Okay, back and mostly recuperated from Mexico. Here begins the trip report:
7 hours travel time there; we arrive at what has been very highly touted as a great house, but what appears to be two concrete cubes stacked on each other with a staircase cut out. The bed feels like more concrete, and the shower doesn't get hot. Oh! And no paper in the toilet. Of any kind. I'm fully aware of how un-guy-like I sound when I say this, but, Ew.
Rented a scooter for $30/day, drank and tanned and drank and ate and drank and drank and ate and drank and drank and ate some more. That was before we started drinking. Seriously, a sixer of Sol cost $5.25-ish, and that was before the refund on the bottles. The best guacamole I've ever had, and for
cheeeeap.
The only snafu we had was when warming up some leftovers to save cash on dinner - we popped some enchiladas in the microwave and some bread in the toaster oven; we were just about ready to eat when *BOOM* the power died. Thank Pete the a/c was on a different circuit; we would have melted.
It was like 120 degrees in the sun at 3 p.m. there; about 90 in the shade in the evening. At least we didn't burn too bad. We saw the ruins at Hacienda Mundaca, a whole estate built by a "pirate" (actually a slave trader), who must have installed mosquito farms. I think I left there with 30 new bites. Coconut water is tasty, but no good for scaring away bugs or soothing one's skin after they come.
It turns out my 3 years of Spanish
*cough* years ago isn't all lost -- I had entire conversations with people who spoke with such an accent I only understood about every fourth word. "Hable menos rapidamente, por favor" was my favorite sentence. Then on the boat when we left we met an Italian couple which just screwed me out of Spanish until we left the airport (our honeymoon was in Italy, and I almost figured out how to talk to people).
First-class airline tickets are nice, except under two conditions:
[list=1]
- You're in the bulkhead and have no carry-on space
- The people in the next row are trying to "drink [their] twenty-five dollars' worth."[/list:o]
Guess what happened on our way home.
As I said in that post above, it's good to be married to someone in travel. As the missus said repeatedly on our trip, "it's good to live on the periphery of the rich."
Missed you all, glad to be back, &c, and now here ends the trip report.