Day 163 - Cancun, Mexico - 13th January 2005 We never really planned to come here. The original idea, when I booked the tickets, was just to get us to the nearest landmass to Cuba that was not in the US. If you don't know, you cannot get from the US to Cuba. There are no flighs and President Bush has made it illegal for US citizens to travel there. Funny but I thought the US was a free country. So you can only go from Canada (expensive) or from Mexico. Since Cuba was where we really wanted to go, Cancun was the nearest place to start that journey. 

I started investigating Cuba whilst we were in Canada a month or so ago. Since we wanted to get a clear 30 day period in our RV across the US, we really couldn't use up more than 4 or 5 days on the trip to Cuba. The prices to fly from Cancun to Havanah were about $1,200 for all of us. We then wanted to stay in the Nacional Hotel in Havana (the really old one in the centre) and this would have cost us about $250 for the night. Then we were going to go on a beach break up the coast where Hemmingway used to hang out. This would have cost us another $1,200 for 4 nights (all inclusive resort). All in all the whole thing started looking very expensive bearing in mind a whole month in an RV costs about $2,000 at this time of year. So Cuba got the boot from the itinerary and we looked at staying few days in Cancun. 

Cancun is a totally fabricated resort. 20 years ago the whole place was just jungle. Over the last 20 years 100s of hotels and resorts have been built here such that it looks like a cross between the Las Vegas strip, Benidorm and Miami Beach. There is not an ounce of culture or history here. Some way down the coast there are some Mayan ruins but that's it. We looked at the hotel/resort websites and choose the Hyatt Cancun Caribe since it looked like it had a decent swimming pool, was actually ON the beach and proported to have all kinds of stuff for kids. It cost $146 per night for our room which comfortably accommodated the 4 of us. So we booked 4 nights, since we already had the air ticket to the place and didn't want to do a turn around in the airport and come back to Dallas, which is the next flight we have to do. 

The flight was 2 and half hours from Dallas and was only about one third full. We arrived at about noon. The airport was brand spanking new (as is most of Cancun) and we collected our bags and proceeded to leave. Then we got hit with the dumb tourist scam. I've done enough travelling to know better but they were so convincing. About 20 to 30 uniformed young Mexicans were on the other side of the exit door. One comes up to us and his badge reads "Tourist Advisor" and he asks if he can help us with any questions we may have on how to get to our hotel and what we would like to do whilst we are in Cancun. Well how kind. Julie and I were both thinking how well organised the Mexicans were putting on this kind of service. First, he showed us which shuttle bus to use to go the our hotel and where to get it. Then he asked if we knew what we wanted to do whilst we were here. By this time he had taken us over to a cubicle. There were perhaps a dozen of them. He then told us about the various excursions and tours that were on offer. We could do a day trip to the Mayan Ruins, do speed boat excursions, visit the Island of Meyerles and so on. He told us the price of each of these and they were in the $30 to $50 each bracket. 

Then came the clincher. By now we were debating about which trips we would like to take. The boys had already made up their minds and we had decided what we would also like to do. Ruben, our "Tourist Advisor" then suggested a great way to do the trips. Simply get in a taxi tomorrow morning and ask them to take you to the Moon Palace Resort. There someone will meet the taxi, pay the taxi fare, take you to the best restaurant in the hotel for a bumper breakfast and give you 8 free tickets for the excursions we had just been eyeing up. Since Ruben had been so kind to stress the "regular" cost of these, I took no more than a moment to realise this could "save" us $320. The only slight draw back was that we were required to listen to a little presentation whilst we were there. Furthermore, I was required to pay $40 to Ruben now and this would be fully refunded by the rep at the hotel. By now I knew it was a "time share scam" so I cross examined him on this one. No it was not a time share but yes there was a presentation. I assumed it was a similar thing being called something else. It was some sort of membership club to the resort. Even so, we thought to ourselves, who cares if we have to sit through a boring presentation for a while if we can get $320 of free tickets. Do you know that feeling when you know you are about to be "done" but somehow fall for it anyway? Well, we knew it but paid the $40 and agreed to go to the hotel the next morning .....