Mexico Easter 2003 - Part 2: Arrival in Cancun

I see where we are starting to pay some attention to our neigbors to the south. We could never understand why Mexico wasn’t just crazy about us; for we have always had their good will, and oil and minerals, at heart.
Will Rogers (1879 - 1935)

Saturday 5th April

I woke up early after a feverish night. Mum and dad fussed around about what I had taken, and we set off for Heathrow Airport at 6 a.m. After a really long queue at American Airlines and a really slack security check, I took my seat to New York, the plane entirely full. The passengers were mostly families and I settled down to read Footprint Mexico to study areas of the Yucatan Peninsula. The Footprint series for Mexico seems to be by far the best guidebook for this country, Lonely Planet and Rough Guide are not well-written for Mexico. My hotel for the first night and trek pickup point is the Antillano in the heart of Cancun, facing onto Ave. Tulum.

On occassional lapses of droll lying around with four hours and thirty minutes still to go for New York, I felt flashes of inspiration about what might be in store for me in Mexico. With a growing feeling of tender, contemplating excitement, the moment that I will get into the Cancun hothouse, feel the place, swim a pool, read the people and learn the Spanish is getting closer. The mood is a kind of stupor that has in store an adventurous education for me. A kind of excitement that I’m going to create and cherish, forged not from my imagination (fed by Kerouac, Thomas Wolfe or Hemingway) but from me!! I am a traveller, a free man in a free world, sitting on an airline seat, the rush of adventure is steaming fast like a germinating seed. I went through the 11/1/2003 edition of The Times Magazine which was a special edition with famous people’s travel journeys, quotations, etc. I saved it to relish at times like this, and savour some of the comments I read in it:

THE JOURNEY THAT MEANS THE MOST

It was in 1982. I took a year off from college to travel around the world with a friend. We ended up, as all seekers do, in India. I worked for a while at Mother Teresa’s Home for the Destitute and Dying in Calcutta. When you’re young like that, and open, and unformed, the outside world can become the inside. In India I sometimes has the sense that I was wondering through my own dreaming brain: it was my unconscious made manifest. This is why so many Westerners go to India and freak out. I didn’t go nearly so far. I was play-acting, mostly. But it remains the most amazing experience of my life, my one true adventure, really. The rest of my life, I’ve stayed, as right now, here at my desk.
Jeffrey Eugenides - Novelist

The journey that matters happens unexpectedly. Shoes that don’t leak or pinch. No fixed destination. I set out to use the British Museum as a short cut and found myself caught up in another agenda entirely. Mexico, ghost dances, corridors, stairs, the enclosed piazza under its pearly dome. It’s easy to get lost. The ultimate urban labyrinth. Walk for hours. Rest. Stare at some retrieved stone in a glass case, a wall carving protected by an invisible beam, pictographs on deer skin. Huge distances shorthanded with cultural plunder. This is the journey that anyone can make, at whim, through one of those spaces - however dubious their provenance - that make urban life feasible.
Iain Sinclair - Author

Sailing Kingfisher back from New Zealand we stopped at this anchorage off Cape Horn called Caletta Martial. Cape Horn has an infamous reputation but my time there proved it can also be very beautiful - we were only there for 12 hours but you knew it was special.
Ellen MacArthur - Yachtswoman

I’ve made a few memorable journeys, but none compares to the first time I travelled over 1,000 kilometres from Northern Nigeria to Lagos in the South. I’d just turned 17 and has never seen the sea. I made the trip by bus, at night. On the way we passed wrecks of cars on turnings, and often the driver had to switch off his lights to deceive highway robbers lurking in the forest. All night the bus was filled with sounds of desperate prayers. Then we reached Lagos and the night gave way to dawn. I saw the Atlantic with the sun seeming to emerge out of it. It was glorious, ineffable.
Helon Habila - Novelist

Source: The Times Magazine 11/1/2003 - Journeys 2003. Quotations compiled for The Times by Lucy Alexander

I am now in the Antillano, Cancun. The time is 3pm as I write by the pool. What follows is a detailed account of this place, as I have always believed that first impressions are tres importante.

The flight to Cancun from New York was uneventful but I noticed most of the niceties you get on the transatlantic route are scrapped. Instead, cheery holidaymakers have to pay $2 to get headphones to listen to the movie - I didn’t miss much with Sweet Home Alabama! As we approached the phantasmagoric land that is Mexico, the ocean turned turquoise, the coral reefs were visibly dense and the sands and forests were all brilliant, in their millions of shades of green and yellow. Yes, so holiday brochures overuse the words sandy beaches and turquoise seas, but unlike their claims, this here is real. We landed in Cancun and holy guacamole, it was one big hotchpotch. No orderly queues, random yells and barks, absolutely awesome. I met a lovely Irish girl who then got lost trying to get her bag. Never saw her again. At the airport, I donned my Indiana Jones leather hat to gain immediate respect from the shared shuttle taxi guys, who gave me a record-breaking $9 fare to Hotel Antillano downtown. And this little drive through Zonas Hotelerias confirmed the first impressions of startling lively beaches - if one ignored the people that filled them with spring break style drinking this time of the day! At my hotel I met some nice English backpackers, girls, doctors, and then went for a wander around and then had a swim. I felt really good, the TV here by the pool has Mexican football on, and a goal is marked by the commentator going “GGGGOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLL” for shedloads of time! They must choose those guys that can hold their breath longest. Don’t mind me swearing today o reader, but right now, Mexico looks ******* awesome in the nicest shade of that curse. This is just the beginning. It should also be mentioned that the colours are so vivid here, that even this book I’m writing on has a healthy yellow-orange tan! I had “dinner” at the restaurant opposite. They served awesome fried fleurtillas and a baked papaya desert (what I called paw-paw when I grew up in Africa). And Dos Equis (XX) is a really good beer, so I had me a few. I really want to sleep as I am 6 hours behind London now. When I booked tomorrow’s wakeup call, I got reminded by the sweet lady that Mexican time goes one hour saving tomorrow. So I booked the call for “8 am tomorrow time, gracias!“.

There you have it, mariachis at the restaurant (those are the guitarists that sing you anything if you pay them) for me, a wakeup call and malaria tables. It seems so harsh to sleep when this place is so lush, but since I’m human and ******* tired, I’m going to do it, with pleasure, feeling kickass blessed under these stars. I know there’s stars because I was staring up at them from the restaurant while a Seattle mum/daughter pair were telling me about their visit to London, England and how much they hated London!