Mexico – A Summary

It’s time to say goodbye to Latin America! We can hardly believe (or Belize 😉) all that we’ve done so far. We’ve also now tipped over the half-way point of our total travels, meaning we have more days behind us than ahead of us. Which is daunting and exciting all at once.

But first, we had a few more days left in Mexico after Hector and Sophie left us until our flight out to Hawaii. Initially I wanted to go somewhere else and have a final injection of Latin-life, but six months on the road has made us tired, and yet another bus journey would eat into the budget. Plus, we know we’re going back to Peru, so this is by no means farewell to Latin America forever.

Our final days were spent splashing about in a pool, walking to and from Walmart, checking out an incredible Catholic sanctuary more akin to a Buddhist refuge, almost burning down our Airbnb host’s apartment, planning Asia, and enjoying a final Mexican meal.

In terms of how we’ve found Mexico itself… Well, I don’t feel like we’ve really gotten to experience ‘Mexico‘, and this was a bit of a planning faux pas on my part. But decisions had to be made all those months ago, and I’d heard only amazing things about the Yucatan Peninsula.

The Yucatan Peninsula certainly seems to be a beast unto itself, and sure, there’s loads of Mexican food and people, but it’s all felt incredibly manufactured for tourism. On the other hand, that has made this bit really quite easy, so many people speak English, a range of public and private transport exists depending on your budget, and we have felt incredibly safe. It’s definitely felt more like holidaying than backpacking. We’ve also gotten to learn a lot more about the maya civilisation and culture, experience varying places mimicking paradise, and enjoy some cooler climes thanks to the coastline.

This has certainly been the most developed part of Central America, and we seem to be here at the beginning of the next huge wave of tourism, thanks to the development of a few new trainlines. Tren Maya to connect up Cancun with the rest of the country, but also one spanning from the Atlantic coastline to the Pacific, to compete with (or complement, according to some people) the Panama Canal. These developments are controversial, lots of natural forest has to be destroyed, as scar-like lines are cut through it. Indigenous communities and animals are also being displaced and their habitats threatened. On the one-hand, it’s an incredible feat of engineering and infrastructure done in such a short time. On the other, there’s a cost to pushing that through, and not just a financial one. As Sophie pointed out, these things stop in our countries because of rules and regulations to protect people, land and nature. Would we prefer our governments to just bulldoze developments through?

So, Mexico is probably somewhere we’d need to come back to. We can see why so many people come here on holiday and cannot blame them at all. I honestly didn’t realise beaches like this existed at all, let alone here, and if you’re on holiday and not short of money, there’s plenty of options to have a whale of a time.

Rule of Three

Highlights (Alex): the boat trip in Bacalar, absolutely gorgeous. Welcoming Hector and Sophie with tequilas and having their company for five days. Chilling out in Tulum

Highlights (James): Tulum ruins and cycling around the area, Bacalar boat cruise, spending time with Hector and Sophie

Lowlights (Alex): Chichen Itza being over-run by sales people and stalls, being scalded for not giving a big enough tip for an already expensive tour, entry chaos at Tulum

Lowlights (James): Dogs rudely interrupting my jogging, aggressive hawkers in Chichen Itza, entry/exit fee confusion

Takeaways (Alex): it’s possible to do all these expensive touristy places on a budget, and paying more at an all-inclusive doesn’t guarantee a better time.

Takeaways (James): As with Colombia, Mexico has a reputation of being dangerous and run by cartel gangs, while there are certainly parts of the country like that, you shouldn’t consider the entire country to be like that. Whether it’s the influence of American tourism or not, there is definitely a focus on consumption and convenience, anything you want, for a price of course.

Description (Alex): tourist-ville, absolutely gorgeous, tortillas galore

Description (James): great holiday destination (didn’t feel like backpacking), sea, sun and sand, tasty food

Entertainment

TV & Film: Justified: City Primeval, Goodbye Christopher Robin, Coco

Books: Red Dragon

Where We Stayed

Airbnb (Bacalar): 4.5 ⭐️ great space, very quiet, calm and private, missing a few things in the kitchen but otherwise very comfortable here.

Airbnb (Tulum): 4.5 ⭐️ wonderful design and amazing bed and bathroom. Unfortunatelt surprise view of building, teeny tiny kitchenette and no heating element on the pool dragged this one down a bit, but everything else was spectacular. Also, free bikes.

Airbnb (Central Cancun): 4 ⭐️, good space, nice pool, amazing huge bed (for us), but needed a bit more care and attention to really make it shine, that cupboard smell will haunt me

Airbnb (outer Cancun): 5 ⭐️, wonderful host couple, felt very comfortable here, lovely design, pool to ourselves

Airbnb (bus Cancun): 2 ⭐️, you get what you pay for, basic accom but proximity to loud music keeping me awake all night, and someone remoting into out TV at 3am lost any stars for convenience of location. Of course, James slept through it all!

Cutting Room Floor

• Chatting with Misse, the young Swedish lad who crossed the border with us into Bacalar, told us his ultimate tactic to save money… he would just have the free hostel breakfast and one other meal each day, either skipping lunch or dinner.
• Compared to us, where if we miss just one meal, we get so hangry that our relationship is more important than our budget!
• An older Canadian gent who has been ‘travelling’ for the past twenty years tells us that parts of the Mexican states were carved up to make Quintana Roo, the ‘new’ region of the Yucatan Peninsula we’ve journeyed through.
• This being invested in to make a place for tourists from the USA who would have gone to Cuba, but had to stop because of the cold war
• Meeting yet another person who got salmonella on their travels, and being very grateful that we have each other to lean on. Not just when poorly, but also when just needing a rest, it really is so much easier travelling as a pair. Huge respect to all the solo travellers out there keeping on, especially the women, they’re far more capable than I was when I tried the solo travel thing 13 years ago.
• The 1 star Google review of an all-inclusive resort saying “essentially we paid thousands of dollars for food poisoning and volleyball”.
• Mexico has the second highest population of Catholics in the world. Brasil has the highest.
• Similar to those in Peru and Bolivia, communities now practice a combined religion that melts together traditional Maya practices with Catholic ones.
• Tombs are painted in wonderful bright colours because they celebrate the dead here. They go to pray to the people that die. After a week you go to the grave, you go and pray and do the rosary, every month for a year you do the same, then you make it like a home at the year mark, and you do that every year. Then at each Day of the Dead they make it like an altar, and everyone honours the dead at the same time each year.
• Day of the Dead (which I learnt most about from Coco, thanks Disney), seems like a wonderful tradition, to talk about and remember those that we’ve lost, keeping their memories alive and passing them down through the generations. I wish we talked more about those no longer with us.
• Cancun means Snake Nest in Maya, we didn’t see any though.
• The Spaniards gave everyone Catholic first names, so you get a lot of Joses, Marias and Guadalupes, but the indigenous maya retain their surnames, so you’ll typically get a mix of a Catholic first name with a maya surname meaning Jaguar or some kind of animal.
• Chichen Itza is built at the intersection of four cenotes, but there are 60 around it in this area.
• Each side of the main kukulkan temple has 91 steps, with one side having just one extra. Add all the steps on all sides, you get 365.
• The temple is oriented to the points on the compass.
• Kukulkan means snake with feathers, kukul = feather, kan = snake (as in cancun).
• Similar to Tulum, clapping here creates an echo that sounds like the quetzal. This is caused by the specific height and angle of the steps.
• This whole area was a ceremonial one, people didn’t live here, they lived around it, and certain ones would come for ceremonies and games of pok a tok.
• As elsewhere, the temples are not hollow.
• They engineered drainage to stop the pooling of water in the large congregation platforms.
• Mayas had an obsession with water and time. They are called masters of time. They had a precise control of agriculture, by being in contact with the universe and having an exact understanding of the calendar.
• Uayeb is five days in August that makes up the 365 days of the year alongside 20-day-long months. Uayeb was typically an unlucky period, bad things would happen in these days. Uay = bad, Ep = spirit.
• Their circular calendar (see photo below) shows the months, and also numbers in dot form, including zero, which is a big deal for reasons I forget. They also have a further calendar on top of this for years and multiple years, which ended in 2012, and why many people thought the world would end that year.
• Many congregated at Chichen Itza on the predicted end of the calendar date in 2012, and rather than the world ending, they saw a bunch of planets aligning. This alignment only happens every 5525 years. It is a mystery how they knew this.
• Time rules everything. The day and month you were born is what you are good for. The day you were born, and the day you realise why you were born, are the two big days of your life. We check out our maya months and predictions (akin to horoscopes), Hector’s is the only one that really fits.
• The whole yucatan peninsula is on a limestone platform. It’s perfect for non-machine agriculture, but not great for the machines.
• Tourists here are half Mexicans, half foreigners, according to our host. This is a better ratio than a lot of tourist areas we’ve been to.
• Our host works in interior decoration and said that the quality of goods imported from China far surpassed that of anything made in Mexico, so he imported everything.
• The story of Mary, Untier of Knots, which is totally random but I quite like it. The grandfather of the donor of the painting was having marital issues and sought help from a priest. The priest prayed “In this religious act, I raise the bonds of matrimony, to untie all knots and smoothen them” and the knots of the marriage were undone. I like to think of this like a masseuse massaging a knot in your muscle to release it, but using religion to work through the knots in your life, through faith and hope.

The Photos

Farewell night to our beautiful freezing plunge pool:

Boating:

So many cute seashells:

One of the maya calendars:

Tequila is made from blue agave, pictured here, whilst mezcal is made from a mix of agaves:

Chichen Itza:

Cenote:

Sophie trying to dodge the whacky wavy inflatable tube… [insert what you think it is here]:

A beautiful bird singing to us outside the window:

Someone leaving a ribbon at the Sanctuary for Mary to help Taylor Swift untie the “knots” of her life:

This worker, who turned on this huge spinning disc of destruction, standing right in the firing line as it spins around. No health & safety here!

I love Crunch chocolate, and so finding an array of no less than six different ice creams from it was like a dream:

You can literally buy everything and anything in walmart!:

Art?:

James is going to miss having six different kinds of hot sauce: