Cancún to San Cristobal
May 21st 1995
We got off the bus at Playa Del Carmen, which is about 50 kilometres south of Cancún, at about eight in the morning. I did the usual quick ritual mumble which i always did on arriving somewhere i'd never been before and which, among other things, was intended to put me in touch with the spirit of the land i was walking on. This invariably paid off - even to the extent that sometimes things would mess up seriously if i forgot to do this and then start going well again after i remembered it. I don't really want to go into any explanations here, but it's something that was suggested to me by an aboriginal friend in Australia after i'd spoken to him about having problems with breaking toes and injuring my feet when i went to new places (in bare feet, as always).
Pretty well immediately, i began to get the feeling that this was somewhere i didn't really want to be. The immediately obvious physical signs of this were that it was all newly thrown up tourist trap style flashy shit. It's hard to put a finger on this exactly, but a few weeks later, at Puerto Escondido, i realized what it was.
I was walking up the beach at Puerto Escondido in the rain, almost at the end of June, in the late afternoon. The sea was a bit stormy and very grey. I looked at the town, which is on a hillside above the main beach, and felt "i like this place - i don't know why really..." Despite the fact that it was a bit of a tourist hole, it was nothing like Playa Del Carmen for instance. Why...? What was the difference?
Puerto Escondido was Mexican. Playa Del Carmen wasn't. Puerto Escondido looked like it had grown up gradually and like all Mexican towns - in the tropics, at least - it was crumbling gradually too.
Playa Del Carmen was new, sterile, heartless and just thrown up by people with plenty of money who want to make lots more money very quickly. It had no function other than being a tourist trap - although real people must have lived there somewhere, pushed to the outskirts, to serve the rich europeans and north americans that the place was designed to atract.
Playa Del Carmen would be identical wherever it was in the world. Puerto Escondido definitely wouldn't.
Anyway, i certainly hadn't put my initial feelings into any coherent form at that point, early in the morning after just getting off the bus, and under some of the worst circumstances of my journey so far. But i did start expressing some of my negative feellings about the place to Paula, which didn't really come out well, as they weren't very clear in my own head. She got pissed off and we had a brief, almost unspoken fight and went off in different directions. I never saw her again before i left Mexico!
Paula had offered to lend me a bit of money so i could spend a few days on the beach before i had to go back to get my passport, but without this, i had no choice but to go straight back to San Cristobal that day, as i had just about enough money for the bus and not much else. However, first i had to have a swim in the Caribbean Sea!
I walked up the beach, carrying my bags with me, as there was
nothing else to do with them, in the direction of where Paula's
Lonely Planet
guide book said there was a nudist beach. I never
found it. I got sick of walking and stopped on the next beach up
from the town beach and went for a swim. It was beautiful. The
water and the beach, anyway. The water really was very clear and
blue and the beach was clean white sand. It was certainly very
different from the Pacific coast beaches.
It was strange how one bit of the ocean could be so different from another bit of what's really the same ocean. It's only a few islands that separate this sea from the rest of the Atlantic, but you'd never guess, looking at the ocean in northern Europe, say, that over here it could be like this. Sadly, this blue sea and white beaches was what had led to the developers totally destroying almost all the coasts around the Caribbean. They just had this obsessive compulsion to destroy anything that was beautiful, i thought - the more beautiful it was, the faster it had to be destroyed. Money was just an excuse for their sick, perverted orgies of destruction i was sure!
After that, i caught the bus to Cancún. Partly because i wanted to have a look at the place, partly because i wanted to check out some travel agencies to see if there were any cheap flights to Europe from there and partly because i thought it would be easier to get the bus back to San Cristobal from there.
Cancún was a horrible nightmare that made Playa Del Carmen look positively friendly! There were long miles of beautiful beaches there - and they were lined for their whole length by expensive and incredibly ugly cliff-like hotels. It was just beach, then concrete right behind it and it was disgusting. I didn't know what was wrong with people that wanted to stay in shitholes like that! And pay vast sums of money for it. Why didn't they just use the money to put a beach in the middle of their cities? It would look just the same and save all that boring travelling to get there!
Anyway, i was on a bus out of there as soon as i could possibly manage it. And, strangely enough, it was the same bus i'd come on, with the same crew. I told them what had happened and they were quite amused by it all really. So was i in a strange way!
I went back to the house in San Cristobal where i'd been staying and retrieved my passports and travellers cheques. I wasn't going to go anywhere else that day, that was certain. I wasn't quite sure what i was going to do now, as i still had to get my visa renewed.