Escape From Playa del Carmen | #2

The next morning I wake up in this room and it’s dark and quiet and I’m not exactly sure where I am so I throw my clothes back in my bag then checkout of the hotel and go out onto the street to see what’s going on.

I get out there and it feels like Jerry Springer and Burning Man got together and built a movie set down in Mexico and now I just pushed the curtain aside and walked out into the middle of it.

An endless sea of bikini and sunglass burns and dreadlocks and purple mohawks and juiced up steroid guys with their shirts hanging out of their waistbands and tarot card readers and rolling suitcases and human pyramids and old men carrying their wives shopping bags and knickknacks and trinkets and souvenirs and beach bums selling dope and hula hoopers covered in henna and bongo drums hooked up to electric amplifiers and tribal looking dudes wearing makeup and straw skirts juggling things that are on fire and everyone is carrying at least one plastic 20” elongated liquor cup with a bendy straw.

It’s about a hundred degrees and my brain is beginning to malfunction so I step into a 7/11 on the main strip to buy something. 

I only get about a foot inside the store before a fat little security guard steps in front of me. He points at my face with one hand and pinches his face mask with the other.

I indicate to the guy that I don’t have one so he holds up a box of masks with 10 peso scribbled on the side of it in black Sharpie and sticks out his hand for the money, but I haven’t stopped at a bank yet so I don’t have any damn pesos either. 

I offer him the only two American quarters that I find jingling around in my pocket but he doesn’t want anything to do with them so now he’s just kind of standing there in front of me with his hand out while I’m scanning the store trying to figure out how to come up with the cash for this stupid little bastard.

I have an idea.

I point at the plexiglass donut case and hold up my bank card and then point at the box of masks and basically gesture to the security guy that if he gives me a mask on credit then I’ll use my card to buy him a donut.

He’s skeptical but he knows damn well those donuts cost more than 10 pesos so he agrees to the deal and hands me a mask and steps aside. I go over to the donut case and use a sheet of bakery paper to pull one out.

So now I’ve got this glazed donut but the problem now is that the whole ordeal has taken so long that I can’t even remember what I was originally going into the store to buy for myself in the first place.

So I’m perusing the aisles trying to jog my memory.

Meanwhile the security guard is staring at me like a prison inmate from across the store and watching every move I make and the whole situation just gets to be so annoying and uncomfortable that I finally decide to bail on the whole thing and that all I want is to just get the hell out of there.

But I can’t just leave because I still have to pay for this stupid donut so I go over to the cash register and the checkout line is like 15 people long. You gotta be kidding me.

So now I’m standing at the back of this ridiculous line with my backpack and I’ve got the mask stretched across my sweaty face and I’m holding the glazed donut with a little piece of bakery paper in one hand and holding my bank card in my other hand while this fat little Mexican security guy is staring at me like a hawk.

About three hours later I finally get up to the register, swipe my card, pay for the donut, shove the donut into the security guy’s greasy little fingers, yank the mask off my face, exit the store empty-handed and back out into the 100 degree circus that I was hoping to escape for a few minutes by going into the store.

I keep walking south and I start seeing these signs for a ferry, so I go check it out and it turns out there’s an island about 10 miles off the coast called Cozumel and I guess these enormous ferries run people back and forth between here and there.

And so that’s what the signs I’m seeing are for.

I’m curious about the island but I also want to get as far away from this place as possible and I’m afraid the island might just turn out to be a giant 7/11 floating out in the ocean and that if I buy a ticket, that security guard will be standing on the shore over there waiting for me get off the boat.

But it’s getting late in the day and I don’t have a ton of options at that point and I also figure I’ll probably never be standing there at that ferry terminal again for the rest of my life, so what the hell. I’ll get the ticket and go stay over there for one night just to say I checked it out, then I’ll come back and be on my way westward, into the real Mexico.

Well I bought the ticket, boarded the ferry and wound up staying out there on that little rock for four weeks.