Day 4: Progreso (not the spaghetti sauce)

By the time we got to Progreso, we were more than ready to get off the boat. The pier is 5 miles long for absolutely no reason at all, so you have to ride a bus to get to the city. I had done some research on Progreso so I had some idea what it would be like. I told the kids to stay close and ignore the harassing vendors. I was surprised and more than a bit annoyed by the vendors. Our goal was to go to the beach, and on the way we were constantly getting stopped. We stepped into a restaurant for a drink and vendors came to our table and tried to sell us crap. The restaurant owner/manager told us not to give the vendors any money, but never kicked them out of his restaurant. To cap it off, he tried to charge me for a drink we ordered but never received.

After our brief stop at the restaurant, we continued to the beach. It was, by far, the dirtiest beach I have ever seen. It’s a good thing you can buy penicillin over the counter in Mexico, because after being on the beach for awhile I felt an infection coming on. We walked down the beach for awhile and a guy that works for a restaurant on the beach offered us a table for $10. He said he’d bring some chips and salsa and we could get some drinks. It seemed acceptable, we were going to need a place to put our stuff and it provided some shade. Of course, we never saw the guy again. I don’t know if the tables actually belonged to the restaurant or if he really worked there. If that had happened to me in the states, I probably would have done something about it. Instead, I just chalked it up as a learning experience. And naturally, we still got harassed by vendors.
The same guy that tried to sell us balloon animals in the restaurant tried his luck with us again. People were selling t-shirts, bootleg DVD’s, kites, cloths, cigars, small children, hypodermic needles, herpes and massages. And yes, the herpes and massages go hand in hand. We hung out at the beach for a couple hours before heading back to the market to catch the smelly bus back to the boat.
On the way back, we stopped at some guys tent (I’m not making that up, it was a tent) who was selling jewelry. He first had to prove it was real shells and not cheap plastic jewelry by trying to light it on fire (Again, this really happened.) He wanted $25, here’s the conversation the followed:
Pyromaniac vendor: $25 for the necklace
Abby: I’ll give you $10
Pyro: $20. It’s real shells, didn’t you notice it didn’t start on fire?
Abby: $10
Pyro: $15
Abby: $10
Pyro: $13
Abby: Deal.
Pyro: How about $20 for two non-flammable necklaces?

Abby looks to her sister to see if she wants a necklace for $10, she says no so Abby buys one for $13. I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder of her. She stood her ground in the face of a flamethrower and when he tried to sweeten the deal by adding the 2nd necklace, she refused. She only wanted one necklace, and that’s what she got. I could give a short dissertation on opportunity cost now, but I don’t want to lose my 11-member audience. I’m pretty sure her and I are the only members of the family that would have done that. Gimpy would have walked away from the tent with 40 necklaces.
We wandered around the market and bought a couple more cheap souviniers. Zach got a t-shirt and we bought some flammable necklaces at the bargain basement price of 6 for $5.
We caught the stinky bus back to the boat and had a great sit-down meal that night. Our waitress was awesome, probably the best service we encountered the entire trip.