Bienvenidos a Mahahual!!

Hola from Mexico!

So I've been here for about a week now, and things are good! Starting to get into the swing of things at work and around town.

I'm living in a place called Mahahual. It's about 4 hours south of Playa del Carmen and about an hour north of the border with Belize. Mahahual used to be a small fishing village, but it started to convert to tourism in 2000 when the cruise ship port of Costa Maya was built. Most people think the port and the town are the same, but they are actually two separate entiies. In 2007, Hurricane Dean came through and destroyed the town and the port pretty successfully. Its still in a process of recovery, but for the most part you cant tell there was ever a storm.

Part of my job is to deal with cruise ship relations at the port, so its easy to see the difference between the port and the town. The port of Costa Maya is privatized, so you cant actually visit it unless you're
on a cruise or have a special port pass. The port is just what you would expect from a cruise port: Senor Frogs, jewelry, and assorted Mexican trinkets. The town is a bit further away, maybe a ten minute drive from the port. It's actually a very cool little town. Lots of little restaurants with delicious food, local artisan shops and beautiful beaches. Much better than the port, but so many cruise visitors don't bother leaving the port!

The shop I work for mainly does excursions for the cruise ships, so we do half day diving trips out to the reef. It's busy busy busy on cruise ship days, especially when we have two or three ships in one day. It has definitely been hard work so far since I've been a bum on holiday for the last two months! Hopefully my muscles will adjust and hauling tanks won't feel so bad!!

Mike and I are doing well, we think we've finally found a good place to live! It's been slow going finding housing, but I think we'll be moving into a studio apartment on Tuesday. Fingers crossed!!

Sending lots of love from Mexico. There's not a whole lot of Wifi around, which seems to be pretty standard for all the places I've been living in the past few years!! Ill try to be good with my updates though,  so stay tuned!

Love and fishes!!