Things are looking up!  At Tulum, we head inland.  Within meters – 50, 100 at the most, everything changes.  We are on a narrow road, that seems only one lane wide.  It is in fact two lanes, but only just barely.  There is no shoulder.  The jungle comes right to the very edge of the road, as if a paving machine drove right through the jungle, paving over the trees.

This is more like it!  A walk through that jungle would be great.

I am desperate to get out of Playa del Carmen.  So much so that I skip breakfast and go directly to the bus station.  The one good thing about Playa del Carmen is that the bus station is less than two minutes walk from my hotel.

Anyhow who knows me can tell how desperate the situation is if I am willing to skip breakfast just to leave that much sooner.  The fact is, this place depresses me.  I’m a traveler, not a tourist.  This place is totally built to cater to the later.  I feel lost here.

From the description in the guide book, Playa del Carmen was once great for travelers.  No longer. Change for the worse tends to depress me.

I buy my bus ticket to Valladolid.  The bus leaves in half an hour.  Glad I skipped breakfast, it’s worth it just to get out of here an hour or two earlier!

The bus leaves half an hour late.  Why have a schedule if you ignore it and instead wait for more passengers who should know enough to get there earlier?  I could have had breakfast after all.

The bus follows the coast, heading towards Tulum.  “What am I doing here?” as we roll along, passing shopping malls and huge resorts on the left, and the occasional dirt-poor village on the right, displaced village no doubt by the resorts, and cut off from their traditional fishing grounds by enormous developments catering to rich foreign tourists.

They’ve long since rebuilt after the hurricane, and then some. It is the “then some” which is the problem. Playa del Carmen just goes on and on. It is overdeveloped with tourist resorts, a total disaster for a real traveler.

The guide book says “Unlike Cancun, Playa del Carmen does not have a strip”. Well, maybe it didn’t have a strip, but it does now. At least it is a pedestrian strip, not a car strip. Many blocks of indistinguishable restaurants that don’t look the least bit appealing to me.

The south end is described as “kitchy” in the guide book, and so it is. The north end is described as “low key”, but this is no longer true. What was the north end is now an intensively developed series of tourist traps. It seems to consist of a solid line of hotels along the beach, backed by kitchy restaurants along the pedestrian walk way.

I prefer the kitchy end, if those are my only two choices. At least the kitchy end is backed by a regular Mexican commercial district where you can buy normal Mexican food in normal Mexican restaurants.

It’s a little late to satisfy the nasty border guard, but I now have a place to stay.

I thought I would be staying in Valladolid, but the last bus had long gone by the time I arrived in Cancun.  I go to Playa del Carmen instead.  It is easy (bus directly from the airport) and there is always the romantic possibility of bumping into Sue, who I met on the Internet, and who I am supposed to meet in Merida.

My guide book is only completely accurate about one aspect of Playa del Carmen – it is developing very quickly.  Much of what the guide book talks about is now quite wrong.

The hotel that looked to be about the best choice in the guide book is not what I expected.  I check in anyhow.  After waking up at 3:00am for my flight, having an emotionally draining game of ‘who will crack first’ with an ignorant border guard (American, not Mexican), and a fair bit of flying, I just want a bed.  I don’t really take in that the court-yard is cement when it was described as a place you can pitch a tent.  Or that the rooms are run down.  Or that they have not privacy – unless you lower solid wooden shutters and forgo ventilation.

After an hour or two of rest, I wake up and take it all in.  People can see into the room as they walk past.  Other people from the hotel next door can see in from their balconies.  It is raining, some rain is blowing in through the window.  It is dark as a cave in there, and the bare bulb hanging from a wire does little to improve this.

Never mind what I have already paid for this room, it is time to move!  I move into the place next door.  The woman at the first place actually gives my money back to me, less 30ps for the use I did get out of it.  Fair by me.

“Homeland Security” is not a farce.  Stupid, yes.  A farce, no.

The border guard and I don’t hit it off so well.  The border guard doesn’t like like my answers to her questions.  Even though I will only be in her country for two hours (long enough to switch planes), even though I will never leave the airport, it is terribly important to her where I will be staying the night.

I don’t have an answer for her because I don’t know myself.  In retaliation, she pulls me aside, calls my bag off the conveyor belt, and picks it apart very slowly.

After giving me the gears and doing her best to make me nervous, I still don’t have an answer.  She lets me go anyhow.

Maybe homeland security is a farce after all.