Mexico!

I got back from Cozumel Mexico a few days ago, and so I figured I should probably post up a recap of everything that happened. I went down with my new friend Shena who was somehow able to get a plane ticket with only about a weeks notice. All in all it was a fantastic trip and we had a ton of fun. I took a bunch of pictures with my camera phone and posted them up to photobucket, you can check em out here.

Our flight left Seattle Friday evening at 10:30pm and went to Atlanta where we had to sit through a six hour layover before jumping on a small plane for another 3hr flight to Cozumel. The flight to Atlanta actually wasn't that bad because it was so late I slept through most of it. The coolest part was being able to watch the sunrise coming up over a perfectly flat horizon from so high up. Don't get to see that around here.

So we showed up at the hotel Saturday afternoon after something like 18 hours of traveling. We stayed at the Occidental Grand Cozumel all-inclusive resort on the South end of the island, and I have to say that the hotel was top notch. Better than most hotels in America, let alone Mexico. The rooms were large and very nice. The grounds were meticulously maintained and the staff was very friendly and helpful. Being all-inclusive all of the booze and food were already taken care of so we never had to worry about paying for anything directly while at the hotel. This is absolutely the way to go and I highly recommend it, it just made the whole trip that much more relaxing and stress free. So after showing up on Saturday we hit the beach to relax and started drinking mojitos. I had never had a freshly made mojito before, but they are fantastic. I think I put down about 5 or 6 drinks rather quickly and passed out quickly after dinner. After being totally exhausted from traveling so much, the mojitos quickly pushed me over the edge. Apparently Shena and I had some conversation that night that I have zero recollection of, and she won't tell me what we talked about, so I'm sure I said something typically stupid.

Sunday was basically our lazy day. We slept in and basically hung out on the beach and did as little as possible all day. I finished up Chuck Klosterman's third book, Killing Yourself to Live, and it was pretty good. I like his earlier books better though. I spent some time snorkeling in the ocean right off the beach and located a HUGE school of fish. I have no idea what kind of fish they were, but I came up on the edge of them and it was some kind of optical illusion, but there were so many the ocean floor was black and it looked like the ground dropped away into the deep ocean. Soon enough I was floating on the surface and they were in a large ring beneath me. As I swam back towards shore a fucking barracuda came out of nowhere and came right up to me, stared at me for a few seconds before swimming off to find lunch. I found out later that was Bob The Barracuda. He apparently likes to hang out there and people see him all the time. That's nice and all, but fuck, it sure did startle me.

That night we went down to Senior Frog's in downtown Cozumel (our hotel was a good 15 minute cab ride South of town) which is the big nightclub party joint in town. We had a pretty damn good time, but the drinks sure were spendy. $15 bucks a pop for some frozen yard daiquiri's and $4 for a bottle of Dos Equis! Made me appreciate the free booze back at the hotel. At one point the MC got up on stage and started asking for 4 guys to come up who can drink beer. I noticed they had four bottles of beer up on stage so I figured it was some kind of chugging contest. Being a large fan of beer (especially free beer, even if it is Mexican beer) I headed up on stage. Now, I have NEVER lost a beer chugging contest, and I wasn't about to let a couple collar-up preppy douchebags break my streak. So I showed them how we drink beer up here in the Pacific Northwest and soundly thumped em. What did I get as a prize? Why more free Mexican beer of course! God I hate Mexican beer.

My main purpose for going to Cozumel in the first place was to do some scuba diving, so Monday I convinced Shena to go diving with me. Because I didn't have my certification card, and she had never been diving before we had to pay the extra instruction fee to have an instructor go through all the equipment, hand signals etc with us. The boat picked us up from the pier right off from the hotel and it was just the two of us, plus one other guy and the instructor. Me and the other guy had both been diving before so we were familiar with everything so Shena basically had the instructor all to herself which helped tremendously as she had a distinct fear of putting her face underwater ever since almost drowning as a small child. She was a real trooper and pulled through without any problems. It was a pretty good dive, I was actually surprised that we went 80 feet deep with someone so new. He took us through all kinds of large coral reefs and we went through a couple tunnels through the coral, including one that was pretty damn tight. We did the two dives then they dropped us off back at the hotel, all in all it only took about 3 hours, which is crazy fast for two dives. Normally it's an all day ordeal.

When they dropped us off back at the hotel I gave our dive master/instructor a $40 tip for being so helpful, and he gave me a dirty look like it wasn't enough! It cost us about $200 to do the dives, so I gave the guy a 20% tip. Since when is 20% a lousy tip? I'm a notoriously cheap tipper and have only recently become amenable to tipping my barber which apparently is common practice these days. This probably is because my haircut actually takes longer than 5 minutes now, and I actually am friends with Trish who cuts my hair. I guess I'm OK with people I don't know thinking I'm a cheapskate, so long as people I do know don't think I'm a cheapskate. Anyway, what ever happened to just doing your fucking job? Why is it everywhere I go these days people expect me to tip them?

So I spent two other days diving while Shena relaxed on the beach or cruised around taking pictures of the island. Both days I got in two dives with several other experience divers so we were able to go a little deeper and stay down a little longer as we were more experienced with conserving our air. We did a great wall dive right on the coastal shelf where I could look down and watch the coral disappear into dark blue nothingness, then look to the left and see nothing but open ocean. It was a weird sense and trigged some minor agoraphobia (fear of open spaces.) We saw a big fucking nurse shark (much bigger than I thought it would be) as well as multiple sting rays (yeah, the same thing that killed the croc hunter guy) and sea turtles. I even had a huge groper fish come right up and stare at me for a good 30 seconds before swimming off. Unfortunately I don't have an underwater camera so I wasn't able to get any cool pictures. They have some silly disposable underwater cameras that you can get, but they aren't good deeper than 30 feet. Oh yeah, I actually got to see a Cozumel Toad Fish which is native only to the reefs around Cozumel island. He was a little guy, only about 4 inches long with some yellow fins.

While we were staying at the hotel there were just over 40 high school kids from Baton Rouge, Louisiana for their high school senior trip. This was a pretty high end hotel, so of course it was all the preppy rich kids from that school. They were funny sometimes, but mostly they were annoying as shit. Being 18yrs old they were just happy to be somewhere where they could drink, so of course there was a group of them who were totally shithammered the entire time. I guess I'm officially an old fucker now that I'm bitching about kids. Hell, while in line waiting for some mojitos one of them actually called me Sir. One night we were at the nightclub at the hotel hanging out with some other Americans we had met when one of the high school guys approached us and offered to let one of us fuck three of his girl friends if we could hook him up with one "older" girl. We told him that we didn't exactly need his help to pick up on drunk 18 year old girls doing shots of tequila.

On Wednesday we got up at the crack of dawn (literally) and ventured over to Chitzen Itza, the big ass Mayan ruins on the mainland. We had to get up early to catch a ferry over to the mainland, then take a fucking three hour bus ride through the damn jungle. First we stopped at a Yucatan freshwater sinkhole where you can swim. We didn't swim, but it looked like fun and I took a shitload of pictures (too many probably.) Apparently because the Yucatan Peninsula is made entirely of limestone there are no freshwater rivers above ground. The only source of fresh water are the sinkholes and underground rivers that criss cross the peninsula. So I got my learn on even while in Mexico. After that we grabbed some quick lunch where I was able to imbibe something extremely rare, Squirt soda pop in a glass bottle! This was definitely the highlight of the day so far. After lunch we finally made our way to the major ruins where our tourguide showed us around to all the major sights. The main pyramid was fucking huge, but they wouldn't let us climb it. Several people had died recently falling down so they closed it off. The main ball court where the Mayans played a game I can't remember the name of was very impressive. Each team was made up of seven players with the objective to get a large rubber ball up through a hoop on either side of the court. One single point was all it took to win (it looked crazy impossible to do even that) and the captain of the winning team was rewarded with the ceremonious removal of his head! We spent some more time exploring the ruins and Shena got a few pictures of me climbing up to a couple places I probably wasn't supposed to be. All in good fun. In all it was a LONG fucking day, we didn't get back to the hotel until about 9pm, but it was totally worth it.

For our last day, Friday, we rented a Jeep and spent the day exploring the island. Well, it's not a very big island, so there wasn't much to explore. There is really only one road that loops around the island, so we basically followed that the whole way. There is a small lighthouse at the southern tip of the island that we saw, and we had lunch at a small beach side joint on the Eastern coast. The West coast of the island (where all the hotels and main city are) faces the mainland and so the water is very calm with no waves and barely even any appreciable tide. The East coast on the other hand faces out to the Atlantic Ocean so it had some pretty decent waves and a much rougher rockier coastline. It's a pretty interesting difference. After lunch we found the local island Mayan ruins and spent some time hiking around there. I have to say that after being to Chitzen Itza this was pretty lame in comparison. These were much more run down and were little more than piles of rocks. Oh yeah, and I got to pay $2 for a fucking can of Sprite! So yeah, I wasn't too impressed.

So the trip was fantastic and we managed to make it home alive and in one piece. The island of Cozumel was TOTALLY different from what I remembered when we went there 14 years ago. Back then there were only 3 or 4 hotels and they were all North of town and none were all that big. Now there are numerous large hotels all along the West coast and the downtown area was all built up and FAR more touristy than it ever was. Which I guess all that was to be expected.

Hopefully I'll have some more pictures to post up once Shena gets around to developing her film.