Playa del Carmen, Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico
The beach beckons, but my reason for traveling to Playa del Carmen had nothing to do with the beaches. I was running out of storage space on my CF cards and wanted to have my photos transferred to a CD so that I could just keep on shooting. (Location)
Flashback: In 2006, 1gb of compact flash memory cost about $100 so I didn’t own too many of them! Not like in 2010, when 8gb of medium speed cards cost less than $5 per gb.
The first thing that I noticed, when I arrived in Playa del Carmen, was the wide array of bright colours, unique items and interesting things to photograph.
Of course, before photographing anything, I had to make sure that I could get a CD burned so that I could format my CF cards and start over again. I had been told that their was a photo store on the main street and it wasn’t hard to find. And yes, they could burn a CD. If I wanted Kodak film, they had lots but digital items were sparse.
Once I had the data storge issue off of my mind, I started to walk around the tourist part of Playa del Carmen, looking at everything and photographing rather more than I needed too.
The beach and the tourist shopping area are only one block apart with many stores running perpendicular to the beach offering everything that a tourist might need.
And if the vendors didn’t get you as you walked that one block up from the beach, there was no need to despair because the main tourist street had more and more on offer. From hats to jewelry to tequila, and clothing of all the colours of the rainbow.
.
While I was worrying about data storage, my wife headed out along the main street to check out the jewelry stores and the fabric stores.
When I walked past this telephone booth, I started to smile and then I started to laugh. Certainly, anyone around me would have questioned my sanity but here I was camera in hand, laughing to myself and photographing a pile of hats! At that moment, all my imagination was working overtime, the phone booth was some kind of Mexican time-lord machine for Mexicans but hats were not allowed so had to be neatly piled outside before being beamed up to who knows where…… :-).
Every street, whether main street or side street seemed to have some different, colorful object to offer. Coming, as I was, from the rather dull, overcast, black and white and gray world that tends reflect many a winter day n Eastern Ontario, all of this colour was exciting.
Playa del Carmen: An interesting place to visit.
*****
*****
