Its a Small World After All

OK, so I apologize to all of you who now have that never-ending, I want to bang my head against the wall, tune stuck in your head, but a couple hundred plastic singing children do not tell lies. It is truly a small, small world. This we have found out over and over again as coincidences, or good karma, or “dude, its all the circular flow of energy, man” have followed us throughout our adventures. Whether it is the exact right person getting in contact at the exact right time, or just lucking out on a wrong turn that takes us to the right place, everything seems to be connected.

Our most recent example lead us into Mexico, a country we were not even supposed to visit, two months after the time we believed we would be in Guatemala waist-deep in our projects for The GROW Initiative (don’t worry, we’re almost there to start language school and projects, really!). As it so happened two days later Donny’s parents were arriving in Cancun (or so they thought), a trip they had scheduled months before. While Donny’s parents had no idea where the hotel was located, we were delighted to find out that their hotel was the exact hotel we had snuck into (I mean accidently got lost and ended up by their pool) while docked with Cinnabar in the town of Puerto Morelos (30 minutes south of Cancun) in one of the only ports that could accommodate our boat’s 8 foot draft.

Furthermore, we had been racking our brains for days trying to figure out how on our way to Cancun we were going to stop off and visit a friend we had met in Puerto Morelos to see his research project on the calcification rates of corals (way cooler than it sounds). Well, problem solved!

So as we said our goodbyes to Lars and Inger, we headed North for our first attempts to take the local collectivos with packs on our backs so big they could have been filled with a whole family of Mexicans headed for a boarder run. After surprisingly failing to fool anyone that we were just really light skinned locals (I still don’t know what gave us away), some really nice Mexicans helped us on a 12 peso (less than a dollar) bus were we sat like totem poles with multiple bags stacked upon our laps.

The driver dropped us off at an intersection, spewed a couple of sentences, or possibly one really, really long word, and drove off. After we refused multiple taxi drivers who wanted an outlandishly high price (5 whole dollars) to take us 4 miles to the hotel we started the long walk beginning to really feel the weight of Pepe and his familia on our backs (not the fault of Gregory packs or anyone associated with Gregory packs). It didn’t take us long of sticking out our thumbs once again before a very nice family in a pick up took pity on us. We hopped in the bed of the truck and a mile or so down the road where we were about to be let off, a crazy car started beeping its horn wildly at us. Convinced that it was a very undercover policia (their car was only a little bigger than a wooden go-cart I used to have) coming to arrest us for our previous trespassing, we hid behind our packs. But as it turned out it was our brand new Gregory Backpacks that my parents had seen in the back of the truck and were now trying to apparently scare the truck in to stopping. Of all the roads at the exact right time, there they were. Up until that point we didn’t even know if they were in Mexico. Flying standby often means you don’t get flights the day you want them. We also didn’t know how we could check into the hotel (or if we were even supposed to, wink wink) without them but with the sight of them in that car all those worries were gone. It was a great reunion and after a circus act of shoving ourselves and our packs into their six foot car (everyone take a deep breath in), we were headed down the road again,

While at Puerto Morales’ Marina before there had been another coincidence- our neighbors, of all the boats in the world, was the boat we almost sailed on as crew (except that they decided to take some other people for some superficial, silly reason such as they actually had experience sailing on the ocean before) Lauderdale Lady, a beautiful Catamaran was in the slip next door. That wasn’t even the port we would have sailed with them to, and it was over a month after we would have sailed with them at all, and yet there they were.

The rest of that week was great, though the feeling of being in the lap of luxury made us feel oddly out of place. This was supposed to be a trip of no money, sleeping in uncomfortable places and helping others and not sipping down the margaritas on the beach. But after a full afternoon of fighting off high pressure sales pitches explaining to us that we can easily afford to buy into their condos for the next twenty years (even with the modest combined income of zero dollars we will be making over the next two years), we felt much better about taking their “complementary” beach BBQ and their catamaran snorkeling trip (actually very beautiful).

So thank you Don and Shirley Comer, Lars and Inger, all the incredible generous Mexicans we have encountered(except those weighing down our backpacks), Robin (the Marine Biologist) , our sponsors Gregory Backpacks, and all the little plastic children at Disney World who have made this such a wonderfully small world.