Rolo on Tour

Cancún:

Luckily I got accostumed pretty fast to that air conditioning problem and have not had any problems since the first night.  I spent two afternoons at the beach, which was quite empty – quite surprising as it was a beautiful sandy beach and the water had the perfect color.

Most of the evenings were spent in the hostel, drinking some beer on the roof. On Wednesday I also went out to a club called Señor Frogs with Moni and Ingo, a german couple. On the way there suddenly I was wondering „WTF, why is there a lion on the sidewalk???“. And indeed there was a guy with a baby lion on his chain. The lion was really angry and was trying to break out. While we walked by, he asked „You wanna buy a lion?“, at least that is what I heard. The german couple later told me that he actually said: „Wanna take a picture with the lion?“. Well anyway as a „good citizen“ I was walking by and not supporting that act of animal cruelty.

The club was really lame (some kind of stupid single party for middle-aged american people), but I could not convice the others to go to another club, so I was sitting at the nearby lagoon for some time. There I was talking to a girl who was working there. Her job was to walk around the club and ask everybody if they wanted to buy cigarettes. She spoke only spanish and I think she was happy that she could finally talk to somebody. We talked for a while and when I got home I felt kind of bad, that I can go on a 1-year-trip around the world, while she had to take on such a job.

The next morning I planned to visit Chichen Itza, a famous Maya site nearby. Well, my alarm clock didn’t agree and fell on the floor at night and therefore did not ring in the morning. The time safed hereby I used for sleeping, grabbing some tacos and deciding where to go next. Finally I decided to book a tour with a company called Bamba Experience, where you are are travelling on a given route and are participating in some activities (More Infos within the next weeks), but you can decide when to go, where to stay etc. So Friday in the morning I got breakfast, packed my things and went to Playa del Carmen.

Playa del Carmen:

I had a really great time in this place. When I got there I was looking for some hostel, in which I had decided to stay in, but i did not find it. So I ran into a place called Hostel Playa and just decided to stay there. The afternoon I spent (of course) at the beach, playing volleyball with some people which appeared to be mostly from Israel. Well honestly, most of them could not play at all, but it was nevertheless quite fun.
In the evening I had some beers with Arik (Beer-Sheva, Israel), Mike (New Jersey, USA), Dominik (Heidelberg, Germany) and Jeremy (Vancouver, Canada), as you can see here:

Later we went out for a walk and suddenly Dominik, Jeremy and I found ourselves in a beach club called Blue Parrott. It was quite fun, but at some point it got a little bit cold, as i was wearing my flip flops, so I decided to leave them alone at some point.

Saturday then was a really eventful day. The day started as usual with some tacos, hanging around and volleyball at the beach. This time Jeremy and me managed to get quite a good 3-on-3 game on with some girls from Chile, some american guy and Johnny, who is half mexican, half canadian. In the evening we started again with some beers in the hostel. Later when we were walking through the streets Dominik encountered the woman of his dreams, as he put it later, so I decided to be his wingman. Later he was kissing her sister ;-).

After staying at the Blue Parrot again until it got closed, we were sitting at the beach for some more time until the sun was rising. After finally having said goodbye to everybody Dominik, Jeremy, Johnny and me decided to go and take some breakfast. Johnny recommended chilaquiles, so I tried them and they tasted really nice. Dominik could not help himself but ordering some more beers .. At some point someone had the idea that everyone of us had to sing a song in his language. As that sounded kind of boring we decided to do that all at the same time which resulted in a quite epic video :-).  Finally at 9 AM we arrived at the hostel and were going to sleep while everybody else was just getting up.

On Sunday we did not really do much, partly because we had to get some sleep and partly because there was a storm coming – destroying all dreams of playing beach volleyball again. In the evening we decided to save some money and cook some pasta, which appeared to be quite ineffective as it resulted in us paying way more than we did the other days when going out for dinner ;-).

Afterwards we played some card games with a couple from Australia and got to bed relatively early.

So this morning I said goobye to everybody and went on to my next stop, which is going to be Tulum.

Saying goodbye to the quite funny receptionist

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Right now I am sitting in Cancún in the lobby of Hostel Quetzal, where I am staying for the first days . The last 24 hours have been kind of stressful:

The flight began as usual with me watching other passengers hurry to be first in a line to get quickly to a bus, which would bring them to the plane, where they would go to their preassigned seats. Congratulations to 30 more minutes of uncomfortable seating!

Well what do you do on a 12-hour-flight? Apart from filling out some visa forms, there is plenty of time to try to solve that for example:

The finger on that pic belongs to Marcos, a cook from Playa del Carmen, who had just visited his girlfriend in Germany. It was very nice talking to him and I could test my spanish a bit (and I realized I have to improve on that some more).

Arriving on the airport the main objective was to find the official counter, where the prices for the bus ticket into the city equaled those which where told to me in advance.

One sample conversation:

Me: I am looking for the .. ticket counter.

Him: … it is 156 Pesos.

Me:  No, it is 42 Pesos.

Him: …

Then he wanted to make me believe that the next bus would leave in 4 hours, because there where not enough tourists who wanted to drive to the city at that time :-).

But finally I found the official counter and got to the city and after one or another mistakenly followed direction eventually got to the hostel and was very happy to get a shower.

After hanging out on the roof of the hostel with the other guests for a while I decided to go sleeping. Unfortunately I could not realize this, as the air conditioning system was quite annoying. It was cold, windy and loud. At 6 o’clock I decided to ask at the reception for another blanket, which resulted in me at least having something like 1,5 hours of sleep. In the following months I definitely need to harden myself up against these air conditioners.

Well enough of that, I am now checking out the beach.

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