’t like that Dario guy,’ confided Peta. ‘He’s just not a very nice person.’

‘Ignore him, then,’ I said. ‘We’ll get the weights right, and you just concentrate on getting your buoyancy right.’

‘Well, at least you did OK,’ she said, and that’s when I realised I’d been so distracted by Peta’s problems, that I’d practically forgotten we were in a cave. In dark water. In an enclosed space. With lots of rock above us and, at times, hardly any daylight at all. The thought made me shudder.

Happily, when Roger and Dario came back for lunch, Roger – who was a very experienced diver and specialised in consuming minute amounts of air by staying amazingly calm and being really efficient with his movements – was kindness personified and talked Peta through how she could make her buoyancy work better. ‘Oh, and I don’t think he’s right,’ he said when Dario had gone to get our sandwiches for lunch. ‘I don’t think your problem is bad buoyancy control; I think your weights are off-balance.’

So when we went back for dive two, we made sure the weights were properly distributed, and hey, guess what? We dived like experts who’d been doing it for years. Well, we did compared to the first dive, anyway...

Dive Two: The Little Brother

So, what’s it like, diving in a cenote? Well, if you have a phobia of dark water and enclosed spaces, then this is about as close to hell as you can get. Now that I wasn’t distracted by other things, my entire second dive was little more than a controlled underwater panic attack, but once I realised that I wasn’t imminently going to die, I applied the same state of mind that I had when walking through utterly petrifying Tunnel Creek in northern Australia, or my first night dive on the Great Barrier Reef. I just stopped thinking about it and crushed any thoughts that might set me off.

For cenote diving is cave diving, for all intents and purposes, and my initial thoughts of always having open water above me were way off the mark. Dario gave each of us a torch, because at times you are swimming through pitch black caverns of deep, dark water, and you have no idea where the outside world is. Most of the dive through the Little Brother cenote was like this, and above our heads was the cavern roof – no air, just the roof – so when I did screw things up and pressed the wrong button, I’d shoot up and crash my head on solid rock. You learn to watch your control in places like this, especially when you spill out into a wonderland of stalactites and stalagmites that you have to thread through gently, trying not to get snagged on anything. At times it’s like flying, because the water is so clear that it’s easy to pretend that there’s nothing but air beneath you (though as soon as I thought that, I suppressed it immediately; that way vertigo lies).

It didn’t help that Dario had given me the only torch that kept conking out. In fact, this was my second torch; the first one he’d given me had a broken strap, so it almost immediately fell off my wrist and I had to dive down and pick it out of the rocks near the entrance. The second torch died in one of the blackest parts of the cave, so there I was, trying not to panic as I smacked the torch back into a dim flicker, while Dario and Peta, who were ahead of me, slipped into the distance in their own personal bubble of light. Luckily Dario had a third torch, which he gave me later on when he saw me struggling, but that one had such a crappy beam that it was almost not worth bothering.

This became apparent when we surfaced in an air dome at the top of the cavern, where there’s about a metre or two of air between the dark water and the cavern roof. Lit only by divers’ torches, this is an eerie place where tree roots dangle down from the rock into the water, and spiders crawl on the roof among strange hair-like webs. The air is breathable because there’s a hole that connects it to the outside world, but it doesn’t feel connected to anything; it feels like the bowels of hell.

Oh, and just in case you thought that a functioning torch is all you need to find your way through a cenote, it isn’t. There are areas throughout the cavern where lighter fresh water sits above heavier sea water, and where the two types of water met, you get what’s called a halocline, and visibility reduces instantly from perfectly clear to mere centimetres. The effect is a little like looking down a kaleidoscope, or if you’re a migraine sufferer, it’s like the kind of visual effect you get when a migraine is kicking in, except covering your whole field of vision. It’s freaky to see the divers just in front of you disappear in a cloud of psychedelia, as if swimming through a pitch black cavern weren’t trippy enough.

But we made it back, having managed to follow the entire prescribed route through the Little Brother cenote, and it was only when we blinked our way out of the water and into the sunlight that I could look at Peta and finally admit that yes, I was underwater, in the dark, in a cave, and just about holding it together.

So I’m glad we dived a cenote, but like sailing the Pacific, once was enough for me. I’d much rather dive over picturesque reefs with the sun beaming down through the azure sea, where there’s life and the big, blue sky above me. There’s no life in the cenotes, apart from a few tiny fish at the entrance, and it’s easy to see why the Mayans thought the cenotes were the entrances to the underworld. Deep down, it is the underworld, and frankly, I’m much happier up here in the light.

Diving in Cozumel

Written: 21 November 2013

Finally, we’ve discovered something truly world class in Mexico. Yes, I know that Chichén Itzá is a World Heritage site, and it is impressive, but somehow it pales into comparison compared to the coral reefs off the island of Cozumel. When I think of Mexico, I’ll remember the madness of the cenote diving and I’ll think of those picturesque ruins at Tulum, but the highlight will definitely be diving in Cozumel.

We almost didn’t manage to get out to the island, as the boats need a minimum complement of divers before they’ll set sail, and not enough people were interested in diving on the day after our cenote dive. But if we waited an extra day, then there would be enough bookings to guarantee the boat, so we put our names down with Dive Mex and sat back to soak up the beach vibe in Playa del Carmen for one last day while waiting for the diving trip. Truth be told I was getting a bit sick of Playa by this point, but I guess that’s what happens in two-dimensional holiday spots with their inflated prices, boorish touts and limited imagination; it felt a bit like we were circling a black hole and I desperately wanted to attain escape velocity instead of spending yet another day doing nothing on the beach, but it was worth waiting in the end, because the diving in Cozumel is absolutely amazing.

Palancar Caves

Luckily for me and my seasickness, the dive boat we took from the harbour in Cozumel was large and uncrowded compared to the tiny speedboat that threw me around on Peta’s first sea dive. Designed for a maximum of 18 divers, we had exactly half that number pottering about on board, plus three guides. Our guide, Marcel from Dive Mex, who had helped teach Peta, was looking after us and Kelly and Gretchen, a really friendly middle-aged couple from near Salt Lake City in Utah who were celebrating their honeymoon in style. Happily for Peta, it turned out that Kelly had learned to dive a couple of days before and had only done a couple of sea dives off Playa since qualifying, so Peta and he had done exactly the same number of dives, while Gretchen had done about 20 dives, the same number as me. After Dario’s impatience in the cenote, this meant that we’d all be at the same level, and nobody would be tutting if we lost our buoyancy or gulped through our air in record time.

The first dive was in the Palancar Caves, a section of the reef made up of large coral outcrops, threaded through by a maze of sand-bottomed channels. Although we’d swum alongside coral on the sea dives off Playa, this was a whole different world, and it instantly brought back happy memories of the astonishing colours and life of my dives on the Great Barrier Reef. Everywhere we looked there were brightly coloured fish, lobsters poking their antennae out of their hidey-holes, psychedelic brain-shaped and fan-shaped and stacked coral formations... compared to the short attention span of life in Playa del Carmen, the reefs of Cozumel manage to pack so much interesting life into such a condensed area that you don’t quite know where to look. We saw a turtle gracefully swimming underwater, we saw large grouper gliding round the coral, and even the other divers exploring the reef were an impressive sight, if only because it showed how great the visibility was.

Peta adored it. For a couple of years now, she’s been playing a videogame on the Wii called Endless Ocean (and its sequel, Endless Ocean 2: Adventures of the Deep), and in it you get to be a scuba guide, taking customers on serene trips through dive sites that are faithfully modelled on the real thing. She’s been pointing out different sea life and swimming with the virtual wildlife for some time now – it’s a perfect wind-down from work – but to do it for real is another thing altogether.

For me, it reminded me of how much scuba diving is like flying. When you dive properly, you control your height in the water by breathing; inhale deeply, and you’ll rise up a bit, and breathe out and you’ll fall. For larger ascents and descents you also use your buoyancy jacket, but for rises and falls of two or three metres, it’s all in the breathing. Of course, when you breathe in or out, it takes a few second for your buoyancy to adjust, so it’s a bit like steering a boat or driving on ice, but once you’ve got the hang of it, it feels like you’re gliding through air, gently ‘thinking’ your way up and down through the undulating coral corridors.

This skill takes time to develop, so Peta stayed a little higher than me and further away from the coral, but she had no problems staying close by; she’d had a baptism of fire in the cenote, where losing your buoyancy is a lot more dangerous in such a confined space, and she got the hang of reef diving straight away. Unfortunately our diving partners weren’t having quite so much luck, and Kelly was going through the fear that I experienced when I learned to scuba dive; coming from the open vistas of Utah, where he’s a cowboy in his spare time, the claustrophobia of a scuba mask and the pressure of deep water on the face nearly proved too much, but after a quick emergency ascent while the rest of us stayed with another guide, he eventually joined us again and we set off through the corridors, with Peta and I gracefully gliding through the canyons while Kelly and Gretchen bounced along in a slightly more creative manner.

It was a lovely dive, and after surfacing we took the boat to the shores of southwest Cozumel, pulled up by a small pier with a handful of other dive boats, and ate lunch with paradise on the doorstep and the sun beaming from a pure blue sky. The only fly in the ointment was that we’d left the cameras at home, as we’d assumed incorrectly that the dive boat would be a liability for technology like that, but never mind; we just drank in the beautiful curves of the beach with our eyes instead.

Paso del Cedral

We were dropped off a little too early for our second dive and had to swim over a fairly flat bit of light coral growth to reach the real deal, but even that was enjoyable, as I used it to see how close I could get to the coral without touching it, something you don’t really want to practise on fully formed and ancient coral reefs. This time the coral was in shallower water and wasn’t as towering, but I tend to prefer this kind of diving; deep channels are fascinating and fun, but when you dive in shallower reefs, your air lasts longer (as it’s delivered at a lower pressure), you get better colours (as there’s more sunlight) and it’s easier to equalise the pressure in your ears and mask (really deep dives can sometimes feel a little suffocating).

Again we saw lots of wildlife and intricate coral formations, and apart from a small hiccup when Kelly lost buoyancy control and tumbled into the reef tank first, requiring Marcel to grab him by the tank valve to stop him ploughing a furrow into the coral, we managed a longer dive that was arguably more enjoyable than the first. I felt for Kelly, as getting the hang of that buoyancy thing is probably the hardest thing about learning to scuba dive, though I’m happy to report that it’s like learning to ride a bike, and even though it’s 16 years since I last did any scuba, that feeling of effortlessly gliding through the ocean is clearly something you don’t lose. It seems that Peta’s skin-diving sessions as a kid have given her an innate feeling for ocean gliding; either that, or Endless Ocean is an untapped educational tool that PADI should consider endorsing.

So these two dives have done the trick, and we’ve now caught the scuba bug. This is convenient, as we’re in one of the planet’s diving hotspots, and we’re planning to travel south through even more of them. Next up are the northern cayes of Belize, where the diving is supposed to be spectacular, and after a detour inland through Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, we again come to spectacular Caribbean diving in the islands of northern Honduras. There’s also some diving further along the Caribbean coast in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama and Colombia, but the best is in the northern Caribbean... and that’s where we are.

That’s pretty handy, then. I think we could get used to this...

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 22 November 2013

Yeah... Mexico. To be honest, it hasn’t really worked out for us here, though how much of this is down to Mexico and how much is down to things like illness and homesickness is up for debate. Whatever the reasons, we’re moving on to Belize, and we’re both utterly delighted with the prospect.

Of course, we haven’t really given Mexico much of a chance, so any whinges I might have are pretty unfair. We spent the first couple of weeks acclimatising in the tourist central of Playa del Carmen, which is about as Mexican as Ko Samui is Thai, and I don’t think you can count Tulum as particularly Mexican either. Mérida and Valladolid were much more authentic, but by that point it was probably too late, as I wasn’t really focussing on Mexico any more by then. When I planned this trip, I included Mexico in the itinerary as it’s a logical place to fly to from London, but the countries I’m really interested in are places like Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. People rave about these places; sure, lots of people are complimentary about Mexico too, but have I ever had anyone light up when I’ve mentioned Mexico, and tell me that I’m about to have the best time of my life? No, I haven’t, but I’ve been deluged with tips and hearty thumbs up from people who’ve travelled deeper into Central and South America, and I can’t help thinking there must be a good reason for that.

And it rained – boy, did it rain. Every day, massive downpours made Mexico smell like old socks, adding to the black mould that seems to have a lethal grip on the buildings round here. Is this Mexico’s fault, that it’s wetter than usual for the time of year? Of course not.

And the food? That really didn’t work for us either. It didn’t take long for us to start getting a bit jaded about having to eat Mexican food again. ‘No! How can you say that?’ I hear fans of Mexico shout, and in particular those who say Yucateco food is the best in the whole of Mexico; well, I like burritos and tacos like the next man, but it’s a boring cuisine, and every restaurant seems to sell exactly the same stuff. And then there’s the fish; it seems that the Mexicans, like their close neighbours the Cubans, seem to have it in for fish, treating it with such a bludgeoning lack of subtlety that it’s criminal... and this on the Caribbean coast! I can’t wait to find somewhere that plucks fresh fish from the azure waters and just cooks it there on the beach, serving it up with some rice and a smile. That would make me a lot happier than another corn-based tortilla-wrapped cheese-tomato mush.

So it’s pretty clear that Mexico didn’t motivate us a great deal, but one of the great things about travelling is that if you don’t like somewhere, you can and should move on. I don’t think we particularly fell for the charms of the Yucatán, so it’s clearly time to strike south for Belize. Just writing that down makes me feel more positive about this trip, so it’s definitely the right move; moving on always is...

Further Reading

This story is continued in another of my books, Into the Deep Blue Sea: Travels in Belize (also available for free from www.moxon.net/ebooks). If you enjoyed this book, you might like to know that there’s a whole series of free books like this available from the same source, covering 25 countries and six continents:

- The Back of Beyond: Travels in Australia

- Into the Deep Blue Sea: Travels in Belize

- A Town Full of Nothing to Do: Travels in Burkina Faso

- In Search of the Lost City: Travels in Colombia

- Tainted by Tourism: Travels in Costa Rica

- A Funny Sort of Socialism: Travels in Cuba

- Snow on the Sun Loungers: Travels in Cyprus

- Love at First Sight: Travels in El Salvador

- Paradise Has Teeth: Travels in French Polynesia

- A Million Mosquitoes Can’t Be Wrong: Travels in the Gambia

- The Road to Jesus: Travels in Ghana

- Stuck on the Gringo Trail: Travels in Guatemala

- Many Ways to Change Your Mind: Travels in India

- Hello Paul, What’s Your Name? Travels in Indonesia

- The Muddy Confluence: Travels in Malaysia

- The Lapping of the Dunes: Travels in Mali

- A World-Class Dive: Travels in Mexico

- Snaking Patterns of Sand: Travels in Morocco

- Roof of the World: Travels in Nepal

- God’s Own Country: Travels in New Zealand

- Poverty and Paradise: Travels in Nicaragua

- Alone on Two-Palm Island: Travels in Panama

- The Head and the Heart: Travels in Senegal

- Serious Fun: Travels in Singapore

- Melted Meccano: Travels in Thailand

If you know someone who might like any of my books, please pass them on; I make no money from this, but I do enjoy the thought of people reading my books and recommending them to their friends. If you’ve enjoyed reading my writing (or even if you haven’t) I’d be delighted if you could sign my Guestbook at www.moxon.net/guestbook – after all, it’s the feedback that makes it all worthwhile. Happy travels!

THE END

Table of Contents

Preface

About Time Too

Man Down!

Playa del Carmen

Day of the Dead

Panic in Paradise

Cozumel

Diving Rain

Making the First Move

Tulum Pueblo

Tulum Ruinas

Valladolid

With this Ring

Chichén Itzá

Hotel Illness

Mérida

Five Day Rule

Cenote Diving

Diving in Cozumel

Thoughts on Leaving

Further Reading

Table of Contents

Preface

About Time Too

Man Down!

Playa del Carmen

Day of the Dead

Panic in Paradise

Cozumel

Diving Rain

Making the First Move

Tulum Pueblo

Tulum Ruinas

Valladolid

With this Ring

Chichén Itzá

Hotel Illness

Mérida

Five Day Rule

Cenote Diving

Diving in Cozumel

Thoughts on Leaving

Further Reading