A journal of places.

Walk out of the arrivals hall at Queen Beatrix and the heat finds you before the taxi line does. The line is right there anyway, a short stroll from the exit, cars with TX plates easing forward one at a time while somebody's suitcase wheel shrieks across the curb. A driver lifts your bag into the trunk, asks where you are staying, and pulls out. Nobody says a price. On this island nobody has to.

The question is whether you want to be charged in the local currency or in your own. Pounds instead of euros. Dollars instead of yen. It reads like a small kindness, the machine looking out for you, doing the math so you do not have to.

The woman running the store keeps scrolling. Two men on a tricycle wait it out with the engine switched off, one of them holding a plastic bag of fish that is going to be dinner regardless. A dog reorganizes itself under a chair. Nobody is treating this as an event.

There is a walkway, a handrail, a strip of hot concrete, and then the lagoon. Velana International sits on its own island. Whatever address is printed on your guesthouse booking, the last part of getting to it happens on water, and the water keeps a timetable that nobody emailed you.

The car is $1 a day. You saw it, you booked it, you have the confirmation on your phone with the number printed on it. You are now at a desk in Cancun at half past eleven at night, and the screen the agent has turned towards you says $486.

Nobody arrives at this idea by accident. The country shows up in your head already decorated: two glasses on a deck, a drone shot pulling back over a lagoon, somebody's ring finger in soft focus. So you sit with the tab open and think that going by yourself would be a slightly odd thing to do here. Like booking a table for two and then asking them to take the other chair away.