Week 1: Finding my feet, Cancun, and The Quintana Roo Camp

As this blog might have people reading it from other countries now, I am going to have to try and use simpler English! However, there is a translate button at the top of the page, for if you get stuck, so I hope there are no problems with anyone reading this!

The first week has been, to put it mildly, brilliant.

Landing in Cancun, I was a bit disappointed to see that it was raining! It was only a brief shower though, and in no time at all I had met up with Monica, who I met through Couchsurfing.com! She and her friend Alfonso picked me up and took me to the local shopping centre, where we ended up sitting in a McDonalds, enjoying the free Internet. Monica was meeting some students at university to get some studies done (her final project was in on Friday) and I was trying to stay awake, as although it was 4pm in Cancun, it was 10pm in my head; I had got up at 5am that morning so to say I was a bit tired would be an understatement! I also met Adriana, a friend of Monica's who is in a rover crew here in Cancun.

Monica on the left, Adriana on the right - my first friends in Cancun!

We went for some pizza, and then met up with Armando, another friend, and saw a popular local hangout, complete with stands selling corn in all its glorious forms, some of which are nice and some of which are not so nice! By now I was getting a bit delirious from the lack of sleep, so Adriana drove me and Monica home for the night. Now I thought that I was going to stay with Monica in her house, so I got very confused when she got out of the car and started asking directions! It turns out that she had a friend who rents out apartments, and he had one free for a few days, so I was staying there! It was a bit scary when they closed the door and left me on my own for my first night, but I was so tired I didn't care!

For the next few days I saw some of the touristy side of Cancun, like the Mayan ruins and the museum (in the rain; it's so hot here that sometimes you get sunshine in the morning, and then rain in the afternoon after all the moisture has been evaporated. Finally my Geography A Level is worth something!) and the aquarium, with a dolphin show to finish it off. I also saw some of the other side of Cancun with Adriana; she took me with her to help with her university work, taking pictures of places in the city that they want to improve, and also going to a high school orchestra recital with Montse, another rover. For some reason, I also went to a salsa club, despite not knowing how to salsa and having decided to go to bed half an hour beforehand!

This is harder than it looks, especially after you have been bullied into eating lots of Tacos!

 

And then I went camping. The camp was the equivalent of a county camp in the UK, as it had all the Scouts from the Quintana Roo state of Mexico. This was good news for me because it meant that I could talk to Scouts from Playa del Carmen, my next destination, to try and find somewhere to stay! The camp was incredible, and lots of people wanted to get a photo with me because I was from the UK; it was like being a Scouting version of Robbie Williams! We did plenty of cool stuff, including a camp fire, making traditional Mexican food, building a sleeping platform (unfortunately I didn't get to sleep on it because there wasn't room but it was still good to help!) and I was honoured to help invest a new rover scout after the camp fire on the Saturday evening. It was great to see what they got up to on the camp, and I will put that in another blog post - this one is already long enough!

Suffice to say that on the Camp, Victor Torras very kindly invited me to stay in his house, so here I am! I had a fun coach trip with the Tropa and the Manada (more on those in another post, but basically other sections) home, and then we went out for Tacos with one of the Scout leaders (we had to wait for Victor because he was taking another leader to the hospital with a broken ankle), and I started taking my antimalarial tablets. So far, no bad side effects, and today I went swimming in a cenote (sacred Mayan pool, good for snorkeling and with a nice little ledge to jump in from), so all in all I am off to a great start! The people I have met have been so kind and willing to help me out, and have been very forgiving of my terrible Spanish! I will try to make the blog posts shorter in future, but thanks for reading and speak to you all soon!