El Cuyo

El Cuyo, Northern Yucatan, Mexico

Our plan after leaving Isla Mujeres was to rent a car and drive down to the apartment we had rented in El Cuyo the day before Mum&Mum arrived. That way we could stock up the fridge and get the place ready for them. The company we were renting the car from picked us up from the ferry port and took us to our car, a banged up old Nissan Tsuru which seemed to be the most numerous car on the road in this part of the world. It looked like 3 large suitcases glued together, but it was an automatic and had air-conditioning so we weren't complaining. We drove down to the super supermarket and spent a happy hour wandering the aisles, filling up the trolley with all the tasty treats we had been missing for the previous few months. We had been advised to get as much stuff as we could in Cancun as there was little that could be bought in El Cuyo itself and the nearest supermarket was an hour's drive away. Then we set off on the two hour drive to El Cuyo, which actually took nearly three and a half hours. Each village we passed through was smaller than the last (but still contained the requisite 47 speedbumps) and eventually they were just collections of wooden huts by the roadside. We arrived in El Cuyo, collected the keys and unloaded the car into the apartment. It was a huge place, and as close to the sea as it's possible to get without getting your feet wet. The only downside was that for most of the journey there we were driving through small scale brush fires along the length of the road. By the time we reached El Cuyo, the air was thick with the smoke from the fires and it hung over the whole coast like a thick fog. After coming from Isla Mujeres where it was bright and sunny every day, it would be a shame if all out time here was spent in a grey haze and smelling of bonfires. When we woke up the next morning, however, the wind had changed direction and the sky was as blue as you could want it.

We headed back to Cancun to collect Mum&Mum, got lost on the motorway in Cancun as Mexicans are so good at navigating they don't need signs, and arrived at the airport just a few minutes before they walked out with their suitcases. Both Cara and I were really looking forward to seeing our mums again, and it was great to see family again after all this time away. They both looked surprisingly chipper after such a long flight, which was good as they then had to sit in the car for another three and a half hours to get to the apartment. If Cara's mum, Linda, or my mum had hoped to get any sleep on the drive there they were out of luck, as Mexican roads have speedbumps every twenty metres. These, couples with the more than numerous potholes guaranteed they were bouncing around in the back seat for the entire journey. By the time we got there they were both starting to flag a bit, so we got them settled into their rooms and Cara made a start on dinner, more of her excellent fajitas. This was made a tad more difficult as all the kitchen appliances had been plugged into one extension socket and it just couldn't cope with the pressure. When you switched on the hob, it would take half an hour to warm up and the lights in the room would noticeably dim. Then if you attempted to use the microwave, it would short out the fridge. When you switched the fridge back on, the hob stopped working and so on. It took Cara the best part of two hours to finish cooking something that should have taken thirty minutes. Great! We had dinner out on the enormous balcony overlooking the sea, and much beer and wine was drunk. Cara and I even had another surprise treat to enjoy with our dinner. One of Cara's friends from back home, Helen, had given Linda a can of Strongbow cider for Cara and a can of Boddingtons bitter for me. After drinking crappy lager for the last God knew how long, we savoured those for as long as we could, which turned out to be about seventeen seconds in my case, and about seventeen hours in Cara's. By the end of the evening, everybody was exhausted and Mum&Mum finally made it to bed. They both slept like babies until late the next morning, but over the next couple of days both mums handled the jetlag surprisingly well. A lot better than I would have done, that's for sure. In fact most mornings, the three ladies had usually been for a swim, taken a walk along the beach and had breakfast before I even opened my eyes for the first time (although I'm obviously not the best benchmark for early risers).

Now, one of the supreme advantages of having family visiting mid-journey was to resupply our meagre rations with all the much-yearned for comforts of home. In the preceding months Cara and I had made various online purchases for goodies. New books, a new compact digital camera with assorted memory cards, new filters for the SLR, various cosmetic potions and creams for Cara and some much needed new books for the both of us. All this was fairly straightforward and Mum&Mum were happy to fill their cases with our chosen toys and toiletries. But this was trivial stuff compared to our real needs. Cara wanted, no, needed chocolate. Cadburys chocolate to be precise. And I hadn't had a bacon butty in 8 months. This was to prove a greater challenge. My mum was getting nervous about being an international bacon smuggler even before she bought the stuff, and the thought of getting the shakedown at Mexican customs didn't exactly fill her heart with joy. But true to her word, she packed the rashers into her suitcase (which was only slightly smaller than a detached farmhouse in Wiltshire) and braved the authorities. Linda did the same with Cara's forty seven kilos of assorted Cadburys chocolate products. As it turned out they were fine, despite falling foul of their own honesty and ticking the box on the immigration form relating to carrying food products. Like true professionals, they bluffed their way through customs with goodies intact, although Linda had to sacrifice a lemon for the greater good (fruit smuggling seems to be a family trait). So, the next morning Cara and I enjoyed real bacon sarnies for the first time in ages and for the next two weeks, Cara was never more than four feet away from a piece of chocolate. As a thankyou, Cara and I repaid the favour by giving Mum&Mum fourteen kilos of books and unwanted clothes to take home for us.

The village of El Cuyo was tiny, but it had a great atmosphere about it and all the locals were very friendly. They didn't even make any comments about the dandy hats Mum&Mum insisted on wearing everywhere they went. I'm reliably informed they are all the rage back home but I thought they looked like they should be worn by a couple of boiler stokers off an old steam engine. Shows what I know about fashion. There were only two restaurants in El Cuyo and they both closed at 6pm, so we wouldn't be having any crazy late nights on the town. We ate out a few times for lunch and the local seafood was fantastic, and most evenings were spent in the apartment, with Cara and me attempting to cook something up with our limited kitchen appliances.

After about five days in the apartment, we eventually began to run low on supplies. As the only things you could buy in El Cuyo were beer and onions (which incidentally, is what I began to smell like after five days in the apartment) we decided to take a day trip to the nearest supermarket in Tizimin, one and a half hours drive away. We took a walk around the town and had lunch in a very pleasant restaurant overlooking the town square. Mum&Mum were both wearing their Ivor the Engine hats, and Cara and I were a good foot taller than anyone else in town. That, coupled with the fact that we were the only gringos for miles around, guaranteed we received plenty of attention as we wandered the streets of Tizimin. We filled up a trolley with everything we needed at the well stocked supermarket and headed back to El Cuyo.

Now, getting there had been relatively easy. Being the only town of any size for some good distance, Tizimin had been signposted almost as soon as we left the apartment (for some reason, they have signs in the arse-end of nowhere. Just not in major cities or on highways). Getting back was to prove a little more difficult, and of course, it was my turn to drive. After taking several random turns, and taking my bearings from the sun and a pack of circling vultures, the general consensus was that we were lost. Obviously, being a man and Compass Mik, I insisted that I knew where we were going. Cara and Mum&Mum were having none of it. They each offered their own version of our intended course and between us we managed to cover all four points of the compass. Let me tell you, being lost in some shabby backwater of the Yucatan Peninsula with three female backseat drivers is unlikely to ever make the top ten of any man's "Things I'd really like to be doing on a Sunday afternoon" list, but we eventually we found our road and headed back to El Cuyo. Okay, so they were right and my directions would have taken us to El Salvador, but that's really not the point, is it?

We spent a great week and a half in El Cuyo. We had an enormous stretch of beach to ourselves, a great apartment, complete solitude and a lot of fun. My mum even had a go at teaching Linda and Cara how to linedance, though I was thankfully spared. I was, however, abjectly humiliated at a host of card and board games, but I displayed inhuman resilience to conversational topics involving X-Factor contestants and Eastenders plots, so it wasn't all bad.
My Mum and I even managed to watch the Champions League final in town one afternoon. The local internet place (actually somebody's living room with a couple of computers in the corner) had satellite TV and the owner kindly let us watch the game. On the walk back to the apartment along the beach, we found an enormous turtle on the sand, but unfortunately it was dead and had been washed ashore by the tide.

We decided to spend the last couple of days of Mum&Mum's trip on Isla Mujeres, to let them experience the crystal clear blue water and actually have a choice of where to have dinner. That, and the fact that Mum&Mum forgot to mention that their flight home was a day later than they had previously told us and we didn't have any accommodation sorted for the last night. Our first night there we managed to talk Mum&Mum into enjoying a couple of margaritas with dinner and they were both grinning for the rest of the night. When it was finally time to leave, we all took the ferry back to the mainland and said our goodbyes. Cara and I had to go straight to the bus station to catch a twenty four hour bus ride to Mexico City, so Mum&Mum took a taxi to the airport without us. We were sorry to see them leave but we had all had a fantastic time and it was great to see the mums again. This had been the first time I'd had been on holiday with my mum for twenty years and I really enjoyed spending time with her again after all these months away. I know Cara felt the same way and we were both a little bit homesick for a while afterwards. We were now on our last few days in the Americas before heading to New Zealand via the Cook Islands, and out of the sunny, beach life we had enjoyed for the last few months. I was even starting to turn a darker shade of white!

Mik

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