Day 6 Cozumel Mexico

This is a surprise: Cozumel, the quintessential cruise port/tour package destination, gets to me in a good way.

I have $200 in shipboard credit as part of my passage. I spend some on (so-called) yoga and a good coffee and still have lots left. It’s a case of use it or lose it, so I book two shore excursions. Most of the shore excursions are for activities like swimming with dolphins, which seems just too wrong―how do I know they want to swim with me? Or driving ATVs across dunes and through jungle which just feels mean to whatever creatures live there.

So I book two beach excursions, yesterday to a “beach” in Costa Maya and today to Playa Mia on Cozumel Island. Today is much better than yesterday.

A tour bus takes us 15 minutes up the coast to this resort. Yesterday and today are my first times on a tour bus. It is strange and uncomfortable. The windows are tinted so I can see out but no one can see in. I look down on people. Just as with the approach of the Harbour Hopper in Halifax, no one turns to look. No cares at all. I am in a parallel universe, not really there. Same road, same time, but not really part of anything.

I only have looked from the outside at tour bus windows before: in Halifax with a bit of disdain, and from my weary feet while on some crazy trip walking or cycling, and then envious of the tourists’ air conditioning and upholstered seats. Everything about a tour isn’t anything like the real deal. Today that is me.

This resort has all kinds of things: open buffet and bar, water sports, swimming, a gigantic water slide, wifi which works not always. The piña coladas are way thicker and tastier than yesterday’s. The music is less intrusive, but what the hell is it with Funky Town and No Woman, No Life (No Woman, No Wife)? Whatever. I hear them everywhere.

(I live mostly without media sounds, or people sounds. Bob doesn’t meow very often. I never listen to the radio. I never play music (except recently Heart’s version of Stairway to Heaven from the Kennedy Centre Honors when Led Zeppelin is celebrated). I watch movies but hardly any TV. I do not go to hear music (except Dance Movie and Gillian Welch). All this has made the never-ending music blasted everywhere on the ship (even crappy-ass Kenny G new-age reed music during yoga) and in port difficult.

Today I am able to swim in the ocean, walk up and down the beach. I go down that big ass slide twice and it is heart pounding. Great. I eat. I drink. There are lots of people here, all from the boats, but lots of space and it’s not crowded at all. A million lounge chairs on the sand.

We return to town at 2:00 and that leaves time before the 5:00 sailing for me to go on board, dump my stuff, change from flip flops to runners and go back out, trying to walk away from the hustle.

I head for Mega, which looks like either a giant grocery store or department store. It’s both. I love shopping for groceries in the USA – the different brands and labels; the wonder of a mile-long aisle devoted to snacks and soda. Here I am giddy with the glee of so much being different and I load up with tiny cans of olive oil, sugarless drink mixes, condensed milk and other pretty things.

Outside I start to walk inland and a block or so in I come across an old man who has parked his rickety bicycle by a low stone wall beneath a shady tree.  He is getting out big grubby plastic dog food bowls. There is a cat there, and as I get closer I see the man has a bag of dry cat food. I stop, say hello and pet the cat. In Mega I had bought a Mexican pouch of Whiskas wet food, as a souvenir for I cat I know back home. I get it out and offer it to the man. He grins, makes a try at ripping the foil and then he goes hunting in the bags on his bike. I realize he is looking for something to open the food with. I say, “¡No, no, señor!” and point out the little notch in the metal where it’s easy to tear. I make the sound jzzzute as oral demonstration of how the pouch opens and he laughs and opens it. I walk on but after I wish I had stayed with him longer.

Back to the boat and a gigantic surprise. All along I’ve been thinking, I’m on a big boat! I’m on a big boat! but my boat, the Norwegian Sun, is dwarfed by a new arrival, pulled up alongside. The Norwegian Epic is the third largest cruise ship in the world and it is massive. Five thousand passengers (we have about 1,900) with 1,700 crew (we have 900).  Suddenly we are a tug.

I go up to deck 13, as high as I can go, and stand looking at the town. It stretches far inland and I have seen none of it and I feel strongly that I want to. About fifteen blocks in, a McDonalds sign is in the sky where there is none by the shore. I keep thinking there is so much more going on here. I really want to find out.

The water below is an exquisite turquoise. I watch a fish shaped like a stick slowly coming along the side of the ship and when I look over at the pier for a person to compare with the fish, I realize it is six or seven or more feet long. Thin. Barracuda?

But the water is amazing. The waters here are the colours of water in my dreams, in the dreams of Red in Shawshank. In the travel magazines I come across in waiting rooms but never buy because somehow they are painful.  Not quite jewel colours: the blues are not sapphire, but something different. The greens are not emerald or peridot, but something different. Something― different and mesmerizing. We pull away from Cozumel, into darker waters.