Trials and Tribulations of a Travel Writer

It’s in Cancún, that rather large, scary resort on the Caribbean coast of Mexico, that I realise there’s a fine line between a travel journalist and a travel journo lost. Here I am researching a brand new guidebook to Mexico and no sooner have I arrived before I’m hopelessly entangled in lotes, manzanas, calles and other bizarre parts of addresses, dragging a one-wheeled suitcase behind me – a spur of the moment buy in nearby Playa del Carmen, to rest my backpack-weary shoulders, a plan that backfires as soon as I step off the bus in Cancún and said wheel irredeemably comes off. This does not bode well.

I finally find somewhere decent-ish to sleep and the hotel owner looks at me like something the cat dragged in – it’s hot and I’m all bedraggled after my suitcase struggle. “You can have a room on the top floor,” he says with a nasty, greasy smile, showing off just what tequila and chillies without a toothbrush can do for you and off I scamper obediently, up eight flights of rickety stairs, while the owner just grins and doesn’t lift a finger. Sigh!

Oh well, Cancún here I come – time to start the real work. Being a guidebook writer may sound like a dream job and true, getting paid to travel the world doesn’t suck, but there’s a lot of legwork involved – literally. Walking up and down the streets of Cancún, checking out everything from hotels, restaurants and bars, to banks, cultural centres and tourist boards, I remain irretrievable lost and no matter how many times I attack the same street in search of no. 35, I can’t find it. In despair I turn a corner, only to find the same street again! This is when it dawns on me that there are two of every street in the centre of town – two “Margaritas street”, two “Tulipanes street”, both one-way in opposite directions and with different house numbers. Phew, mystery solved – for now.

Cancún is a challenge for the budget traveller, geared almost solely towards the package tourist and the mid to top-end of the market and it’s my job to seek out exceptions to this rule. Budget places, though, have a nasty way of disappearing from year to year, or moving, or changing names, or – well, you catch my drift. It’s good exercise, I tell myself after a long hike to the tourist information office, only to find it’s now the Polish embassy. Exhausted I slip some pesos into a drinks machine, which happily munches my coins, but refuses to spit out the drink. I almost start howling in misery there and then, when a kind security guard bashes the machine so hard it finally coughs up the can and my faith in humanity, if not Cancún, is momentarily restored.

Some eight hours walking the streets and I almost feel like I’m plying my trade, but at least the hotel touts near the bus station now recognise me and have stopped trying to show me their cheapie hovels. Thanking heaven for small mercies I slowly stagger up the eight flights of stairs to my own hovel and collapse in a heap. Tomorrow is a another day...

By Anna Maria Espsäter

First UK Rights

The Footprint Guide to Mexico will be published in November 2009, http://www.footprintbooks.com/
Contact details: amespsater@googlemail.com