Our days in Cancun were the most relaxed and chilled that we had had throughout our whole trip. We were so chilled that we never went sightseeing or in fact anywhere else besides the beach through the day and local bars at night. It was probably a good thing that we stuck to the beach as every evening without fail me and G got ourselves completely lost trying to find our downtown villa!
Night 1: Got lost at night on our way home from the bus station
We thought we knew exactly how to get home as it felt like we had just walked up one road to get to the station. Well we were completely wrong about that and spent at least an hour circling the station trying to see something familiar. We ended up stumbling upon some sort of street show in a tiny local bar and got pretty drunk with the local girls football team. It was a fabulous night (especially for G…), very cheap and we had some amazing tacos!
Night 2: Got lost again at night walking from the bus stop that we thought was right by our street.
It wasn’t… After an hour and half of wandering around we walked past a shop with 2 locals sat outside who asked if we were we lost. Being in downtown Cancun we really didn’t want to admit it so said we were actually looking for a bar. They told us to pull up a chair with them and ushered the shopkeeper to bring a couple of beers, uhh I mean coffee! So several ‘coffees’ later we had covered every topic from employment to family life to how star signs effect your personality and a thousand other mental conversations all in broken English/Spanish. As it grew later the shop keeper shut shop and it was time for us to leave still none the wiser as to where we were or where we needed to head. As we walked away one of the guys asked where we were staying? We told him the main road from where our street was only to be told that we were only 1 block away the whole time!
Night 3: Getting lost walking home from a local restaurant
So we didn’t get back home the most direct way that we could have but by now we had been down pretty much every wrong turn so managed to eventually get home. However one wrong turn took us past a park where the locals were all latino dancing on a stage with each other surrounded by vendors selling delicious street food. It was amazing to see everyone of all ages getting up and dancing so skillfully to the live music. I wish we had been slightly more sober so that we could’ve tried it out too but just keeping upright was a struggle!
Night 4: G getting lost… again!
I actually somehow managed to get back without G on night 4! Our landlord called round around 9pm as we still owed for our stay and could not believe how cool I was about the fact I’d lost G and that I was sure he would find his way back soon. The landlord wasn’t so sure and made me give a full description of what he was wearing so he could look out for him whilst driving around town. I think he was actually quite concerned for his well fair. Anyway, sure enough after midnight G came back with lots of stories of people he had met that had bought him hotdogs and tequila and had eventually pointed him in the right direction!
Now we may have just been very lucky in our experiences, but just how friendly the locals were made us question everything we had heard about Mexico. We had to admit that all the information we had on travelling through Mexico was just don’t risk it, but we hadn’t actually met anyone that had travelled away from the coast to get an honest account of the country. We only caught public transport and were pretty much drunk everyday in Cancun so would have been easily targeted, but we were not at all. We loved how relaxing the town and coastline was and are now looking forward to seeing more of the country.
Have you or anyone you know been travelling into Mexico? I would love to hear if it is safe for independant travellers!
expeditioningloveandstuff 