Into the Blue

Almost exactly one year ago, my boyfriend and I spent a wonderful week on Isla Mujeres in Mexico. I had heard about the island from someone at work who had been there in 1978. He described its sleepy charms to me and I was hooked. Needless to say, 28 years have brought a lot of change to the island but it still holds its own in the charm department. We cashed in some frequent flyer miles and got two free tickets to Cancun. I decided that that gave us the green light to stay in a more expensive hotel than we normally would. After a week of internet reasearch (hotels on the Island range from very cheap to VERY expensive), we chose The Hotel Villa Rolandi. The Villa Rolandi is a twenty room hotel with its own private beach on the western side of the island, looking across the bay at Cancun.
We barely made it out of the Cancun Airport, every two feet there is a person trying to rope you into some activity or other while someone else with a competing offer tries to tug you away to their own counter. Politely explaining that you aren't interested does nothing, the only thing to do is to pick up your bags and just walk away. We battled our way out to the curb and got a cab, making sure to get a price quote before we got in the car. And finally, we were off to Playa Linda to rendezvous with the Cocoon, the yacht sent by the hotel to bring us out to Isla Mujeres.


Being picked up in a private yacht sounded good when we read about it on the internet, it was a thousand times better in person. The water was impossibly blue and the motion of the boat shook off the city stress as it scudded over the waves. We sped across the turquoise blue bay, and into an inlet (the Laguna Makax), docking at a pier right behind the hotel, frigate birds drifted serenely overhead.


The wooden boards of the dock were heaven to my feet. A porter took my bag from me as I tried to lift it myself, I had to pause and remind myself this was my vacation and I was paying some extra money for some extra pampering. Up in the room we breathed a sigh of relief and contentment and sat back to enjoy the complementary glasses of champagne while the water beckoned.