The closest I've come to international travel is an eight-hour excursion into Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico...part of a cruise package we took in 1994.
Cancun is a whole different beast. And, post-911, getting into it is no easy task.
On arrival here in the resort jewel of Mexico's east coast, one immediately notices the heat. We've plenty of it here...at 300pm central time, the mercury is a mild 92 degrees. Add in the 70 percent humidity, and your sweat glands get the message: get busy, son...and start drenching the American before he can get too comfortable.
Cancun Airport has one of the best organized immigration and baggage claim systems in Mexico. So I am told by one of the bi-lingual locals who I happen to strike up a conversation with while waiting to get through the four hundred other people whose flights just landed at the same time ours did. When I get to the baggage area, I find six carousels full of people's prized possessions...and a very, very long queue of people waiting to get those possessions x-rayed by the Mexican government officials who have compressed those four hundred folks into three lines.
And then, there's customs. Make sure you have the right form filled out; make sure you've signed it in two places; and then go through a series of snaking lines and winding paths to get to the minimum wage government lackey who looks at your incorrectly filled out immigration forms; scans your passport while giving you the once-over, and decides you're not much of a threat to make things tough in his homeland. Three rubber stamps later and you're off to the ground transportation platform.
This is where the fun begins.
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