some of this is true

Stopping over at a Major Canadian City for a second time will in fact be much easier and shorter than a week previous, but unfortunately it will seem to take far longer and leave you somehow more tired. (WARNING: If this is your first time stopping over at a Major Canadian City, and you have not yet been to a Latin American Country and back, see the first lesson in this series)

Preparation for this second stop over should begin many weeks in advance. The travel agent should not be able to book you on the correct package leaving from Halifax, so you should instead have to depart from a Major Canadian City, the flight to which you should be forced to book yourself. It is important that you book your return flight for Sunday night.

When you’re finally in the Latin American Country, sometime around Wednesday you should realize your trip in this sunny paradise is half over. You should count the days that remain. You should take stock of things and wonder how anything can really exist when we’re so far away. You should look at your ticket from this Latin American Country back to the Major Canadian City. It should say Saturday.

Don’t feel defeated. Instead, take a moment to remind yourself, almost convincing yourself: you really wouldn’t mind staying an extra night in a Major Canadian City; there are people to meet, sights to see; and, really, when you think about it, it’s like a surprise bonus trip, sort of like you’ve won something thanks in part to your own stupidity.

Wait until Friday and feel the whole world standing between you and a good night’s rest at home, in your bed, where you can sleep in and check your e-mail and make a good cup of coffee, at long last. Pay 50 pesos to use the Internet and pay more than 100 Canadian dollars to change your flight, which should depart much later than you were hoping.

When you’re on the plane, with an entire row to yourself, thank God, try not to think about the six hours in between when your plane lands and when your next one lifts off. Instead, sit back and watch a movie about an elaborate heist, a sequel of a sequel of a remake, and wonder if real-life heists are always so complex, if this could even work at all.

Land. Collect your luggage, and run into a couple from your flight, from the resort. Tell them goodbye. Tell them it was nice to meet them. Tell them, hey, you never know, maybe you’ll run into each other again some day. This should be an empty, hollow exchange. You will never see these people again.

Check in for your next flight. You shouldn’t be hungry, but you should need to find a restaurant.

Look for a restaurant that doesn’t have the word Grill in its name. This should be near impossible. After too long considering your small number of options, make a decision already. Resist the urge to take a seat at the bar, where mostly middle-aged men sit, all hoping beautiful women will pull up a chair next to them and fall in love. This only happens in movies.

Order a beer, and the fish and chips. Airport food is actually worse than airline food, if they still had proper airline food anymore, because the little plastic containers of reheated food on airplanes were exactly what they promised — which wasn’t much at all — but this sorry collection of fish and thick, greasy batter is dishonest, a bold-faced lie, food that hardly belongs in a high school cafeteria masquerading as fine dining.

There should be a young woman at the end of the bar on the opposite end of the restaurant, who you will realize has been on the phone for the better part of an hour. She will have long brown hair and sad, dreary eyes, and she will cry, off and on, the entire time you’re there, her emotions leaking out of her eyes like paint. It’s not clear whether she’s angry or sad, probably both. She will look desperate, almost pleading, but also like she’s breathing rage into the telephone. Try to imagine what she’s talking about, but then suddenly feel terribly sad and stop wondering. Just mind your own business, for Christ’s sake. Like you don’t already have enough to worry about.

Next, end up at a World Famous Coffee Shop. Order a large. Watch the cream bring light to the darkness. Briefly put your head in your hands as you hunch over the table and close your eyes, begging for sleep, but decide if that happens then you will sleep too long, miss your flight and then you will be here, at this airport, probably forever.

Spend the next three hours alternating between the following: wandering around aimlessly; reading the rest of the Miami Herald Cancun Edition; standing on moving sidewalks, which, you will convince yourself, are moving you into the future; reading your first taste of Canadian news in a week, and realizing not much has changed; blinking yourself away from sleep; waiting for time to slowly march on.

Hello, bonjour, they should now begin a pre-boarding announcement for Air Canada Flight 626 with service to Halifax. General boarding should commence shortly. And when it does, go ahead and board the plane.

By the time you land and collect your luggage and catch the shuttle and walk in the cool darkness through a familiar neighbourhood to your street, which should be named after a European capital, it should be three in the morning. Don’t unpack. Don’t brush your teeth. Don’t even get undressed. Fall onto your bed and trip into oblivion and miss the next day almost completely.

Leaving the tour is easier than joining the tour.

Joining the tour requires planning and payment and foresight and reading brochures and considering the weather and waking up early and remembering your bathing suit because just in case, you never know.

Leaving the tour, on the other hand, requires only that you do not get on your bus and that you do not really have a plan as Cancun Line Bus 930 lumbers away toward the coast without you, your seat conspicuously empty.

I left the tour at the large cenote just outside Piste, which itself is a few minutes away from Chichen Itza, where we had spent much of the day. I asked our tour guide, Carlos, the best way to get a taxi back into town, and he hummed and hawed and then walked over to a colleague on another bus, and they talked in Spanish for a few minutes — during which there were several pointed stares in my direction followed by loud, booming laughter — and then he told me his friend would drop me back in Piste. So I became an impostor on this bus full of people who had obviously spent the whole day together and probably had a good idea who did and did not belong, and they must have been very confused when the bus stopped on Piste’s main street and let this stranger out, like that scene in that movie where the tourist is kicked off in the middle of nowhere and soon finds himself surrounded by bandits.

Piste’s main drag is about two or three blocks long, and I found myself standing across the street from the bus station, which was next to a hotel that, among other things, had a Chinese restaurant inside. I walked straight to the station counter, clumsily asked to go to Valladolid, and 10 minutes later stepped onto an Oreinte bus, gave the driver 20 pesos (about $2 Cdn), and promptly fell asleep as the air conditioning tried earnestly to cool off the whole world.

When I woke up, out the window there were buildings and gas stations and stores and cars and bicycles dodging each other on narrow streets, and soon we were pulling into the bus station and it was time to get off. I looked around and tried to figure out where I was on the map, and walked a direction I thought was north and a few blocks later realized I was going in the entirely wrong direction. I eventually found the hostel located a few blocks away from the city’s main plaza. A sign on the door: Closed for renovations. So I walked to the luxurious Hotel Zaci, which has a pool and air conditioning and three channels on the television, paid my 325 pesos for a room, dropped off my backpack and headed outside.

Valladolid is a small city (pop. approx 66,000) in the central part of the Yucatan, sharing the name of the former Spanish capital, and it was actually relocated two years after it was founded in the 1550s. Large Catholic churches punctuate rows and rows of colonial-style, square buildings, varying shades of muted yellows and pinks and oranges. There’s the main square, with trees and vendors and a large fountain in the centre, two or three cenotes sprinkled through town, and occasionally cars with large speakers on their roofs drive around blasting something in Spanish, and I can’t tell if it’s advertising or politics or something else entirely.

My first stop was Meson del Marques, a hotel next to the plaza that has a reputation as the city’s best restaurant, and the grilled chicken and beans and guacamole and quesadillas, covered in very spicy sauce, made me feel like I hadn’t eaten in weeks. Next, there was a small museum that was open but didn’t have any lights turned on, though this seemed a moot point when it came to the Spanish-only interpretive displays next to colonial artifacts and a scale model of what I assume was 16th century Valladolid. Finally there was Las Campanas, a small restaurant off the opposite corner of the plaza, with cactuses (one looking exactly like a pineapple) and “Viva Mexico” posters on the walls and a trio of three young musicians on guitars singing soft, melodic folk songs, covers or originals I couldn’t tell.

I woke up early in order to take advantage of cooler morning temperatures, but even at 8 o’clock it was hotter than I’ve ever felt before. It was the kind of day where you can drink three litres of water and only have to pay two pesos to use a public washroom once all day, walking around drenched in sweat. Breakfast at a food court-like setting where vendors hand out menus as you walk by, like the eager sellers that line the trendy Fifth Avenue in Playa del Carmen. Then I walked to the market, hundreds of square feet of fruit and vegetables and freshly butchered meat and colourful nylon backpacks with Snow White and Transformers and Spiderman and the Pink Panther. The Zaci cenote, the namesake for my hotel, was nearby and I paid two pesos to walk down to a large sink hole covered in algae with stalactites and bats overhead. There was a small zoo at the entrance, with signs promising monkeys and parrots and other exotic animals, but only one cage had anything in it, Gansos, which it turns out just means geese.

It was about an hour’s walk to the Convent of San Bernardino, a massive 16th century church filled with statues and paintings of Mary inside its bright, rose-coloured walls. Behind the building is a large courtyard where makeshift paths cut through trees and bushes, and a brick dome covers a cenote, which the church would use to irrigate the gardens. There’s a museum in one room of the church, all in Spanish of course but it featured pictures of archaeologists diving into the underground rivers below to pull up artifacts from centuries before. A man that works for the church gave me a tour for a small donation, and even though it was clear I didn’t speak Spanish he explained everything in intricate detail, and I nodded along, encouraging him to keep going. He brought me out to the cenote and turned on bright lights so I could see down a deep, dark tunnel and see a sparkle of water below.

I made my way back to the centre of town, had some tacos and rice as a late lunch and then, largely exhausted from the walking and heat, headed to the bus station. The three-hour ride to Playa Del Carmen was 144 pesos, for the first-class bus that makes fewer stops and presumably features better air conditioning, or just colder. I took my seat and closed my eyes and slipped away, ignoring the strange selection of American movies. I woke up a few hours later as the sun sliced into the horizon and the bus crawled into Playa del Carmen, the nearest town to the resort, and then grabbed a taxi back to our reasonable facsimile of Mexico.

They’re called excursions, I think, because it sounds more exciting than telling someone they’re going on a tour. A tour implies safety, control – sanitation, even. But an excursion, well, just close your eyes and use your imagination, because anything is possible. They could just as easily call it an expedition, a trek, a journey into the unknown. Hold onto your butts, they would say, without a trace of irony, this isn’t your parents’ tour, no sir. We’re going on an ex-cur-sion, and they would whisper this word, dramatically, in three parts, as if it was actually three complete sentences, three entirely different thoughts.

At first we had grand plans to rent a car and travel the Yucatan on our own, slicing through the jungle while speeding along the highway, careful not to get lost and to mind the Retorno signs as we slowed to a crawl over unreasonably large speed bumps. But then, naturally, those grand plans faded away as we considered the surprisingly comparable cost and the ease of just letting someone else take care of it all, making sure to select the options that would avoid whirlwind stops that barely let you step out of the bus to see anything. And we found some that seemed to fit the bill, paid the eager salesman and make sure to set our alarms for what seemed to me to be unreasonable departure times.

First there was the zipline park, hanging from a series of steel cables — two kilometers total — high above the ground, whipping in between trees as our bodies were dragged through the humidity of the rainforest, and I thought the movement would create a breeze that would cool me down, but instead it just blew more warm air at me, like turning on a hairdryer on a very hot day. There’s not much to see through the thick greenery, and, despite what the brochure claimed, there’s little extreme about being strapped into a tightly fastened harness with two safety cables holding you up, but it’s an interesting feeling to be at the same time immersed in the forest and above it all. There were also two people we didn’t know with us, and one of them couldn’t keep straight and upright to save her life, spinning around in tangles and often stopping long before reaching the end of each line, and I’m sure the guys taking us through wished they could just cut her loose, but they showed infinite patience and made sure she went last. Then it was mountain biking to the cenote, a sink hole of water supplied by a network of underground rivers (there is no surface water on the Yucatan Peninsula, no true lakes or rivers or ponds) for a quick swim and a few jumps off a large cliff that made my head feel like it split in half when I entered the water.

Another day was snorkeling on the coral reef, off the coast of Tulum with the ruins in the background, walking down the stairs of a catamaran into the water and the floating with the sun searing a layer of burnt skin onto our backs as we floated along, our eyes trained downward. The reef of course provides refuge for all sorts of tropical fish, which I saw in large schools and also off on their own, loners I imagined, who don’t like large crowds of fellow fish bumping into each other, fighting for the same food along the sand and showing off for the tourists. The same reef, it turns out, provided similar protection for the Mayans living in Tulum, an invisible barrier for the Spanish to sink their ships on instead of coming ashore to launch their attacks, which they would do eventually anyway, but the thought of large vessels filled with bastard explorers listing over as they filled with water, unable to even conquer 20 feet of water, much less the land, seemed gratifying. We visited the ruins, too, walking around a centuries-old city that made me feel the way videos of mini-subs exploring the cabins of the Titanic make me feel, like sneaking into something terribly personal, some sort of voyeur.

And then there was Chichen Itza, four hours away, one of the new Seven Wonders of the World, in fact, where there is a ball-game stadium and an observatory and so many buildings that haven’t been unearthed yet and of course the pyramid, which visitors are no longer allowed to climb, which I thought was just as well because if we could try walking up the stairs to scale the 45-degree incline, I would have to think the whole situation was predictable as I inevitably tripped and tumbled down to the hard ground below. I particularly liked the observatory, partly for the look of it, like an ancient planetarium, without the laser shows, of course, and mostly because I want to know how they knew all of that about the stars and the moon and when exactly the equinox would be, and how they designed so many buildings to cast the correct shadow at exactly the correct time of year and some of the buildings were actually giant calendars like giant stone computers but somehow smarter.

The resort, the Occidental Grand Xcaret (pronounced esh-cah-ret), is what I think of when I imagine a Mexico theme park. Everything — the food, the beer, the foliage, the workers’ uniforms, the architecture — feels like a copy of a copy, a caricature of what someone who no doubt lives halfway around the world thinks Mexico should look like for well-to-do tourists who want the slice of life that comes with visiting an exotic nation, for a week or two. They just needed a break, they’ll say, some place to get away from it all — but not really away from anything. It’s a sprawling piece of land carved out of the coastal jungle with dozens of oddly designed buildings glued together by pools, reclining chairs and more than a dozen restaurants and bars, one of which you can just swim up to, behind the waterfall. You get the sense that they could have built this anywhere, even in, say, Halifax — bring in some sand and palm trees and parrots and lizards (maybe a few monkeys for good measure), add in some poorly paid Mexican workers, then fence it all off and you wouldn’t even need to tell the guests to use their imaginations, because I doubt many could tell the difference.

We had fun here, obviously. How could we not? The mess of poolside bars and food — even if it’s exactly what you’d expect in a buffet designed for hundreds of people cycling through everyday; and even if the beer seems watered-down, defying the proudly displayed “Corona Extra” sign on the tap — is hard to not find entertaining, sitting back and soaking up the opulence. Geckos darting across the ceilings of the hallways, iguanas lounging about on the sand and rocks and bright red parrots flying overhead. And do they really have deer in Mexico? I suppose they must, or else why would they be here, having leapt out of their enclosure, no doubt, wandering through the bushes? There are exotic fish in the small inlet that makes up the resort’s beach, which is lined with dozens of reclining chairs sitting the way you might arrange beige and green squares of cake and lard icing on a party tray, carefully placing them as close together as possible without letting them touch (they mustn’t touch!). And of course there is a multinational collection of sun-burnt tourists wandering around, sleeping on hammocks and making small talk as staff carry around tucans and other small animals so everyone can pose for a picture as a monkey sits on top of their head.

For some people I meet, this is a perennial visit, the same place at the same time every year. A ritual, “our spot,” they’ll call this place, and between the moment they arrive and the moment they leave, they can find no good reason to venture past the front gates. That coloured band on our wrists, they think to themselves, is all we could ever need. There is a wedding here, as well, and I think that’s an expensive invitation to accept, quite rude on the part of the bride and groom, really, and the “Disco,” with its largely empty dance floor and strange mix of American music, is an especially odd place for a post-wedding party.

Others are more interesting. There is the Ukrainian travel agent from New York who, along with a group of her colleagues (competitors, really, she corrects me), is scoping out resorts all along the Mayan Riviera, to see what they’re all about. This place, she says, is good, and may get a recommendation the next time someone steps into her office and says they need to get away, from their lives or their jobs or their children or their loveless marriages. And the husband of one of her colleagues/competitors, she points out, is a current member of the Israeli equivalent of the KGB, a fact that I never did decide whether to believe. There’s the young woman here with her mother from England, who wonders aloud why everyone doesn’t just say lift instead of elevator, and explains what exactly paraletic means, since this is a word I’ve only heard in a British hip hop songs. The woman from Columbia, who seems so sad to learn I can’t speak Spanish, but we try anyway, and she tells me about her life in Mexico City as an engineer, and her mother in New York, where she and her daughter finally plan to visit next year, and I tell her a little about my life in Canada as a reportero, a word I am glad I learned before coming here. Lots of people from the United Kingdom and Germany and France and Canada. Some of them — the Canadians in particular — start talking about all the crazy times they’ve had, drunk, at the bars back home (one woman, who is already sloppy two hours after arriving from the airport on a shuttle, is enjoying being on the other side of the bar, she says as she apologizes for the state she’s in, a change from her life as a bartender in Winnipeg). The woman who works at the Wal-Mart head office in Arkansas orders me a frozen drink called a Miami Vice while her husband, a health insurance salesman, bemoans the lack of public health care in the U.S. while insisting that he’s not part of the problem (note: he is). Sure, sure, I say, and decide it’s time to go find some lunch, away from these people.

We had fun here, obviously, but thank god we were able to get off this place nearly every day, though in some cases, I’ll admit, we were simply leaving one Mexico theme park for another.