The Angry Australian

It was with a sigh of relief that we landed in Cancun. We got out of Cancun straight away as it's a resort town where hotel prices start at US$100 per night. And it was full of American teens who head south of the border cos you only need to be 15 or something to buy a beer in Mexico. We jumped on a bus and went straight to Playa del Carmen. Playa means beach.

Playa del Carmen's a silly kind of place, all geared to US tourists, and full of short, stocky chaps whose aim in life is to strip Americans of cash. And Australians. It took just a couple of days for me to develop an intense dislike of Mexicans and the attitude that the Spanish-speaking world can suck my cock. In my experience, they were either aggressively extortionate or siccophantic and grinningly subservient. My attitude has changed somewhat since, thankfully. It doesn't feel nice to side with the Spanish conquest.

I bought a couple of rocks and some weed on the first day. The coke was OK, but the weed was woeful. Brown, full of sticks and seeds. If you tried to sell this shit in Australia, you'd get killed.

Our time there consisted of lazing around on the deack chairs and chez lounges on the beach, drinking cocktails, which went some way to balancing out the irritations of not being able to walk a step without some idiot pushing their crappy wares, and then being rude about it when I said I wasn't interested in a fucking hammock I'd have to drag around three continents.

Probably the most noteworthy incident, and why in an earlier entry I brought up my Vegas nosebleed, was an experiment I performed on the second of the four days we were there. Purely in the interests of science, of course.

After buying a few halfie bags from a guy who took me to his office and showed me his kilo stash, I ran back to my hotel room and took so much of the shit, I almost spewed. And it only took two bags! While I was a little disappointed in my performance, it really did the trick. While my companion slept, I wandered the streets. Across the road from where we were staying was what a thought was a seedy upstairs bar. The doorman had a machete strapped to his side. "This is my kind of party", I thought. I was wrong.

I went up the steps and realised it was an extremely locals-only karaoke bar. When I came through the door, it was like that scene in Police Academy when the seargent and his underling get directed to the Blue Oyster. The music didn't stop, but it was like it had. Everyone turned around and stared at me. While my stuff was kickin in to eleven. Never one to leave somewhere just because everyone wants me too, I ordered a beer. The barman looked me up and down. I smiled the stupid "I come in peace" gringo idiot grin I've adopted for the Spanish-speaking world. He looked me up and down again. Then he shoved a lighter in my face. And looked at me. I was feeling slightly paranoid by this point and was wondering why the fuck he was holding a lighter near my face. More come in peace from me. More lighter holding from him. I was getting worried. "Oh, fuck. He's looking at my pupils. Just like the doormen in Sydney clubs. "Oh fuck, they're gonna kick me out before I've even had a beer". "Problemo, Senor?" I asked, grinning again. He just gave me another, slightly different weird look. And lit my cigarette. It had been hanging out of my mouth the whole time. I drank my beer, and left.

After a little more street-wandering, I eventually found a beachside nightclub where I boogied on the sand for a few hours until they started playing Pat Benetar. Always a good time to leave. Rejecting myriad offers of whatever a chap could want (coke, weed, women), there was not much to do but go back to the room.

I decided to take the back streets and saw something that, despite my elevated mood, almost brought a tear to my eye. In Playa del Carmen, there are stray dogs and cats everywhere. Hundreds of them. I saw a little fox terrier cross lying in the gutter. He was skinny, covered in huge ticks and was twitching his last. I'm not a people person, I'm a dog person. I can walk past a hundred toothless beggers and feel nothing, but seeing this poor little fella broke my heart. I stopped and gave him some water from a nearby puddle and a little pat. In retrospect it was a foolish move as he pobably had rabies.

The next day, as my companion and I left our (extremely well priced, rather lovely) room, she turned to me with a look of horror. "Get back inside the room," she uttered. It became apparent that the blow had reopened my Vegas drinking-straw wound and a trail of blood was running down my face.

We tired of Playa del Carmen rather quickly and moved on to a town which has been described as what del Carmen was like ten years ago called Tulum. The town itself isn't much to blog about but the nearby coast is littered with cabanas, where we took residence for a few clean-living days.

We took a tour to the Sian Caan bioreserve which was fairly fabulous. We got picked up from our cabana and taken to the base. We were informed that they were a bit short on drivers that day, and would I mind if I drove one of the Jeeps through the park. Thankfully, my baggy shorts concealed my instant erection. It was my first go driving a manual with the stick on the right, but did not find it difficult at all, though I did have a couple of micro-sleeps on the long, straight, bumpy ride through the park to where the boats were. We then chugged around the mangrove swamps for an hour or so, checking out the splendid range of birdlife. Cormorants, eagles, hawks, all kinds of beaut shit. We had an hour or so for snorkelling around the reef and saw rays, lots of fish and other reefy things, as well as dolphins and sea turtles.

Rather than heading to the interior and checking out the 'real' Mexico as we were a bit tired of it by then, we headed down the coast, by BUS (never again, sweet Lord, never again), across the border, to Belize. This was, by far, the most vexing border crossing to that point, and since. First, we had to get off the bus, make our way through all the guys strapped with automatic rifles to officiate our exit from Mexico. Then, we had to get back on the bus, through the neutral zone. Then we had to take all our bags off the bus, go through Belize customs, put all our shit back on the bus. It was all a bit much after the six-hour bus trip. Thankfully, it was worth it, as the next entry attests. DO read on, won't you...