Back from Mexico

So Cancun is a really big, thrashed, overdeveloped city with all sorts of overdeveloped areas around it. Very cheesy. And the Isla is getting pretty darned developed and we were in the developedest hotel there. But it was really really nice and I didn't even care that I was the biggest gringa around.

The Carribean sea is so beautiful, I can't blame people for wanting to visit. And the fish are neat. I went snorkeling with Ed and Doug at El Garrafon — the cheap place, not the $50 a day place — and the fish were pretty spectacular. They're kind of used to people bringing little jugs of fish food out and using them to attract them, so they will swim up to you. And then Ed threw fish food at me and the fish were all over me. Ew. So. Gross. Big ole floppy yellow and black stripy fish with their fish mouths going glop glop glop at me and their unblinking eyes.

Here are a sample of the photos I took:



Doug is so relaxed. He got pretty badly burned, though. People, use your SPF 50s on the first day!



Ha ha. It was so funny that first day. The boat was called "Turista!" Like the illness! We were so naive.



Rob is so darn cool. He and Carol Jean made it all happen.



You can't climb the Mayan ruins anymore. Some people think this is a real loss. They are jerks who don't mind fat American asses trotting up and down the limestone, wearing it out and scratching their names into the walls because they can and they'd like to think they're as significant as some extinct culture. That is a symptom of the American Cultural Virus that, coincidentally, could be found on the bus back from Chichen Itza. It was showing a Wesley Snipes vehicle, "Unstoppable."

I made everyone get up at 5 a.m. to get to CI, by the way. I am a damn martinet when I'm put in charge. And the bus didn't leave from Cancun until 9. It's like that episode of the Dog Whisperer when the Great Dane who is naturally a follower is put in charge by his stupid owners. I'm naturally a follower. I can't help it.



Pasty person at Tulum! Watch out!

One of the things that surprised and gratified me on this trip were all the incredibly fit, young, attractive people who had all tanned to a deep brown and had their hair sunstreaked so they were the same color all over. They were Japanese, Brazilian, European (North and South), Israeli, and possibly Visigoth. And then there I was. Pasty and not terribly petite. I felt like the Wilmoth clan was the mid-way marker between these demi-gods of attractiveness and the fat old American people in loud clothes. Unfortunately, as the poem says, "things fall apart, the center cannot hold." Someday I will be a fat old American woman with her shorts all bunched up in her blazingly white, fat thighs. Wearing white Keds with scrunched down pink socks.

No, I feel a duty to try to maintain the center for as long as possible.

More photos next month, when I get my bandwidth back!