As we've been wandering the planet, we've ended up in places that have sent our friends scrambling for their atlas (or in the case of Bonnie D, places that all just ended up in her broad category of "why the heck would anyone want to go there??"). The atlas' were definitely not required when we announced plans to head to the Mexican Rivera for some R&R (it's exhausting being on vacation 365 days a year), as well as a fitness blitz (as Carol C has been quick to point out, it can be fattening for me as we travel non-stop) with a little tennis thrown in, and perhaps another crack at Spanish lessons. Given the Mexico stories we got from our friends, we might be the last Canadians to have rushed to this country in order to escape another season of cold Arctic air. So why did no one warn us that we might be the proverbial square peg in a round hole when visiting Playa del Carmen??

Not knowing what we were in for, we locked ourselves in for 3 months- we weren't sure what the optimum number is for recharging a life battery but we figured this would be a great start especially since we would be missing the worst part of a Toronto winter. Perhaps a little more research was in order.
 
We rolled into Playa del Carmen (PDC) just as something called the BPM (Beats Per Minute) 'Festival' was starting. Now we have been to some of the most amazing festivals in the world and can say with some certainty that BPM is no festival. It turns out to be ground zero for all those scraggly looking dudes who have achieved their life dream of being a scraggly looking DJ playing pretty much the same song with a heavy, repetitive bass beat over and over again at a volume that was triggering volcanic activity all over Mexico. It was BPM morning, noon, and night. It was dueling scraggly dudes right across the street from one another. It was scantily clad women (ok- that part was good despite death stares from DH) drinking themselves mindless while bopping up and down next to the stage, and equally mindless dudes hanging around trying to figure out how to make their best pickup lines work when conversation was next to impossible. It was designer drugs and mostly it was designer irritating. Little did we know that even when the festival left town, the scraggly dudes stayed, and BPM music would be a core staple of life in PDC.
 
Because of noise we bailed out on our first condo in PDC (a never ending mix of traffic, construction, BPM neighbours, and live music bars) and booked a beachside location that we came to refer to as the Devils Playground (particularly if you imagine the Devil as a relatively small, completely out-of-control child, or, more accurately, collection of evil children). Now before Deb B jumps all over this and writes us off as a child-hating barren couple, It's not the evil, head-spinning, screeching spawn that we had our biggest issues with (although to be honest, during a recent storm I was sheepishly cheering for a stray lightening bolt when a gang of screaming kiddies continued to play in the pool), but rather the bubble-headed parents of these mini hurricanes.

Some of our dissatisfaction with Playa was probably shaped by the unravelling of our plans for our 3 months here. We obviously weren't going to get the rest we were hoping for but as we hit our 25 year anniversary, DH apparently slipped beyond a warranty date I wasn’t aware of (and no, if I had been aware of the best-before-date, I probably wouldn’t have explored trade-in values!!). Early on in our Mexican adventure, her teeth (or her fillings at least) started popping out. And presumably because she struggled to keep teeth from flying out of her head, it triggered a pinched nerve in her neck which somehow led her to blow her knee out which in turn set off her sciatica (an exponential pain progression apparently). My Princess had turned into a female Quasimodo almost overnight dragging her leg behind her with a limp arm dangling (and the missing teeth were driving a desire to purchase a banjo). She was still trying to keep up with daily gym visits we had planned on as well as the tennis hours we had scheduled, but then the most traumatic injury of all occurred (particularly since it happened to me)- apparently when you jog in the humidity of Mexico, a sweat soaked heavy cotton shirt can do serious damage to your nips. I discovered this as we sat through a breakfast in a crowded restaurant and DH helpfully pointed out that I was lactating blood which was streaking down the front of my shirt. Tapping a couple of those mini Mexican souvenir sombreros over the injured parties cured my injury (I might be the only tourist to ever find a good use for those tiny sombreros), but DH was forced to the sidelines for the duration of our stay in Playa (the physical breakdowns didn’t put her in any mood to resume our Spanish lessons which was our other big objective of our 3 month stay). 

 In addition to a non-stop diet of tacos, burritos, enchiladas, alambres, (with the common thread of being largely unhealthy and universally spicy hot), we did have a couple of nice distractions. Given that we had been traveling through some of the world’s most exotic locals we were somewhat surprised that people picked overrun Playa del Carmen as the spot they would pick to hook up with us- perhaps only a Canadian could understand the value of time in the sun and heat, however brief, in the middle of yet another brutally cold Canadian winter. The Killer B’s, Deb & Dave B, were the first to show and, as usual, we had a great time with them and although the adventures were not to the same level of trips past we did try out a couple of the more amusement park-like adventures on offer- underwater scooters, parasailing, dune buggys and so on. Just to feed Dave B’s need for a soccer fix we took in a game with the local Playa team beating a rival. During one particular beach day we did have concerns that we had stumbled into a Mexican cartel gunfight as Deb B suddenly collapsed face first into the white sand sending up a significant puff of smoke, but it turned out that we had inadvertently discovered her limit of large glass margaritas (3).

Deb P also came down with a trailer full of kite boarding gear- for the uninitiated kite boring is one of those inconvenient sports that requires a lot of specialized equipment, an isolated beach area, a steady wind, and a setup that leaves you exhausted but once you get the kite airborne, what a rush- you’re able to speed along parallel to the beach just in time to… turn around and race to the other end of the beach... and then turn around and race back to where you just came from, etc, etc, (maybe that’s why they call it 'kite boring’?). Deb P, or "Smokey" as she came to be known, did join us for meals scheduled around her kiting, and evenings were reserved for BFF conversations with DH that were probably deep and meaningful but always seemed to end with animated discussions around which pair of shorts made whose bum look bigger. 

Playa del Carmen is not Mexico, doesn't really pretend to be Mexico and even the odd excursion to places like the magnificent Chichen Itza doesn't make you believe you're experiencing an authentic Mexican culture. Many of the neighbouring natural wonders have been turned into amusement parks (how do you justify building two massive resort hotels on the beach of an endangered turtle feeding area). It's one of those warm weather destinations that have fallen to the hoards of invading tourists who are looking for a couple of weeks of escape/bad behaviour (at least we hope they wouldn't behave this way back home). We really hadn't run into this kind of place in our travels to date and I'm not sure I see the magic that others seem to see- PDC won't make our list of WOWs but it certainly has a fan base.