Mexico, 2003 by Marcus Coltro

André on Venado Island, getting ready to snorkel

In August 2003 André and I went to Mexico for a shelling trip. Although time was very short on Mexico City we went to visit the Museum of Anthropology, which is very known for its great collection of old artifacts. Of course we saw a lot of shells on many exhibits, specially land shells! From there we flew to Mazatlán to start our collecting. Mazatlán is a nice city but not many places to collect on its beaches, which means you must rent a small boat to go to far places. The local Aquarium is nice - need a bit of remodeling, but has some nice tanks and a small shell collection (needing some corrections on the labels). We were able to find some nice material, including some nice Patella mexicana which was one of the targets of our trip.
We also tried to find some land snails but we only got a few dead ones, but it definitively was not a good spot for collecting them. We took another flight to the Caribbean side, and had to fight with the air company so they would allow us to carry as much weight we had - they wanted to charge US$450 extra! Using the good old way to bargain they left us fly without any charge...
We arrived in Cancún at night, having booked just that night since we thought we could find a better (and cheaper) hotel on the next day. However, we discovered a meeting of WTO (World Trade Organization) was taking place in Cancún, meaning all hotels were full and the city had a policeman in every corner to make sure no one was carrying a nuclear artifact. thus, we rented a car and hit the road up north to find some place to stay. We took a ferry to Isla Mujeres and spent three days there. It was very pleasant, beautiful scenery with crystalline waters! Only common shells, but plenty of places to drink Margaritas and eat Mexican food!

- These photos were digitalized from originals (slides or paper) so the quality is not as high as the photos you are used to see in our website.