Travel Journal: I Thought My Hotel in Cancun Was Burning Down Due to Pesticides
During my most recent stint in the Mayan Riviera, I was staying in the Hotel Zone in Cancun – I was just chilling in my room on a Tuesday night working on this blog when I heard a crazy loud sound coming from (what I thought) was my AC. The sound kept getting louder, and louder, and louder still until I thought the AC was going to explode. I went running and turned it off but the sound kept coming. I had no idea what was going on I just knew I had to get out of the room, but when I opened my door the entire corridor was full of white smoke (!!!).
Honestly, I know emergencies can happen anywhere – natural disasters, volcano eruptions, tsunamis, house fires, anything could happen, especially while traveling, but I didn’t realize until this moment how little prepared I was for any of those things to ever happen to me.
I stared, open-mouthed and dumbfounded, into the completely smoke-filled hallway for a moment. I couldn’t see anything through the smoke but I knew I was on the first floor, and then I sprung into action. I grabbed my laptop and my phone from where I was working on my bed, took a deep breath, and then sprinted (barefoot – not the best call in case there really had been a fire!) into the unknown.
5 seconds later I was out in the open courtyard, birds were chirping, people in bikinis were lounging – and no one seemed to give a crap that my hotel was seemingly burning down. Even more shocking than when I first opened the door and saw the smoke was how fast it was over and everything was back to normal. I felt completely crazy, clutching my MacBook barefoot in the open air. Around the corner, three men with what looked like a giant smoke machine were spraying the perimeter of the building I had just fled.
Cancun, and the Mayan Riviera overall, is a jungle. What are jungles full of? Well, lots of things – but mostly bugs.
Tourists come down from North America and freak out at the cockroaches, mosquitos, gnats, and scorpions, propelling hotels and Airbnbs to do pretty much anything to stop guests from leaving bad reviews.
My hotel had started a new practice to keep the bugs away and was spraying the whole building with pesticide every Tuesday evening on the down low. They weren’t telling any of the guests, (probably because it’s a bad look), and since I wasn’t out at the bar for Happy Hour like everyone else I was the only person who was greeted by a wall of pesticide smoke at their hotel door.
I had an issue with pesticides while I was in Tulum last year. Cockroaches were coming up through the plumbing – big black sewer ones. I lived in NYC before I started traveling, but tropical cockroaches are even bigger and grosser than the ones we get there. Some grating over the plumbing (most drains in Tulum/Cancun are just an open hole) would have solved the issue of things being able to come up from the sewer, but for some reason, the usual response to pests in Mexico is to call for an exterminator to spray the area.
I just happened to be home when the exterminator arrived to fumigate my Airbnb. I don’t know what came over me, since I had already asked my Airbnb hosts if the fumigation was safe and they had already said yes, but I asked the exterminator how long until I would be allowed to come back to my apartment – he said I couldn’t come home for THREE DAYS and my Airbnb hosts had said it would be fine in 10 minutes (!!!!!).
The insecticide they were planning on spraying isn’t safe for people to breathe in, but hotels/Airbnbs spray it anyway – there’s less oversight for these things in Mexico. I have no idea if what they were planning on spraying that time in Tulum was the same pesticide they sprayed at my hotel in Cancun because the exterminator in Tulum never wound up spraying it after I complained to the hosts.
The issue usually is they don’t want to not get use out of the hotel rooms while the chemicals dissipate so they don’t tell people they’re spraying anything, or don’t tell them what they’re spraying period. I ran into this problem later in Cancun when I wanted to know what chemicals I had just run through a cloud of and the front desk just said “Don’t worry, it’s safe, it helps with mosquitos” 😬.
I felt super stupid for thinking there was a fire in my hotel after the fact. For one, I ran out barefoot which would be a terrible decision if there actually was a fire I had to run through – two, I never smelled smoke or fire, in fact, there was no scent from the grey fog in the hallway at all. I still have no idea what they sprayed, but it probably couldn’t have been good for people to breathe in so I’m happy I didn’t stop and take a big sniff to make sure there was a fire 😅.
