Our Mexican Adventure

It’s Thanksgiving, and we have much to be thankful for …

• Having the support of our family and friends on our crazy decision to move to Mexico just for the hell of it.
• Our trusty ’97 Honda Civic making the Mexico journey without any side trips to the mecanico auto.
• Our cats surviving the long trip and not leaving any permanent marks on us.
• Arriving safely in our final destination, Playa del Carmen.
• The friendliness and warmth with which we’ve been welcomed in Mexico.
• Blue skies, white sand beaches, turquoise sea, green trees and bright sunshine.
• 40¢ tacos al pastor.
• $3.50 mojitos at Babe’s Noodles & Bar.
• The best brownies in the world at Ah Cacao Chocolate Cafe (and an awesome cappuccino too).
• The running track at the soccer stadium.
• NAFTA.
• A U.S. dollar to Mexican peso exchange rate of 10.6 or higher.
• The Italians’ contribution to Playa del Carmen — pizza, pasta, panninis, coffee. Yum!
• The Americans’ contribution to Playa del Carmen; the Walmart should be done any month now.
• Not having a job.
• Being on vacation.
• Spending 24 hours a day, 7 days a week together for the past month and still loving and respecting each other as much as and probably more than ever. Aw shucks.

Happy Thanksgiving!

After an intense search that went as far north as Cancun and as far south as Playacar (Playa del Carmen’s version of suburbia), we have finally succeeded in finding an honest to goodness cat litter box! Can we get an amen?!

We’ve made little progress in our apartment hunt. After much effort, we’ve finally acquired an old issue of Andale, a free classified paper, that contains various apartment listings. Oddly enough, their office is right around the corner (we saw it for the first time on Thursday!), so we’ll try to get a newer issue on Monday. We’d really like to find a place before tourist season really picks up (mid-December). Wish us luck!

We hear Chicago got some snow recently. We know exactly how you must feel. It’s been overcast, occasionally rainy, and only about 75 yesterday and today. Sucks to be us.

Has it really been four days since we last talked? We really must get better at updating this blog thingie. So much has happened — so much that we can’t seem to remember when it happened anymore. Did we lay on the beach in Xpu-Ha on Monday or was that when we took a walk through Puerto Morelos? What did we do yesterday?? What day is today? Is it still November? Did we miss Thanksgiving?

This is pretty much our state of mind right now, but for your sakes, we will try to reconstruct just what the heck we’ve been doing with all our time.

Sunday:
Woke up feeling lazy, but since it had been publicly documented that we were going snorkelling, we figured we better get to it. We found Tankah Bay, our trusty Civic made it down the dirt road and we found the cenote we had heard about. A guy with an “oh so offical” Manatee Cenote t-shirt informed us the cenote was privately owned and we would have to pay a $5 fee. We were pretty sure this was not true and decided not to fund the scheming, yet enterprising young man. (Yes, we know it’s only $5, but we’re unemployed!) So, we grabbed our snorkelling gear and checked out the ocean reef. We saw some fish, but the reef was mostly dead. We’re outta here!

We moved on to try our luck at Xpu-Ha, about 20 miles south of Playa del Carmen. It’s tricky to find the exit to the beach at Xpu-Ha. In fact, it’s difficult to find exits to get to the beach along most of the Mayan Riviera coast. Technically, all beaches in Mexico are open to the public. However, you can’t go through privately owned land to get to the public beach. With all inclusives swallowing up almost every piece of available land and installing security guards to keep non-guests out, getting to the beach can be challenging. But we found our exit, a single-lane dirt road with a small sign on the ground saying Xpu-Ha X-4. It’s easy to miss as the very large and very pink Copacabana resort is right next to it. Xpu-Ha was worth the search. Beautiful beach and an excellent lunch at Cafe del Mar (the best tofu dish Libby’s ever had).

Monday:
Woke up feeling lazy and decided to sleep in. But the cleaning lady wanted to clean so we got up off our butts and went to Puerto Morelos. Puerto Morelos is about 20 miles south of Cancun (half-way between Cancun and Playa del Carmen). We had heard it was hit pretty hard by the hurricane. We also heard that this laid-back town had the largest English language bookstore on the coast and had a good number of long-stay apartments for rent at reasonable rates. As our current place is only available for another 3 weeks, we thought we should investigate.

We took a leisurely 2 hour walk around town. Puerto Morelos was indeed laid-back, but a little too laid-back for our tastes. We saw very few people around, the bookstore was closed (although the sign said open), several restaurants were closed, and we heard they had been having problems with their electricity. We did see some beautiful beachfront homes however. After admiring the fronts of the homes, we walked along the beach to see the backs of the homes and check out their views — only to discover that many no longer had backs to their homes. They were gone — ravaged by the hurricane! Pictures are in our photo album under Puerto Morelos.

Tuesday:
Woke up feeling lazy. John read Fahrenheit 451. Libby read Ender’s Game.

Wednesday:
Woke up feeling lazy, but decided to shake things up a bit. John read Ender’s Game. Libby read Fahrenheit 451.

Oh yeah, we also went to go check out Tulum. Beautiful! Didn’t do anything but lay on the beach, but had a great time. We’ll go back to Tulum later to explore the ruins.

NEW: If you would like to be notified of new postings to this blog, please enter your email address at the right and click the “add” button.

We’ve been in Playa del Carmen (PDC) for almost a week now, and it’s beginning to feel a lot like … Christmas … um, I mean home. The apartment search hasn’t gone as well as we had hoped. The only place we found that was in our price range and available wouldn’t allow cats. Displaced persons from Cancun and Cozumel probably grabbed up all the apartments right after the hurricane.

We are currently renting a studio condo unit for 4 weeks (or less if we find an apartment sooner). It’s pricier and smaller than what we want, but it’s a block from the beach, has a kitchen, 2 balconies with hammock, all the filtered water we can drink, and most importantly — free wireless high-speed internet. See our photo album for pictures.

Having a kitchen allows us to cook our own meals (and chill our own beer), which makes it seem more like real life rather than just a vacation. We went grocery shopping to stock our new kitchen. The grocery stores are pretty much the same as back home, except for one thing that freaked Libby out. Mexicans don’t refrigerate eggs. Considering how many egg dishes Libby has already eaten in Mexico without getting sick, we decided to do as the Mexicans do and buy the eggs. Research on the internet shows that fresh eggs can last 10-14 days without refrigeration. We saw chickens a few blocks north of our condo, so there’s a good chance our eggs are fresh. Check out this link for an interesting egg experiment.

Can You Really Store Fresh Eggs a Year or More Without Refrigeration?

The nightlife in PDC is great, but gets pricey after awhile. Still, talking to locals is one of the best ways to find an apartment, so we’re considering it a research expense. We’ve met so many interesting people down here already. Wednesday night, we met two members of a heavy metal band from Austin, Texas, Closed Hand Promise. They were really cool. If you like metal, check them out here.

Tonight, we are going back to one of our old haunts — The Blue Parrot Bar. It’s right on the beach and has swings instead of bar stools. The dance floor blew away in the hurricane, but an update on their website says that it should be back in just a few more days.

Tomorrow, we will venture out of PDC and go snorkelling in a cenote at Tankah Bay. A cenote is a fresh-water filled sinkhole, and the Yucatan Peninsula is full of them. We’ll try to hit as many of them as we can. It’s a rough life.

We’re going out to take some more photos of PDC now, but you can check out what we have already in our Photo Gallery.

Until Nov 4, we were uncertain whether or not the road to Cancun was open. While sipping our coffees, playing catch-up on our email, and uploading our photos, we finally got confirmation that the road was open — thanks Playa Maya news!

Finally, the day we’d been waiting for had finally arrived. We packed up the car and started the last leg of our journey from Merida to Playa del Carmen. About 75 miles from Cancun, we arrived at the second of two toll booths, and were informed that we did not need to pay the $17 toll because the road was damaged. Shortly thereafter, the impact of hurricane Wilma on the tollroad became apparent. Here are some pictures from the damaged toll road: Detour, Dirt Road crossing flooded area of toll road, Aftermath of a car caught in the hurricane. The flooded area of highway was about 2 miles long, but the remainder of the distance between Merida and Cancun was fine.

Initially, we decided that we did not have time to go through Cancun, but we ended up there because we needed to get some fuel. Most of the pictures in the Cancun album show the damage caused.

As we drove on to Playa del Carmen, we wondered what awaited us. What we entered into was a torrent of rain that prevented us from seeing much of the town, and a series of hotels that didn’t want anything to do with our kitty kats. Not quite the welcome we had hoped for. But we eventually found a hotel, and the rain let up.

After a great dinner and the best mojitos at our favorite Playa restaurant, Babe’s, we headed over to a bar rumoured to be an ex-pat hangout. We soon had the pleasure of meeting Julie, Sharky, Victor, D.J., Morgan and Mercedes. Things were looking up.

The next morning, the sun came out and we headed straight to the beach. After a quick swim and nap, we headed into town. We found both the beach and town to be in great condition. The main difference between now and our last trip to Playa in May is that a number of trees have lost many of their leaves and/or branches. Oh yeah, and there’s much fewer tourists here now. If you’re interested in coming down, we highly recommend it.

Although Playa’s been having great beach weather, we have been spending our last 2 days taking care of practicalities — getting cell phones, looking for apartments, sampling tacos, figuring out what to post to our blog, etc. Once we get settled into an apartment, we’ll be able to focus on the important things — laying on the beach, reading a book, sampling tacos, and wondering if we’ve done anything interesting enough to post to our blog.