Submarine excursion/amnesia down Memory Lane

 A choppy boat ride took us a few miles down the coast to where the submarine was waiting.
We've done a similar excursion in Aruba and from that I learned that you can't get good photographs down deep without bright lights. This is a blue world for the amateur not the dazzling rainbow world of Jacques Cousteau. Oh, well-blue is better than nothing.

Every passenger gets a window seat and charts are provided to identify the fish you may see but of course they will all be blue...

In the blue mirk it is hard to spot the fish and sometimes that's because there are no fish to spot

Then suddenly you see a shoal of them

What goes down must come up and soon we were back on the surface and transferring over to the boat that would take us back to the pier in Cozumel.

We passed by the two Carnival ships

Carol, knowing that with 5 ships in port today, the town would be busy with roaming tourists decided to return to the ship to relax in the quiet of the aptly-named Sanctuary while I was keen to visit downtown and see if I recognized any of it. A taxi had me there within 10 minutes.

 What was once a dusty impoverished little town has been transformed and groomed over the years into a "made for tourists" destination. The "Mexican" feel is long gone. It was unrecognizable.

A wide road now runs along the waterfront-it was roadworks when i was last here and work proceeded at a "mañana" pace in the boiling heat.

A Holland America cruise ship gets the berth closest to town

Mexican wrestlers like to remain anonymous

The streets are no longer narrow and dusty. They're tourist-friendly and immaculately clean.

I stopped at a bar for a refreshing beer

When I visited Cozumel in the past I seldom went downtown. Rather I would go to a distant hotel such as El Presidente and use their pool with a swim-up bar or their sandy beach. It would be an afternoon of relaxation, away from the crowded noisy bars and shops of the town.

Here's the "beach" downtown

I am away from the shopping district at this point. You'll know it when every other shop you pass is selling diamonds and jewelry. Each of those glitzy stores has a well-dressed person in the door asking you to come in. Diamonds and jewelry are exactly the last two things I will ever need so I don't go in and just keep walking. I don't buy tee shirts to tell everyone in the future where I have been either...

These are the fast ferries that will take you to mainland Mexico-the Yucatan Peninsula and from there to resort towns like Cancun.

Does every town have a Hard Rock Cafe by now?

You see the Police car above. What I didn't photograph was a pickup truck carrying soldiers with machine guns. Mexico is often in the news because of the killings resulting from the drug trade.
Cozumel exists for the tourists and so they must be made to feel safe.

It was hot and I'd been walking for a while and needed to use a bathroom. I didn't want to go into any of the packed noisy tourist bars so I went into a shiny shopping mall to find one. A modern Americanised emporium like this didn't exist back in the 1980s.

After a brief bathroom break it was time to taxi back to the pier where I would find my ship waiting for me.