The Ugly American

Believe me when I say I didn’t expect much from this secret supposed paradise known as Isla Mujeres, a tiny island off the coast of Cancún.

For one, it’s a tiny island off the coast of Cancún—Cancún, which is nothing but a hairy ball-sack of a tourist trap. It’s stuffed with so many T-shirt shops and tequila-shooting frat boys that you can barely see the giant stucco restaurants where the waiters wear gun belts with booze bottles tucked in the holsters, let alone the refuse-infested seascape beyond that.

Besides, I never thought I’d go back to Cancún after the last time I’d visited a few years prior, when I’d made sure to piss off all the shop owners by being a bitchy tourist before I left. “Excuse me,” I’d say, “but do you sell T-shirts here? I mean, I know you have T-shirts here, but I was wondering if you sell them, since I’ve been standing here a good 45 seconds and you haven’t waited on me. So I thought maybe this was a T-shirt museum or something, and all these T-shirts are actually on display rather than for sale. Am I wrong?”

So you see, I couldn’t exactly revisit this place without the expectation that I’d be forced back to the plane at torch-point. But the way my new neighbor, known simply as The Psychic Miss Sherrie Cash, kept talking about Isla Mujeres made me wonder if I’d tossed that part of the Caribbean into the toilet too soon. I’d never heard of the little island, but The Psychic Miss Sherrie Cash used to live there, and every time she talked about it she foamed at the mouth and lapsed into a trance, practically, recalling the loveliness of the place and how she couldn’t wait to get back. At dusk the sky was the same color as the ocean, she’d sigh, which made the horizon a mystical parfait of blue hues, and the sand—sigh—was white as washed linen and warm as a womb.

But what really got my Internet-ticket-finding fingers working was the fact that she had lived there an entire year in a hotel that only charged 10 bucks a night. Ten bucks a night? Now I had to see this. I knew it couldn’t have been a crappy hotel because The Psychic Miss Sherrie Cash was?? partial to her makeup, hair extensions, rhinestone-studded butterfly clips and reams of beaded gowns she quick-changed in and out of all day. A woman like this cannot live in the kind of spider-hole you’d think 10 bucks a night would afford you. The room had to have had adequate bedding and a good cross breeze, if nothing else, and I would happily wade through that puddle of hangover puke called Cancún if it meant a decent room on a rustic Caribbean island 9 miles off the coast of Mexico for only 10 bucks a night.

A Fact-Finding Mission

It was just a matter of time before round-trip airfare to Cancún was on sale for less than my water bill, so I hopped the plane with The Psychic Miss Cash and off we went. I have to tell you, from the air, the ocean was the color of the knees on child’s faded dungarees, and I almost believed right there that anything was possible, even the Caribbean on 10 bucks a night. The drive through Cancún to get to Puerto Júarez—the port where you catch the 15-minute water taxi to the island—was the hell I expected, but once I stepped off the boat and onto Isla Mujeres I couldn’t believe what I was seeing—a perfectly passable, bucolic little Caribbean enclave. The sun was setting, and the sky was such an acid splash of vivid color that it hurt my heart to look at it.

We went straight to the legendary $10-a-night hotel—a tiny, tidy, three-story adobe called Marcianito (translation: “little Martian”), with double beds, painted shutters and balconies dripping with blooming vines. Sure enough, prices had soared to a whopping $25 a night. I tried to muster some huffiness over that, but it’s hard to be huffy when, outside, the horizon is a mystical parfait of blue hues and the sand is white as washed linen and warm as a womb.