A Nighttime Scavenger Hunt With Coolers in Cancun

At least five stores to fill one grocery list. Early 1990s.

I don't have a photo of Shelley's drawer, so this is mine, in Maine, this week.

Six months in Caribbean Mexico became 27 years, a travel internet business built without a phone line, caves nobody had mapped, a dead body or two. Now I’m telling all of it.

Superdeli in downtown Cancun, centro, closed at one in the morning. Shelley and I would roll in around 11:30 pm with the coolers already full in the back of the truck and an hour of dark road still between us and bed. We had been up since before the first dive. The cappuccino was for the drive home.

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This was the early nineties, and there were no grocery stores where we lived, in Akumal, halfway between Playa del Carmen and Tulum. There were minisupers. Basic convenience stores hawking Cokes, Masa, small packages of cookies, maybe fresh tortillas, and a few aging oranges. If you wanted to feed yourself for the next two weeks you got in the truck and drove to Cancun. Shelley worked for a dive shop and I worked for a competing one up the coast, six days a week. So grocery shopping usually meant after work, at night.

We took turns on who drove. Shelley had a bright red pickup with a cap on the back. I had a burgundy stick-shift Nissan with an open bed and a couple of blue Coleman coolers that had seen better days, one with the lid off its hinges. Grocery bags got wedged between the coolers or bungeed down so nothing flew out on the highway.

Shelley had gotten there, I don’t know, three to six months before I did. From Florida, blonde hair bleached by the sun, blue eyes, a sweet smile. A cave diver. She homeschooled some American kids on the Calvert curriculum. Their parents owned some condos they rented to divers. She also led dives when she wasn’t teaching. She stayed about two years and went home to the States. And Shelley loved her sweets.

Cancun was small then. No Walmart, no Sam’s, no Chedraui. One list was a four or five store excursion, if you were lucky. You never knew which ones would have what you needed. SuperISSSTE, the government store, was always first. Rice, beans, cooking oil, candles for when the power went out, and boxed milk, the kind that keeps almost forever. It had a couple of checkout lanes. Boxes in the aisles, grimy floors, and sometimes the stench of something rotting.

SuperISSSTE, Cancun. The government store. Always the first stop. Photo credit: Soy Gerald Facebook

Then Comercial Mexicana, San Francisco de Asís, another small grocery store that is now long gone. Then it was a hunt through supermanzanas, or neighborhoods, for small shops to round out whatever you could not find in the first stores, or hit shops like Parisina that sold fabric, bolts of cotton, and sewing notions.

Every parking lot had a guy with a rag over his shoulder and a whistle. No uniform, in plastic sandals trying to help you park your vehicle. Whether you needed help or not. You gave him a couple of pesos to stand by the truck while you went in, as security, since the truck bed was full of purchases. During the day, flip them a few extra pesos and they’d put a piece of cardboard on your windshield to block out the heat of the sun.

As with each of these stores, it was a scavenger hunt to find what you needed and what you wanted. And when it wasn’t on the shelf, is there a substitute? Where else could we maybe find it? Are they still open? You bought everything you saw when you saw it, because you didn’t know when it was coming back. That’s how Gary and I ended up eating a lot of Kraft macaroni and cheese, doctored up with the green canister of Kraft Parmesan and black pepper, on a diver’s budget and calling it dinner.

I was a new wife trying to run a household, in this case two rooms. What I was always looking for was coffee. Beans, from Veracruz if I could get them, and you’d think in Mexico that would be easy. No. The Mr. Coffee maker came with the casita, furnished. The royal blue coffee grinder we had carried down from our house in Baltimore. It was hit or miss shopping for coffee beans. When I found them I’d buy two, three, or even four bags and stack them in our bodega.

Whoever was up first made the coffee. The grinder whirred, loud at first, and you’d give it a couple of shakes while it hummed. If it was Gary, there was always a brief pause after. He’d turn the grinder upside down and give it two taps with his hand to get the last of the grind out of the blades.

Gary's kitchen, this week. Sound on.

The night I’m thinking of, we had done all the stores. Coolers sweating in the truck bed. Superdeli was the first place in Cancun with an espresso machine, or the first one we knew about. Bright lights, a clean floor, a little cafe where you could get a cappuccino and a pastry, and an import shelf we scoured every time because something might have changed since last visit. Oscar Mayer. Lunchables, which nobody needed. Danish butter in a can, always stocked and always good. Skippy, grab that. Stoli for about 80 pesos a bottle, four bucks, back when vodka first showed up in our part of Mexico. Espresso instead of instant. It felt refined to us. There were always a few Cancunenses at the tables with a coffee and cigarette at that hour, and a taxi out front hoping for a fare.

We had our coffee sitting outside. As we finished walking through the small store, we approached the one open cash register. That’s when Shelley pointed at the shelf.

Hershey’s Kisses.

Up until then there had never been a Hershey product in our part of Mexico. And here were two grown women at midnight in a pretend NY-style deli in Cancun getting excited over a bag of chocolate Kisses. Shelley put three bags in her basket. She kept a drawer in her refrigerator at home for sweets. Bubulubus and whatever candy some unsuspecting tourist had been conned into muling down from the States. The Kisses were for special occasions.

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The drive home.

The highway to Playa, then on to Akumal, was two lanes and no shoulder. If you caught the edge you went down a big drop into the jungle. There wasn’t a light anywhere from the edge of Cancun to Playa. Windows down, listening to the one radio station, Radio Turquesa, until it faded out long before we got anywhere. After that it was a cassette tape or nothing.

If somebody broke down out there at night, you didn’t find out from a hazard triangle. You found out from a can of kerosene, or gasoline, burning in the road up ahead.

My friend Dan, American, a Texan I believe, lived in a casita a couple doors down with his girlfriend. He had been on the coast for a few years, looked after some properties and ran a laundry service in Tulum. Blond, tan, handsome, and he wore a gold chain with a cross off the Matancero, the 18th-century Spanish galleon that went down off Akumal. A really good egg. Coming home from a Cancun run one night in his combi, a VW bus, he did not see the cow standing in the road, and it came through the windshield.

Playa was a little more than half way home. You knew you were coming up on it because there was a radio tower with a red light blinking on top. And that was all there was. Then another stretch of darkness to Akumal.

We didn’t open the Kisses in the truck. Shelley squirreled hers away in the drawer in her refrigerator with the rest of her stash. Me, I put mine in the refrigerator so the ants wouldn’t get them.

Not long after the Kisses, Cancun got an Ace Hardware. For weeks it was all the Coconut Telegraph, the rumor mill up and down the coast, could talk about. Opening day you’d have thought the Super Bowl had come to town. The parking lot was full before the doors opened. People were tailgating at a hardware store. It was right before Christmas, so every gringo gift exchange on the coast that year was a first-world brand from Ace. I’ve read since that it may not have been a real Ace, as far as the company was concerned. Nobody in that parking lot cared.

Gary and I got a Cuisinart food processor that Christmas. From Ace. It’s still in the kitchen, Gary’s kitchen now. So is the grinder we carried down from Baltimore. I was there this past December and he made the coffee. The grinder, whirl, shake, the pause, two taps.

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Same coast, other days