Visiting Cancún: Snowbirds in the Sand

“There are two profoundly lonely states for a human. The first is in a crowd of countless others, entirely disconnected. And the second is alone in a city during a holiday.” – Old Sean

Holidays in Merida

Hurricane season has officially been over for a while now and I’ve done all I wanted to do in Merida during my off hours.

Granted, there hasn’t been much to do.  Christmas holidays in Mexico are somewhat intimate, so things really quiet down during the week.  As such, most of my time was spent walking around a gradually quieting city.

Merida doesn’t pull any punches in terms of Christmas decorations though.  Virtually every roundabout and many parks are filled, not with Christmas lights, but enormous plastic cartoon sculptures of Christmas icons, usually glowing a range of colors as spotlights blare. 

Coca-Cola signs, multi-styled Santa Clauses and pillars of plastic ginger-bread replicas spot the city.  Best of all is the downtown area, where Remate de Paseo Montejo goes into overkill with Christmas lights, creating tunnels, putting up four-story trees and decorating the small lawn with sitting orbs along the ground.

Overall, the entire setup is festive and pretty but without the fanfare I associate with a United States Christmas. 

Final Merida Moments

Otherwise, things have been relatively calm and laid back while I continued my studies. 

I found an unholy amount of Mayan chocolate and ate that alongside some more traditional Christmas pastries until walking for a full day was essentially out of the question. 

The art museum Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Ateneo de Yucatan (MACAY) reopened to the public and I managed to walk around inside with only one other person on a Tuesday.  Parque Las Americas with the Concha Austica also boasts compelling outdoor artworks in bright yellow and rustic reds with Mayan letter carved into surfaces around the green-space. 

And after a very quiet visit to Mexico this year, where the vast majority of people stayed inside due to COVID, the downtown area has started to bustle, very slightly as street performers return to their corners.

That’s pretty much it for Merida. 

I found a few of my favorite outdoor dining options, including C’est Pantastic, my primary coffee-shop stop in the mornings and Panaderia Melazza, which makes a toasted panini that compels me to ignore the food I have in my fridge.  But, by and large, my time in Merida was essentially finished.

Onwards to Sands

However, I’m not heading back to the states.  Things don’t look particularly enjoyable there by any stretch of the imagination. 

Instead, a friend from town offered me a place to stay in Cancun where I could continue avoiding crowds, enjoy the beach and continue meandering around.

Now, I’ve not heard too many nice things about Cancun.  Most people consider it overpriced and a bit tacky with a somewhat seedy general reputation.  Of course, on the flipside, the beaches are supposedly gorgeous and if you’re willing to pay, the hotel services and parties during Spring Break are second-to-none.

And if you’ve visited Cancun and stuck to the Hotel Zone (Zona Hotel), I fundamentally agree.  It’s not my taste. I like visiting old ruins nearly forgotten and choked by weeds, forests so dense they hit back, old areas in town where people wince at me while I try to pronounce food items and tiny shops that sell everything except what I’m looking for.

However, Cancun’s Hotel Zone is none of these things. That being said, Cancun has gradually won me over on other fronts.

The Hotel Zone

For me, Cancun can be divided into four main sections. 

There is the Hotel Zone, which boasts enormous seaside hotels overlooking white sand beaches and the famous turquois water.  These superstructures balanced on a giant land bridge arcing out into the ocean before curving back toward the airport come in numerous styles with waves, curves, sharp blocks or odd wheel formations. 

At night, these structures blaze to life with neon lights painting their facades.  Gracing the edges of these massive lodging chains are supermalls with canals carved between them and open-air designs peering off into the ocean. The opposite side of the land-strip is caked in short, dense trees which block people from peering into the admittedly pretty and calm bay. Boats, jet skis and other watercrafts of sleek design dip across the calmer waters and take tourist for short joy-rides.

If you want to know my least favorite area of Cancun, it’s around here.  Touristy, expensive and a bit predictable, this is not my ideal area to explore. 

That being said, if someone wanted a luxury relaxing vacation, they probably couldn’t do much better.  The views are beautiful, the narrow, soft-sand beaches are divine, the hotels are upscale and soothing and there’s a lot of space from beach-front to beach front.  Without exception, each hotel is perched right on the edge of the sea. 

I like Cancun’s beaches a lot, but I don’t particularly care for the Hotel Zone.  It’s not very walkable, so the easiest and cheapest way to get around here is by taking the Route 1 or 2 bus, which does constant loops for 12 pesos per person.

Downtown Cancun

Secondly, there’s the downtown district.  Extending from the enormous flee market Mercado 28 (not a real flea market, just a tourist icon) to the initial coastline, there’s the secondary tourist zone. 

A bit more quietly upscale and moderately priced, this area has a fair number of hostels, cheaper hotels and more interesting food options. 

I adore walking around this area.  Cancun has an ongoing art project known as Sea Walls which focuses on decorating numerous buildings with full-wall murals.  Av Carlos Nader has the highest concentration of artwork scattered about and boasts enough trees to make walking a shady, pleasant experience, but numerous adjacent streets are also well-decorated. 

There are tons of smaller restaurants, relatively few chains aside from Café Nader (a breakfast and lunch chain that’s somewhat notorious for a showmanship milk-coffee).  My favorites I’ve sampled include the difficult-to-find Kotaro (a tiny, extremely traditional Japanese restaurant), and Kisin (which opens for takeaway much later in the day). 

Living District

Thirdly, there’s the general Cancun area, which I haven’t explored thoughouly.  This area has very few tourists, tons of rambling Mexican homes, businesses and the traditional narrow streets and sidewalks I’ve come to love. 

In typical Mexican fashion, during storms, the streets tilt and intersections become nearly impassible on foot unless you’re willing to have your shins halfway submerged.  This entire zone is inland, away from the coastline and makes up the vast majority of Cancun.  Anything Southwest of Mercado 28 is part of this grid. 

In terms of Mexican cultures and experiences, this is probably the most authentic area.  There are performers juggling fire on street corners across from folks sitting on medians with wares of cigarettes, sweets and other baubles. 

Cars plunge down narrow streets while thunderously squeaky buses pitch behind them.  There are numerous shops and businesses, the best ones open at night serving pastor tacos, created by sheering off hunks of meat from a giant, rotating spit nestled alongside a live flame.  Dogs bark through some nights and cats yowl through others and everything is covered in a fine layer of grit. 

I really like exploring this area (as much as is safe) since there are odd gems tucked away everywhere: A shop that sells whole pineapples for thirty US cents, a small alcove of peeling artworks with intense expressions and goofy eyes, a entire horse tethered in a park right next to a major farmer’s market on weekends, smack in the middle of the city and the usual riot of flowers covering virtually every surface not dominated by someone’s home. 

Mexican homes, of course, are a fun in their own right.  Usually bright pastels, Mexican homes have narrow, often rather unassuming gateway entrances that lead to sprawling, multi-roomed, cleverly-spaced homes with high ceiling and a comfortable echo. 

Outer Cancun

Finally, the last portion of Cancun is also the rarest.  Tucked away at the extreme fringes of the ocean and beach and city, there are pockets of enduring nature that I adore, all the better for their scarcity. 

Great, uncomfortably sharp stones jut into the sea at the southernmost point of the beach, where tiny hermit crabs flee my footsteps like drunken pinballs.  Painfully red crabs hunker in crags, warding me away with enormous claws chittering out messages. Egrets lurk in mangrove trees, torn between ignoring humans and prudently obtaining distance. 

Crocodile warning signs spot the inner-bay area, but I’ve only spotted one, lounging with it’s eyes unblinking above the water.  Mangrove trees are part of the far-flung biological preserve between the Hotel Zone and Airport and massive lizards skitter outside of sandy holes, greedily soaking up sunlight before vanishing at a human glance. 

So my final, two week consensus regarding Cancun is, yes, it’s lovely.  I could do without the Hotel Zone and I’m not terribly fond of how difficult it is to walk around (Cancun is extremely spread out, so getting from area to area requires a car, bus or taxi at the very least.  And I generally don’t trust taxis) but overall, the layers of the city have a lot of merit.

A Note on Homefronts

As I write this, the US is playing out another chapter in it’s drama with yet another surge of politics and the usual flimflam.  Which is perhaps, a rather underwhelming way to describe the early events of 2021, but I cannot imagine anyone following the news is anything but wearied by it.  I only review the media on Thursdays and still find it wearing. 

Regardless, I’m in to hurry to return stateside.  I only have a month in Cancun, but rather than heading home, I plan to drive south and set up near Playa Del Carmen, where I’ve found a tiny-home a mere half our walk to the ocean. 

So until then,

Best regards and excellent trails,

Old Sean

Written January 9th 2021

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