Mayan Riviera - Part 1

After two days we arrive in Playa del Carmen

Ok gang. Remember when we had to travel for 48 hours to get to Guanaja? Well, guess what? Yes. It took us that long to get away from Guanaja. Surprise! Who knew?

When I left you on Friday evening we were in a nice hotel room in San Pedro Sula, Honduras eating Papa John’s pizza. It wasn’t bad but, most importantly, we didn’t have to make it. After a month in isolation it was nice to get on my phone and tell someone, “Bring me pizza. Now.” And it worked. No boats required. Cool.

Saturday morning we headed off to the airport for the first of the next two legs of our trek: San Pedro Sula to Mexico City. It was fine. Really. Nothing terrible happened. To us. I say this because the entire departure area was filled with older women sitting in wheelchairs. I’m not exaggerating.

There are only five gates at this airport and none of the planes are very big so there couldn’t be more than five or six hundred passengers waiting. I counted more than fifty women in wheelchairs. About 10% of passengers were in wheelchairs! Parked in rows like 1957 Chevys in an antique car show. No men. Did I miss something? Did a disabling plague attack only Honduran women? It’s a mystery.

In every airport in the world you’ll find people taking advantage of wheelchair assistance. Usually there will be one or two on a flight. But ten? Fifteen? Fifty? I suspect there’s a nefarious reason for this but I hesitate to cast aspersions at all of Honduran feminity. Let’s stick with a disabling plague that affected only women and leave it at that.

Anyway, our plane was late so we arrived at Benito Juarez airport with only an hour to clear customs and race across the concourse in time to make our flight to Cancun. It all worked, surprisingly, and we even flew past Citlaltepetl, Mexico’s highest peak at 18,491 feet.

We emerged into the Mayan Riviera night at 8 pm to meet the guy who would deliver us to our rental car. Piece of cake. Right? Wrong. The car rental agency is a little hole in the wall off the airport property. The price is right and it’s, more or less, hassle-free. Unusual for Mexico. That’s the good part. The guy at the counter spending almost an hour with the couple ahead of me… that’s the bad part. Anyway, crappy car in hand, off we went, in the darkness, to Playa del Carmen.

Did I mention we hadn’t eaten since breakfast? Are you familiar with the concept of “hangry”. No one wants to be in the car with me when I’m hangry, in the dark, in a crappy car that I just waited an hour to get, after flying all day and being in an unfamiliar place. It wasn’t pretty, but we managed to get there in one piece. Dinner? Toast and cream cheese with a beer chaser at 11:30 pm. ‘Nuff said.

Now, if you’ve been following along you’ll know we were invited to stay with Gareth, a friend from Facebook who I’d never actually met. What a wonderful offer! I mean, we’ve never met. Come stay at my place for a week. Are you sure? Sounds like quite an imposition. YES, was the response. Ok then.

Fans of horror pictures already know the script. Unsuspecting couple stays with welcoming, total stranger who seems outwardly friendly but secretly wants to kill them and eat their livers with a nice Chianti. You’ve got to admit that thought has crossed your mind. I won’t spoil it for you. You’ll have to wait until the next episode to see what happens.

Back to our arrival. We knew Gareth was away for the weekend and wouldn’t be there when we arrived. He’d arranged the necessary access for us to get into the building so we made ourselves at home. And then, parking happened.

Parking in PDC is complicated. The entire central part of town has paid street parking between 10 am and 10 pm. You can park outside the area anytime for free but we are stationed within the zone so, no. Like many places, you buy a ticket from a machine, place it on the dashboard of your car and you’re done. Except those “everywhere else” places have machines that accept plastic. Not here. Only credit cards issued by Mexican banks, which we don’t happen to have. You have to use coins. Yes, coins. Who has coins? Not me. And, you can only pay for six hours at a time so using it during the day means dropping whatever you’re doing and racing back to the car before the meter maid comes along and locks a steel boot on your front wheel.

There’s an app. I like parking apps. You plug in your license plate number, tell it what zone you’re in, feed it your credit card info and, Presto! Not here. This app requires a) fluency in Spanish, a requirement I don’t yet satisfy even though I can find out if the library has apples, b) infinite patience, which I’ve never had and c) a Mexican credit card. Easy right? Sorry. Coins. So now I’m doing the car shuffle every day, parking in the free zone during the day then moving it in front of the building because the free zone isn’t so safe at night. It’s fun and I’m enjoying it. I get to exercise and meet interesting people every day.

So there we are, safely ensconced in this nice, virtual stranger’s home Sunday morning and it’s time to buy groceries. There’s a nice store at the end of the block so that afternoon we grab a couple of bags and hoof it to the supermarket.

Well, as it turns out, Sunday afternoon is not the ideal time to shop for groceries at this location. That’s when they stock the shelves by blocking the already narrow aisles with carts full of boxes. Oh, and there’s a lot of other people who stole our idea and they think they can shop there at the same time. Assholes. They should have stayed home.

At this point it’s important to note there are approximately thirteen pesos to the Canadian dollar. That means you have to be good at dividing by thirteen to know what stuff’s going to cost when it shows up in your Visa account. It turns out I’m almost ok at this, except for the time I stared at butter selling for nineteen pesos and arrived at it costing fifteen dollars. If you were with me in South Africa in 2022 you’ll know what I’m referring to. The rest of you? We’ll call it a brain cramp and leave it at that.

If you’ve managed the math you won’t manage the cost of imported goods. For example, a bag of Lays potato chips runs around 130 pesos. Let’s review. $10 CAD for a bag of chips! Since there’s very little in the way of local packaged goods it can make grocery shopping expensive. Local produce, meats and baked goods are very reasonable but don’t think you’re gonna drop some change for that box of Oreos. Think bank loan.

Then you get to the checkout. As you know, I’ve been faithfully Duolingo’ing Spanish for almost seventy consecutive days so I know some. Conversant? Hardly. I can figure out written Spanish fairly well and I can understand some spoken, if spoken slowly enough. But, when the cashier’s question sounds like one long, unintelligible Spanish stew of letters, forget it. Plaster the dumb face on, stare uncomprehendingly and wait for her to decide you’re another stupid tourist and assume the correct answer without waiting for yours. I need a sign that says, “Speak slowly. I’m Canadian.”

I’m going to close this episode with some bathroom humour. Two things. First, we just spent a month in Guanaja taking cold showers because who has hot water, right? I went to take a shower here the morning after we arrived and turned the knob to one side and it was cold. I turned it to the other side and it was a tiny bit warmer. I guess that’s what they call “hot” here so I took yet another cold shower.

Penny goes in an hour later, takes her shower, and comes out smiling because she had hot water for the first time in weeks. All I had to do was let the “cold” one run for a few seconds and it would have been hot. Joke’s on me.

Lastly, many of you know I always look at construction methods in other countries and apply North American building code rules. The toilets in this place are HIGH. No idea why, but we feel like we’re eight.

And, on that note, that’s all for tonight. I’ll get you all up to date later in the week before we take off for the final leg of this journey. Cheers.