Isla Mujeres is a small island just off the coast of Cancun, Mexico. It is long and thin, measuring about 7 km (4.3 miles) long and 650 m (2,130 ft) wide. Most people take a ferry from Cancun to get there, which takes 20 minutes or half an hour.
My wife and I made the trip over a few times and always enjoyed it. Friends of ours took the boat over from Cancun as well, and they had a blast doing different things. They drove a golf cart around the island. We went snorkelling and checked out a water park. Diversity, amigos!
At the north end of Isla is a beach. Michelle and I never bothered with the beach on Isla, because beaches are a dime a dozen. We’d just gone out of our way to get to Isla, and the patch of sand we left is a damn fine one, so our palette was craving something different. Perhaps “a more authentic Mexican experience,” perhaps “whatever. ” How could we know what we didn’t know?
Kensington Market, Mexico
Steps away from where the ferry docks is what I would call a shantytown. It is a collection of shacks, somewhat interesting at first glance, but then what you see becomes a loop. It is the same five stores over and over and over again. The prices are garbage, there’s likely a big company running the whole thing, and it is total ICK unless you have never left your suburban home ever.
If you have ever been to Kensington Market in Toronto, imagine that doubled, tripled or multiplied by ten. Some people say Kensington is great, the real Toronto, but 99% of anyone with a clue recognizes it as total rubbish.
I walked through a street fair in New York City once. It was on the west side of Manhattan, 7th Avenue or something. It was massive, like the shantytown in Isla, and had the same shops repeating over and over. Both those street fairs and the market in Isla are sad and depressing, but at least the ones in Manhattan pack up and leave on Monday.
As a longtime Torontonian, I just wish Kensington Market had packed up and left about 40 years ago.
But back to Isla Mujeres
You gotta go looking for the good stuff. The Man is never going to offer it up easily, nor is el Gringo.
Michelle and I headed south every time we visited Isla. On one trip, we strapped on life preservers, or, as my friends’ daughter would call them, BOAT COATS, and slowly drifted northward along the western coast, pretending to know how to snorkel while looking at the fishy fishies. Or was it the vicious fishes? It was great, whatever it was. Just floating with the current, peeking in on another world. Peeking in on a couple of different worlds, actually, the Mexican one and the underwater one.
One couple who went over to Isla on another trip went snorkelling and saw a barracuda. They’d brought down their own karaoke equipment and sang Heart’s song “Barracuda” that night. I mean, like the world needs another reason to hate Heart!
Museo Subacuático de Arte (MUSA) was installed after chelle and I floated in the waters off Isla, which is bittersweet. They installed an underwater art gallery off the coast of Isla Mujeres, which also serves as a coral reef, making it ever-changing and ever-evolving and preserving nature in a highly creative way. It must be amazing to see a concrete, sunken VW underwater turning into a reef with fish floating by.
So this is what I said about Isla Mujeres, on Facebook, sorta.
We enjoyed snorkelling over there. It was on the opposite end of the island from where you took your pics.
They had a nurse shark in a pen, maybe 100 square feet, 30 metres by 30 metres or so. Some dude wrestled the shark, then held it for a while, then people who had paid to have their picture taken with it got their chance.
Yes, it was sad and like watching the aftermath of a car crash.
A big fat guy with a Texan accent said to me, as we watched on the sidelines, on the dock.
“I tell ya what, they got that shark doped up or something, cuz she should be kicking that little Mexican’s ass.”
All kinds of things went through my mind.
Instead of engaging the shark-wrestling insider, which would have been more fun, I just laughed out loud.
His words had all sorts of things running through my head.
- Was he one of those people who go to pro wrestling and think they are the only ones in on it all being fixed?
- Was he part of some secret shark wrestling subculture, similar to underground cockfighting or dogfighting rings that we hear about in the news from time to time? YES, I am looking at YOU, Michael Vick and Marcus Stroman.
- Was his big belly concealing a 1975 Cadillac Eldorado, or 300 pounds of pharmaceutical-grade cocaine?
I did feel equal parts fear and sadness about the man as well, thinking he was some combination of stupid and evil.
After I laughed, he mumbled something with much less bravado, and I think he wandered off, enjoying his cigar, judging the doped up nurse shark as he walked the dock.
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