We’re in Mexico, so we’ve got to call it Corona virus, right?
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(Paragraphs are still not working on my website, so sorry for the annoying little stars to separate everything!)
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Our first day in Playa del Carmen, over a month ago, the beaches were packed. And a few days after we arrived, there was a small protest about how much beach the resort chairs took up.
Now there’s plenty of space and most of the resort chairs sit vacant. But locals and expats (and us!) are still here, so the beaches remain far from empty.
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While this is supposed to be high season right now, the majority of tourists have already gone home.
All my digital nomad friends here, except one, have jumped on last minute flights to their home countries already. And that last friend leaves on Tuesday.
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Like everywhere, the businesses in Playa are reeling from the lack of customers. I’d heard that most restaurants and establishments were supposed to close today, so I went to the beach and took a long walk around town to check it out.
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Surprisingly, most places are still open, including my favorite restaurant where I am currently. I asked if they’d close this restaurant in the near future due to the virus.
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Close? Oh no, we won’t close, came the answer.
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Good to know I’ll still have access to Italian coffee and fish and chips!
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Buses all over the country continue to run. Flights are still operating in and out, with little to no inspection of the health of travelers.
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Things are relaxed. Really relaxed.
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The only areas we found empty in the supermarkets were the pasta and instant noodles shelves.
There’s been an increase in grocery shopping, but I’ve never seen anyone hoarding.
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There’s plenty of tp, too.
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There has been an increase in crime (theft) lately due to the shortage of work, though. Some worry that foreigners will become a target during this time. A good amount of locals have mistaken me for a Mexican though, so I can still go out if things get bad and we need something! 😉
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While most countries in Latin America, if not all, have closed their borders, Mexico has not. The President here is taking less draconian measures than anyone, it seems.
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There’s been an increase in police presence, with patrolling of the beaches, though beach-goers pay the police no mind and there haven’t been any plans to close the beach, as far as we can tell. (The beaches in another city, Mérida, have been closed though.)
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We’ve been staying at a hotel here in Playa. It’s a cute, boutique place that we were simply passing on our way to find a different hotel, on our first day in Playa. I decided we should stop in and see if they’d being willing to negotiate a good price for us.
Negotiating is part of the way of life down here. I wasn’t too hopeful going in though. The place looked a bit too far out of our budget range.
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But the lady at the desk was so sweet. She worked it out to give us a room for 600 pesos a night– which was exactly what we were willing to pay.
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Just before finding the hotel, we’d stopped to eat at a restaurant: our first and only time eating that day, as it usually happens on travel days.
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My mom was wearing a shirt she’d bought in the little micronation of Vevchani, in North Macedonia. The words on her shirt were written in the Macedonian language.
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Our waiter came up to our table and stood silently for a second then just said: “Vevchani.”
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You wouldn’t have been able to read that word without knowing Macedonian.
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“Uh, yeah! Vevchani.” I replied.
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“I’m from N. Macedonia,” the guy said, “You’re wearing a shirt from my country!”
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He was the sweetest guy, and I don’t know what it is, but after having lived in N. Macedonia for a couple months and falling in love with the country and people, we felt like he was kind of family and someone we could trust right away.
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We told him we were thinking about staying in Playa for a month, so he immediately did everything he could to help us and get us in contact with people who had rooms available for good prices.
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None of those places worked out, but the hotel we were staying at offered us a monthly price of 10,000 pesos. (That’s currently equivalent to $404.)
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Everyone at the hotel was SO nice and the environment was beautiful, pleasant and had fast wifi (the most important thing! Haha) So we agreed to stay.
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We hung out for a full month in Israel last summer, but since then we’ve constantly been on the go, changing location very often.
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We were (at least I know I was) exhausted that first month in Playa. I went to an amazing cenote and we got to know which were the good beaches and restaurants. But we didn’t focus on activities too much.
While we started to see a lot of the positives to Playa del Carmen as we stayed, we still realized that the beach bum expat vibe here wasn’t at all our style.
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Thankfully our hotel was in an area further away from the tourist trappings and obnoxious fifth avenue walking street, while still being in a quiet, convenient location.
I met up with a Mexican friend who lives here, and whom I’d met in Barcelona last summer. I told him I preferred going to a beach a bit on the far side of town, called Playa Esmeralda.
His eyes went a bit wide and he said, “Isn’t it dangerous?? I wouldn’t want to go to that part of town.”
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It was known as the dangerous part of town, where the already poor looking buildings turned into more of a slum.
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I always went to that area on runs and walks though, as it was peaceful, without a gringo to be seen, and where no one bothered to call out to you to buy something.
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It’s not something to boast about, but if travel gives you skills, one of them is definitely the skill of recognizing danger. Especially when you’re a girl who often goes out alone.
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I have noticed that I’ve learned to quickly read faces and body posture, as well as environments, to determine if they are safe or questionable.
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This is pretty much just what people would call “being aware,” but it’s a second nature that becomes increasingly refined the more you travel, I think.
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Anywho, in this “dangerous,” slum-ish area of town, I found fathers walking around and playing with their cute, baby daughters, kids trying to go crazy fast on little bicycles and friendly stray cats and dogs, which I, of course, patted.
A huge way I determine the safety of a place is through the treatment of the animals and children that I see.
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While some of the criminals of the area may live there, it seems they’d go out to the touristy areas to do their crimes, while the bad neighborhoods were left alone in unnoticed solitude.
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Since we weren’t totally fans of the rude expat population here or the overall vibe, we thought we’d take an overnight bus (20-22 hours) to a cute looking town in the Mexican mountains called San Cristobal de las Casas.
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Originally, after our month stay ended in Playa, we had planned to go to Guatemala. But that plan was ended when Guatemala closed their borders. San Cristobal was our plan B.
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We hadn’t booked the bus ahead of time, since things were changing everyday and we didn’t want to get left paying for a ticket that’d get cancelled.
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That backfired on us, since the bus turned out to be completely sold out the day we wanted to leave. We couldn’t just leave the following day since it wouldn’t be my day off anymore. The bus goes through the night and I work at night.
We talked to our hotel in Playa about it and they told us there was a couple from Argentina who’d be staying in the hotel for a month, since their flight home got cancelled.
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The hotel would be staying open, so we were welcome to stay another month too.
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And so we here we’ve decided to stay!
Mexicans here are very chill and friendly; I think it’s the perfect place to be.
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God is amazing with His timing and plans. He just so happened to get us an amazingly priced flight to Mexico from London a couple months ago.
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And my mom just so happened to agree to come here, after having said for years that she didn’t want to go to Latin America.
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His plans are perfect and good! It’s always fun to see what He does, especially since we could never guess it!
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How are things where you are? Let me know in a comment below! 🙂
Great writing, as usual. Love the way you look to children and animals to see how safe an area is. Snowing here in Western Mass now so the beaches look particularly sweet!
Thanks, Dan! Wow, snow in spring. You guys are hardy folks up there!