It Felt Like Part-Vacation, Part-Kidnapping...

🔥

I know it's been quiet in here lately, and a lot of that was my fault. Saul and I were hosting our usual board game meetings in cafes around Cancun, but the other day we got invited to this new place, a hostel in the Hotel Zone.

I've had some great memories in hostels and with people I've met in them around the world, and especially while backpacking southeast Asia. They were sometimes $1 US dollar per night in Vietnam.

Things were going fine, his friend gave us a tour of the place, and we settled on having the games night in the lobby where the most traffic would come through. Sure enough, with an initing pile of hundreds of dollars worth of board games stacked high on a table at the entrance, they started wandering in: a tourist from Chile, a man from the Czech Republic, and eventually an energetic Chinese psychologist who ironically started off the conversation by telling us all about his problems. He said he was passing through just for a night or two and then on his way to Cuba. As the games progressed, he said, "Hey, I know, let's go to Coco Bongo!" It had been a dream of mine to go for the last 3 and a half years. But it's ungodly expensive! So it just wasn't in the budget. He said, "Ahh, come on, I'm going to get a table, it's $300 and I'm paying it anyway, but if I add someone they'll let you in for $30 bucks." I thought, hmm, that's not bad, even with a Mexican local discount it's still more than that.

Maybe..

As the others weren't budging, he kept badgering us, "Okay, what if I just pay for you to come? I only booked a hostel instead of a hotel because I was hoping to meet some friends and go on adventures since I don't have much time left here."

So we agreed. We met the Chinese psychologist down in the lobby, and took off. He insisted on tacos before the show, and said he knew the best taco place in town. We both laughed, what does a Chinese man know about Mexican tacos? Enough apparently, those were the best tacos I've ever had in my life. I don't eat that crap, but what's the point in being obsessed with health if a couple of times a year you can't celebrate being alive. Not jumping headlong off the wagon, but merely partaking in a few bites for the comraderie.

Coco Bongo was part Las Vegas, part Cirque de Soleil, part trashy night club. I definitely thought more than once, other than having all the wasted years back, I thought "Man, I do Not miss my twenties." on several occasions that night. It was fun though, and som extremely talented performers and aerialists.

We shut the place down about 3am, and headed to get steak and nachos. Then we walked to the beach and found some lounge chairs left in the sand, and chatted until the sun rose. I haven't missed an entire night's sleep in a long time. It was a nice change, but not anything I would ever pursue intentionally.

The sunrise was our cue, we split up, they went back to their hostel, and I caught a cab to crawl into my bed a few minutes past 9am, utterly exhausted, but kind of reminiscing about those similar sleepless nights until sunrise adventures back in Hawaii when life was easy.

Another call came that evening. Fancy, expensive Japanese food by the beach. I never turn down Japanese food. There happened to be ive performances with scantily-clad natives blowing fire and dancing. The weirdest Japanese dinner of my life.

The next morning, our party was off to Playa del Carmen. I thought it was just a day trip to go scuba diving in a deep, blue, underwater cave, so I just brought the clothes on my back and a dry change of clothes, not thinking much of it. It ended up being a week! I'll get back to that, the first day was pretty cool. We got suited up, took a quick refresher on the settings since I hadn't dived in 5 years, the instructor was a cool Spaniard and a great teacher, he was patient and showed us some really neat places in the caverns. The views were unlike anything I could have imagined. I initially thought, Isn't this kind of lame, just diving in a cave? What is there to see?

The answer is Everything! There was massive fish swimming around in there, neat cave spiders, these huge sulfur waves that made blurry ripples in the water where you couldn't see anything, and when we would dive deep and come up to see these rays cutting into the water like knives, and fish circling the light, it looked like stars and we were astronauts in another world. I'm disgusted we coudln't take photos, it was some "private" cenote. They were greedy is my only guess and use that as a way to keep people from enjoying it without paying an arm and a leg.

We stopped for an all-you-can-eat steak buffet. And then caught a last-minute ferry to Cozumel. I sailed there with my uncle after my mum died. So it was a neat experience to come back and see everything again. We had an awesome midnight snorkeling around some corals with hand lights. I hadn't night dived in a few years, not since Hawaii. Everything about Cozumel was nostalgic.

Being the only one sober, I had a lot of alone time while the others were sleeping off their substances, to go on a bike tour, explore the city, swimming, snorkeling, I even found a cool ring in some coral. "A gift from the sea." The days drifted by, back to Playa del Carmen for another night, then I got to pop back into Cancun and sleep in my own bed. I was concerned Saul would have forgotten what I looked like. I got back to town just in time to surprise him at a cafe where he was playing some board games with friends.

Then off to church with friends I invited from the cafe. It felt good being around sober, normal people. Hahah. We took the bus back to Cancun from the sleepy little beach town where my church is, had lunch with my favourite girls, and I headed down to the bus station to catch a bus to Holbox. Gosh, I have been so far removed from that life, the ever-on-the-go tourist, that it felt strange but oddly familiar at the same time.

Next up, we agreed to meet in Holbox, a purely magical island where the beach comes alive with the glow of billions of sparkling blue bioilluminescent algae. But getting there was part of the adventure. I got a late start, and so had to catch the local van. It was hilariously rustic, a busted out window, and the spare tire tied to the front seat. I kind of enjoyed how ugly our little van was, until the engine blew up and we had to pull over, the cabin full of smoke, and wait on the side of the road. I hadn't left much hope of catching the last ferry to the island, and figured it would be my luck to get stuck alone stranded 2.5 hours from home for nothing. We had one and a half hours to make it to the last ferry for the night. And we were stranded on the side of the road an hour from the port.

And wouldn't you know it, we made it!! I couldn't belive it at all The second the rescue van pulled up, we piled in as fast as we could and chatted nervously the whole way wondering if any of us would make it in time. I got out, and bolted for the ferry dock. Last one, just in time.

We sailed over in the dark. The last boat for the night. I got to the shore with 4% left on my phone and no way to to charge it. I had to find my friends fast. I finally did. With 1% to spare.

But such is human nature, I'd been saying to myself the very day the adventures all happened what a shame it was that I'm always working and doing nothing fun, and then when I was only adventuring all day every day for a week I was missing working. I've missed you guys, I missed the community, and I've got something big I'm working on. Stay tuned.

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