Apr 28 2003
Isla Mujeres
Some evenings are simply unforgettable. Last night M and I wandered around the tiny downtown Isla Mujeres looking for a place to eat. We decided to go a bit upscale and found an excellent restaurant in a huge open-air palapa. We had lobster tostadas and grilled tuna spring rolls for appetizers. (This place had a very contemporary menu, but with the cats and dogs running around it was also very “of Mexico.”) Both appetizers were excellent — probably the highlight of the meal.
We followed that up with main courses of shrimp pasta with rosemary, and grilled fillet of grouper with some kind of Mexican-Asian fusion sauce. Marvelous! We had a really nice Mexican white wine to accompany it — I don’t remember the name of it, but it was of very good quality with a nice floral nose and mild fruity flavor. (The west coast of Mexico is producing some excellent wines these days due to some significant investments from California and French winemakers.)
It was about 10 pm by the time we finished dinner, so we went for a walk across a small bridge to a resorty part of the island that had a wooden pier that jutted way out into the water. The water is very shallow along there, so even 100 or so metres out it seemed like it was only two metres deep. It was Sunday night and we are easing into the slow season, so there was no one around at all, except for a few restaurant workers packing it in for the night. The sky was clear and the stars were sparkling. It was marvelous.
The best was yet to come. We made our way back to where we had parked our rented scooted, climbed on, and headed back to our B&B, which is about a mile or so out of town, on the rough and rocky Caribbean side of the island. What a marvelous ride. We were having so much fun zipping along the deserted road with the sea wind blowing through our (helmetless) hair that we kept on going another mile or three down the road, then we crossed the island and zoomed back on the other side. (Isla Mujeres is about seven kilometres long but not wide — only a 150 metres or so at its narrowest and maybe 600 meters at its widest.)
We got back late, turned on the A/C in the room, and cooled down before packing it in for the night. Today, we hopped on the scooter and retraced that extended part of the ride in sunlight, stopping to snorkel at the reefs at the southern tip of the island. For details about that, you should check M’s blog.
