Last Day in Mexico

Dec 30th. One more day in the Caribbean. One more morning of hot sun tanning on our originally green skins now beautifully turned pale yellow after a full week of deep exposure. One more Scrabble night to go. In a common effort to keep this trip memorable, we agreed we would splurge on a nice hotel room for the last night, away from the rusty/bloody/dead buggy sheets of Tulum. We decided to set camp in Puerto Morelos, because it was a fisherman’s village that wasn’t yet welcoming its springs with wet t-shirt contests on the Zócalo, so said the French Routard. When we got there, we were famished so we sat down in a nice little café and ate tortillas, listening to a jazzy elevator tune on a loop. The idea of going to bed in a genuine place where modern civilization and X-boxes had not yet reached the shores was delightful. Our eyes were sleepy, our heads heavy with scrambled memories of the past week.

Barely carrying ourselves, we walked to the first pensión and asked for a room. Lleno. Ah. On to the next… Lleno. And the next and the next were all Llenos. God damn tourist guide! After the 7th attempt, I asked the owner, desperate, where we could go. He said that so close to New Year’s eve everything would be fully booked and that there would not be anything here, or anywhere along the coast included our dreaded Cancun. He was even renting rooms that were not fully built yet: business was that good and our planning that bad. I asked again if there was anyway, anywhere besides in our car where we could spend the night. “Well” he said, there is a Motel on the highway between here and Cancun, a kilometer after the airport. Turn around on the Southbound and here it is. It is on the highway but it is clean, secure, and nicely done. I believe you will find a room there.”

It was past 10pm, meaning way past our bedtime, and anything else than taking turns to sleep in the half sized car would have done. The instructions where pretty straight forward and it didn’t take long before we spotted our shelter. Indeed it was secured: 2 guards were standing at the entrance asking for our room number. We said we were looking for a place and he lifted the gate. The owner of the cute hostel was right, empty rooms they had… to the point that it started to look suspicious. But who has time to be suspicious when you’re about to get the only vacancy on the whole coast? I visited a room before agreeing to anything as we would always do. It was indeed very clean, the king size bed big enough to fit four people and elegantly placed on a… hem, podium with purple dimmer lights. As I got out, I told Emmanuelle and Vanessa what I had seen. We laughed at our tacky Vegas style room with a private garage embellished with African statues, and opted for a more traditional bedroom with 2 large beds. Asking about the price, the receptionist inquired “¿la noche entera?” “What do you mean, the whole night?” “can we take it for, say, half a night? Ahaha” I replied. Funny me. “Yes,” she said “3 hours, 8 hours or la noche intera.” Ah. Well, the full night please. Hem.” We unloaded our bags, still unsure of where we had landed. As I walked into the über bleached room, Vanessa worded our unexpected concern “this can’t be a brothel.” (well, “hôtel de passe” in French, where rooms can be rented by the hour. But maybe the Victorian English language I have learned has conveniently chosen to elude a translation and the question altogether.) “This can’t be a brothel,” she said, “or there would at least be condoms.” “Point taken,” I shouted from the other room, “I just found them!”