Our first week in Cozumel

And what a week it has been! Our place here (lets call it ‘blog central’) is great. It is right at the back of the only town on the island (San Miguel) right in the heart of local life. Our neighbours live in shacks mish-mashed together with concrete, wood, corrugated iron and any other useful junk they can find. The kids drawing table for instance is a board of wood roped onto the front of an old motorbike, which they sit on as the scribble away. Our house is really the only building that you’d recognise as a ‘house’ on our street and the kids love it! Every evening they come and play on our little patch of grass at the front, as if it were the best toy they could have! They are all very friendly and talk to us in Spanish through the kitchen window while we are washing up. We don’t understand most of what they say but they have introduced themselves one by one, very cute. The town itself is very much a ‘locals’ Maya/Mexican town like this until you get towards the water front; literally the pavements, walls, buildings etc change two blocks before you reach it. Along the main promenade are a long string of jewellery shops and big American chains like Ron Jon’s Surf Shack. This district is where the Americans from the big cruise ships shop (more money than sense?) and they don’t really seem to venture any further in. It is nice to have some Western amenities though. We have a cinema here that shows films in English so yes we did go and see Indiana Jones on our first day … hmm, we don’t know about aliens but we sure have seen some interestingly shaped skulls whilst we’ve been here in the Maya heartland.

We will report to you first hand if we encounter any more supernatural goings on. Yesterday we went to one of the beach clubs on the south-west coast. At first we were astonished at the price of a cocktail, until we saw the size of the glass and just how much alcohol went into it. We only needed one for the whole day!

Adam informed me that he’d never been on a banana boat ride so I frog marched him down to one. The guy in the boat thought we were drunk cause we fell in twice! To be fair we probably were a little. The whole falling in thing was great fun until we remembered that there were sharks in them there waters! Eek! No limbs lost yet though (I think that makes me two up on Jaws now). Anyhoo, it seems that one Long Island Ice Tea makes Adam fearless as he then suggested that we should go parasailing, having never done that before either. So, we did! It was amazing. The sea is just sooo blue and its really sort of peaceful whilst your up there, well I thought so anyway!

Now we are in the Caribbean we decided to experiment with Caribbean cooking. So far we have mastered one rum cocktail and a delicious spicy chicken meal with coconut and mango. Can you believe that we actually made perfect coconut rice! We will have to make it for you because it was so damn delicious. Best start preparing your taste buds!