A Week in Playa Del Carmen- and our first trip abroad!

This is our first travel blog in a hopefully long series of travels!  Being broke students, we figured we would start our travels with a relatively cheap and safe trip to Playa del Carmen.  Plus, we just really wanted to go to the beach.  We arrived at the airport in Cancun in the late afternoon, spent quite a bit of time in line at customs (trying not to be TOO obvious while staring at the very young guards with very big guns), and finally made it out into the sunshine to wait for our shuttle to the resort.  We really lucked out, and were the only people in our shuttle, so we had a straight shot to the resort.  All in all, about a 45 minute drive to the resort.  Not much to see on the drive between the airport and resort- lots of random people and dogs just hanging out by the side of the road.

The shuttle dropped us off at the resort, the Viva Wyndham Azteca, and left.  Then Greg and I had our first hiccup in the trip.  Let me preface this by saying that neither of us could use our cell phones in Mexico, we didn't know if the resort even had pay phones, we had given our parents our travel itinerary and contact info ahead of time, and my whole family was traveling in Italy at this time.  Anyway, we walk up to the check-in desk, and the clerk informs me that they've overbooked the resort, and that they will be moving us to an entirely different resort.  She basically said "Here's $5, go call a taxi to take you there.  'Bye.'"  I was sooooo angry... Now we're going someplace we haven't heard of and where neither of our families knows we are.  Awesome.

By the time we got to the resort, it was dark, and we basically pitched our luggage across our hotel room and headed for the bar.  But the next morning when we woke up, we headed on down to the beach, drink in hand, and spent the next week with our butts parked in lounge chairs 20 feet from the ocean and just relaxed.  I have never seen the ocean that color before, and I never got tired of looking at it.

On day 4 of our trip, we took a taxi to Puerto Aventuras, and boarded our ridiculously expensive private fishing charter.  The boat crew didn't speak English, and our collective Spanish is pathetic, so there wasn't much conversation.  They did provide us with a warm 12-pack of Corona, and Greg forced some of down, determined to get our money's worth out of the trip.  We didn't catch a single thing.  Not only did we not catch a single thing, but it was the most traumatic boat ride I've ever been on.  The captain drove around for an hour before heading for deeper water.  Right about the time when I couldn't see shoreline anymore, it started to rain.  Then the wind picked up, and the boat started pitching from side to side.  Then waterspouts started whizzing across the lake (which are usually cool to see- but not when you're on a little boat with 2 people you don't know and don't speak English and you have no idea where you are).  Then, just to top it all off and make sure my Dramamine was really working, the deckhand starts screaming in Spanish to hit the deck because somehow we have managed to boat into the only swarm of bees in the whole of the gulf of Mexico.  You could hear them hitting the boat.  I seriously considered kissing the pavement when we got back to shore.

Unsucessful fishing trip aside, the rest of the trip really was fun.  Greg and I had never been on a real vacation together, much less out of the country together, so we killed two birds with one stone and had a pretty good time.  Hopefully, we will have many more opportunities in the future to get out and about and see as much as we can together.