The triumphs, turmoil and sheer drama of being twenty-somethingish.: Month in Mexico: Part 1

I have been back 12 hours and I have met a ton of people who ask, “Tell me everything about Mexico”. It’s hard to believe that a month or so ago, none of this had happened, because now it feels like such a big part of my life. I promised each of them that I would tell the story right. This is my attempt. It’s not gonna be short and it’s not gonna be too interesting unless you have deep love for me. Also, I’d like it to be acknowledged that with the “M” screaming at me, I didn’t use “Memoirs” in the title. Yes, it was hard.

“Why Mexico?” is a common question. As much as I wanna give some romantic notion of Mexico beckoning me, the reasons I picked Mexico were more practical than anything else; Developing country prices, no visa, cheap tickets. In fact, the whole summer was mostly about California and Mexico was just injected as an afterthought when I realized that my budget can only sustain me for so long in Californian money. I was so excited about California that, I kid you not; I didn’t know ANYTHING about Mexico until I was already on my way to Cancun from San Francisco. Thanks to the Lonely Planet I was reading on the flight, I figured out how to get to the Downtown with the cheapest way and that was all the info in my head. Cancun airport is great because you have lines of kiosks where government appointment people help you shit tons with all the info you need. And they make it clear that they aren’t trying to sell you stuff so you actually feel very reassured. However, that guy asking me, “How many times have you been here? You know a lot already (Lonely Planet told me exactly how much the bus would cost, where it would drop me and exactly which sidewalk it would wait at)” gave me this false sense of confidence about the rest of my night. I also had a very false notion that my being brown would make all the difference in blending in. NOPE. The minute I left the airport, I realized that I clearly didn’t look as Mexican as I thought and in fact, with a complete lack of Indian tourists in Mexico, drew way more attention. My first few hours in Cancun were hell. I had way over packed from California and I walked around the city with everyone giving me contradicting directions. It didn’t help that the city was not stroller bag friendly at all and not a single soul spoke English. Also, it was dark and dusty and I was completely expecting the bus to drop me off at some gorgeous beach. After around an hour of walking around a city which looked like my least favorite parts of India, I finally just entered an internet café and told the owner to dial the hostel. I was nearly hysterical and thankfully he agreed to come and fetch me. The hostel itself was decent. The people were nice. I managed to get two weeks’ worth of clothes laundered for dirt cheap so I was pretty decently happy. I walked across the street and got a meal of chicken quesadillas, which after a month, still happen to be the best quesadillas I’ve ever had. Cilantro sauce, I love you. The hostel was nice but very quiet. Also it was FREAKING HOT. I didn’t sleep a wink all night because it was my first night in another country and I was also really uncomfortable because of the heat. I also have this habit to sleep with my laptop if I feel scared or lonely, so I was sleeping with my laptop and all night I had nightmares of it getting stolen. Finally, in true hostel fashion, the last people came in at 1, and the first people to leave were up at 5, so it was just a bad night overall.

Quesadillas at Cancun

First Night in Cancun

I woke up the next day at 8 and decided that I’m gonna make Mexico awesome no matter what it took me. So I headed to the kitchen with full gusto, in high spirits, to grab the free breakfast. After a month in Mexico, I realize that the breakfast they served was a freaking feast. But I had been spoiled by hostels in Indonesia with their proper cooked breakfasts with three or four options served buffet style. So my expectations were cosmos high. Here was a jar of Jam, some butter, a toast and a toaster. Also, some bananas. I was so bummed. I grudgingly ate a piece of toast and headed to the beach. Finding the beach and getting there was easy and cheap enough (8 pesos of a bus ride each way). It’s called Delphines beach and to get there it takes 20 mins of crossing the fanciest palatial resorts you’ll ever see. Delphines is a nice enough beach but they have all these beach lounge chairs right by the water with the umbrellas. The minute I fell asleep on the chair, this guy wakes me up and after 5 minutes of really frustrated hand gesturing and attempt at communicating, I realized that he wanted me to pay 200 pesos to use that stupid chair. So I had to get out of the cozy shade of the umbrella and lie in the sun. My mood wasn’t helped by the fact that I was carrying my Kindle so I couldn’t get into the water leaving my stuff on the sand. So I just sat there for a bit baking in the sun. It was still gorgeous no doubt, but it wasn’t feeling right yet. After a few hours on the beach, I knew I’d had my fill of Cancun and decided to move on to this place everyone couldn’t stop talking about: Tulum.

Between Cancun and Tulum is a city called Playa del Carmen. From everything I had heard, Playa was also a very touristy place like Cancun and I decided I’d had my fill of that. So I just took the next bus from Playa to Tulum without staying too long. I reached Tulum when it was slightly getting dark so I decided to just treat myself to nice cab ride directly to my hostel. I picked the hostel with the best breakfast and the highest ratings and I was so excited. I show up at the hostel (which was significantly outside the city) and it was shut! After seeing me trying to break in (I really wanted to stay there), the owner comes out and tells me they are renovating. I was far from the city, had just paid for the taxi ride to get there and I wasn’t getting the breakfast everyone was raving about. I was really getting tired of this. The owner recommended the place next door and it was the shittiest place in the world. I got a room (BLAZING HOT) and tried to make the best of it. I asked the owner where I could get some dinner and he said that there were NO food places nearby. I see a gas station across the street and eat a Cornetto for dinner. The hostel guy then gives me a 30 min speech which could have conveyed the same information in 5 mins. It was dark by then but he convinces me that it’s a great time to go to the beach. He gives me directions and basically said that I need to cut through Mangrove forests and then I’d see tons of restaurants, coffee shops and what not. Here I am imagining Waikiki in my head and imagine chilling in some beachside bar with a cocktail. I get a bike from the hostel and set off on the freeway. After two seconds I realized that the bike had no freaking brakes. Thankfully the realization came before I was trying to cross the interstate. I went back to the hostel guy who taught me that the brakes are on the pedals and not on the handlebars. He, for good measure, also acted like every moron should have that information. I set off again without realizing that retraining my mind on how to stop the bike was much harder than I thought. I reached the forest and that’s what it was, a freaking forest. There are guards at the beginning of the forest who casually wave me in, so I’m thinking it was a normal occurrence for people to cycle through the forest in the pitch black. I have directions and I keep biking through forests so dark that I can’t see my own hands. If freaking out was an option, trust me I would have screamed out my lungs after 10 minutes. But I was scared that me screaming would only attract animals so I just continued to bike, looking confident and determined, without letting the animals sense my fear. After struggling through a steep slope with no fucking brakes, I finally made it to the beach. It was white shining sand and fucking gorgeous. It was so quaint; White dunes of sand, coconut trees, fisherman’s boats and white tents. There were also no lights or bars or cocktails. I was the only one for as far as I could see on the beach and while it sounds magical now, I was terrified. I was walking around a bit (cos the alternative was to go back into the dense iguana infested jungle) and this guy comes and shines the torch in my face. I have imagined this scene a million times in my life. I am suddenly alarmed by a guy. I grab his arm, trip his leg, and with one swift movement he is flat on his back. Obviously, then he happens to be telling me that I dropped something and we fall in love. But I completely digress. The point being, the first time, I was finally alarmed by a guy for real, I pretty much froze and all my thoughts were based on the fact that my parents are gonna kill me if I die here. Thankfully, again after much much frustration, I figured out that he wanted to rent out one of the cabanas on the beach. Here is a somewhat, in retrospect, funny part. I kept telling him that I wanted to check out the inside of the cabana. So I kept miming, “you, me, cabana, walk, show”. I dunno if you can see how this can convey wrong information. But basically he finallyyyyy took me to show a cabana. Turned out it happened to be his and he thought that’s what I wanted. I can safely say that I have never pedaled faster through a Mangrove forest in the middle of the night before. I reached the hostel and yelled my lungs out at the hostel guy for recommending that. To give him credit, he insisted it would have been heavenly had I waited for the full moon to come out. My rest of day two in Mexico mainly consisted of boiling in the heat, all hostel mates speaking in Spanish, hearing a guy poop right next to me while I showered, and seeing a cockroach near my bed.