BlathrWayne Lorentz

You know how mid-tier cities desperate for attention create little signs or murals or plazas just so that people will take photographs of themselves and post them to social media and give the city free publicity? Carnival wins this game.

At Carnivalʼs cruise port in Cozumel, Mexico there is a small white sand beach. It is conveniently located right at the end of the pier that the tourists use to get off the ships.

It has a perfect little row of perfect little palm trees and perfect sand in front of perfect blue water, and the perfectly massive profiles of Carnivalʼs cruise ships in the background.

Thousands of people take pictures there each year and post them online without realizing that itʼs a marketing campaign. The stealth equivalent of those giant photo frame props that second-rate cities place around town to let the vanity-afflicted know exactly where to stand in order to get the perfect picture of themselves for social media.

Carnival deserves a big fat “good on you” for doing a great job with this guerrilla marketing technique, and pulling it off at industrial scale. It couldnʼt have been cheap to execute, and certainly demonstrates extensive vision and cooperation between departments within the company.

You can tell the Carnival Dream is a happy ship by the way itʼs always smiling.

There used to be a restaurant in downtown Houston that had a big sign in front reading “Mexican food so authentic, you shouldnʼt drink the water.”

In the 90ʼs that was considered humor. Today, it seems like a tacky and rude perpetuation of a stereotype.

And then I saw this at Cruise Port Cozumel.

Is it possible to run a beach resort with no electricity except car batteries, and credit card processing over a long-distance radio link with a yagi antenna?

Yep. It's called Lookout Beach, on the east coast of Cozumel.

Alcohol, sun, wind, and isolation. It would be paradise if the beach wasn't so terrible. There's a nice white strip of sand, but the part by the water is nothing but foot-shredding coral.

It also seems to get the worst of the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt. But otherwise, once you convince the touts you don't want any trinkets, it can be relaxing.

Some people see a rock. Some people see the lizard.

We went to an ancient Mayan archaeological site called San Gervasio. Hereʼs the basics, as told by our tour guide:

• Everything was wonderful in Mexico until the Spanish arrived.
• The Mayans used to have a vast city here.
• The city was so vast it needed roads that were in perfect alignment with the moon.
• Women were only allowed to come to the island and its city when they had their periods.
• Everything was wonderful in Mexico until the Spanish arrived.
• something something mumble mumble
• A treasure hunter bought this site from the Mexican government when it was too busy fighting a civil war to care about treasure hunters buying historic sites.
• The treasure hunterʼs tool of choice was dynamite, and he blew all of the historic buildings to pieces looking for gold he never found.
• Some of the chips from the dynamite explosions ended up on the tour guideʼs shoulder.
• Everything was wonderful in Mexico until the Spanish arrived.