Full moon rising - Cancun and the royal tequila fail

When travelling, things don't go always as planned. Because sometimes places turn out to be different to what you are expecting. Cancun, which you could also call the 51st state of the USA, had a mysterious charm to it, and kept us there a full four nights instead of the 14-hour in-and-out job that we had anticipated.

Probably Cancun's greatest feature is that its "hotel zone" mecca of flash resorts, strip malls and annoying american package deal tourists is situated miles away from the actual downtown area, which is much more chilled out and packed with ordinary Mexicans.

The hotel area was in prime position though, it occupies this long skinny strip that juts out into the ocean, and hogs Cancun's entire beachfront area. It is immense, something like 30km in length. Fortunately just because the hotels are on the beach doesn't mean the ordinary budget traveller cannot enjoy the splendour of Cancun's beaches, which, I have to say, are absolutely out of this world.

You can't get much closer to perfection than this strip of sea and sand. And we waltzed on in, right through the lobby of a hotel, down the stairs and parked our cut-price butts right on one of their fancy deck chairs on the powdery-white sand and spent hours ogling the sparkling azure water, which was as clear as a swimming pool.

Unfortunately, as with most things set up for tourists, perfection comes at a price. The towering hotels lining the narrow strip of beach are causing the beach to erode, and with all of the natural vegetation stripped away there is nothing to hold the ground in place. Last year they dredged up tonnes of sand from the floor of the Carribean to stop the beach disappearing at a cost of $US70m.

Cancun just played host to the United Nations climate change conference -  a follow-up from the unsuccessful Copenhagen summit last year. The organisers were smarter with the setting this time around. I mean if I were an important policymaker I would be much more inclined to sign up to an emissions-reduction agreement if I were lazing on the beach in sunny Cancun than if I were in gloomy Denmark.

The conference, as expected, did not bring about a game-changing international agreement on climate change, but it did throw the spotlight on Cancun's own vulnerability to erosion and rising sea levels, as is set out in this article.

Lunch proved a challenge - as this was zone USA there were obviously no taco stands to fill our bellies for 30 pesos each ($2.50). The malls just had overpriced burger joints and did not look appealing. Finally, out of the corner of our eyes we spied heaven in bar form - a Cuban Mojito and cigar lounge. It had a back balcony overlooking the lagoon, on the calmer, non-beach side, where we sat, sipping mint-infused mojitos and chowing down on delicious guacamole and corn chips.

At last! An Adam-sized beer!

This was a positive cocktail experience. Our time with the tequila bottle did not prove so enjoyable. Walking around the downtown area close to our hostel - where we spent the majority of our time just hanging out because it was that kind of laid-back, appealing place - we spied a "European mart". Well it doesn't take much more than a few jars of olives, some cheeses and wines to get me excited.

The giant tequila wall

Adam was more taken by the wall of tequila - not surprisingly Mexico is not left wanting for varieties of liquor extracted from the agave plant (a succulent, not a cactus I'm told) - this includes tequila and its cousin Mezcal, which we have not yet tried.

I'm not sure if the mistake here was consuming the red wine with dinner before switching to tequila afterwards, or the fact that shot glasses here are double the size and we felt somehow obligated to fill them up.

Either way it was a complete disaster. We didn't even go out anywhere, we were just chatting to some other travellers in the hostel courtyard. Real tame. Next thing I knew I woke up in bed wondering how I got in there. Adam appeared later on looking decidedly unwell. The bad thing about tequila is its tendency to make things slide rapidly downhill. 

The crash landing came the next day, when we made a mutual decision to admire tequila from afar from now on. Shouldn't be too difficult to stick to the beers!

Cute german shepherd puppies at the hostel