Cancun

After Piste we caught the bus to a nearby town, Valladolid. We had a look around at the church and main square for an hour which was pretty and then headed to Cancun in order to catch our flight the next morning.

Our first impression of Cancun was: has this place been hit by a bomb? We decided that Cancun is the biggest dump we've ever visited in our lives, with half torn down buildings, empty shops and people trying to sell you stuff the whole time: “hotel hotel”, “Restaurant amigo, best food in town”, “jewelerey shop, come inside to kill your time.” It really gets on your nerves! We found the Mexican's market for some food, managing to avoid most of the touts and mariachis.

Cancun is much more expensive than the rest of Mexico. Al devised a method to work out whether a restaurant is cheap or expensive – if a bottle of beer costs M$15 then it is nice and cheap, if it goes up to M$20 then it is mid-range, M$23 is pretty pricey, and anything over M$25 is extortionate. Many places in Cancun priced their beer from M$25 – 30. After our lunch/dinner we decided to check out the beach area before dark. We jumped on the locals bus rode down to the 'zona hoteleria'. Basically Cancun has two parts – 'downtown' where we stayed, and 'zona hoteleria' which is across a wetlands area and occupies a strip of land on the coast, so it's actually quite far from the actual 'old' town. We were taken aback by how horrible and tacky it is down there. You cant even see the sea from the road for all the massive skyrise hotels, shops, bars and restaurants.

It's literally a concrete jungle, catering for Americans who want to go on holiday to mini-America. Everything is huge and fake and it's really horrible. It's also full of fat Americans with no taste.


We managed to find a small strip of public beach, sandwiched between two hotels and had a look at the beautiful turquoise sea for a few minutes with the handful of Mexican locals who were there.

We then jumped back on our bus with the Mexican workers who had finished their hotel shifts and headed back downtown. We both agreed that we will certainly not miss Cancun. It's basically for unimaginative people who don't want to leave their resorts unless it's on a private coach to Waterworld or to the giant Starbucks or giant TGI Friday's surrounding their hotel.