A few days ago I hopped on a plane from Sydney and headed to the mayan jungle In Akumal Mexico, a small town about 150km south of Cancun, for a month long artist residency. The first night I arrived here I was driven here in the dark for an hour or so, I had no idea where I was, it was too dark and i was way too jet lagged to know what was going on, it did not feel like I was in Mexico.
The first morning, the other artists woke me up and took me to the local cafe for breakfast, a chat and some coffee, they then took me on a tour of the town, the whole one road and about 5 shops, 2 of which are dive shops as just in front of us is the second biggest coral reef in the world. The water is super blue, a nice gradient of lights to darks all over the reef and the sand is as white as a piece of reflex. The first thing i did after breakfast was swim in a lagoon, where on the way I was greeted by a few spiders in the jungle and a couple of iguanas on the rocks.
The following day I took the day to my self to go exploring, Walking up the beaches, taking photos, settling myself in to the town i’ll call home for the next month. I had my snorkel with me so I stopped by for a look, everyone has told me about how amazing all the turtles are here and how beautiful the reef is. As I was walking in to the water I thought to my self, I wonder how long it will take to see a turtle, I put my mask on and swam about 3 metres and there he was, one huge mother fucking turtle with a few hombres (sucker fish) chillin out on the bottom of the Caribbean sea eating sea grass. I froze, at first I was like shit look at that thing, I had no idea what to do next, thenI settled in, hung around for a little while and just watched in on his life, he didn’t seem to fussed by my company and I was more than happy to have his. This is a very very beautiful place
Today was a whole other story. I woke up really really early, as I got word from a couple of the other artists about an adventure happening today with Karl (a sculptor working here) and his girlfriend Maru. . So few of us jumped in the back of Maru’s pick up truck and drove along a highway for an hour or so in to a small little town (which i can’t for the life of me remember the name of) and pulled up at this tiny little food stand, Karl and Maru recommended it as they’ve been there a bunch of times. At first being greeted by a tiny little lady in a tiny little cart somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Mexico was somehow a little intimidating, but we ordered some food and it was Great. After that we drove about another half hour further out, to a pet crematorium and watched a cat get burnt, I thought that was one of the weirdest things I had ever seen until our next stop… A dog refuge, Mexico is FULL of wild dogs and this is the place where the worst of the worst end up, there were like 150 dogs, all barking like mad, it was fucking nuts, they had half mangled faces, drible everywhere, giant nipples, giant nuts, missing legs, ratty fur, they were mean mother fuckers, it was really really confronting, I couldn’t help but want to help them out in someway, but the only thing you can do is buy one if you live in canada i think, where they have a deal with fedx or something to send the dogs up to their owners for free. Anyway…. after these weird experiences we cruised through a whole bunch of quiet little Mexican towns, it was amazing, all the crazy coloured stores and houses. What stunned me the most was all the typography. All hand painted signs, so much yet so little attention to detail, a little hierarchy with caps, lower case, italic, drop shadows etc etc, you always see this stuff in movies and what not, but in the flesh they are so beautiful and very inspiring. I can already tell a month in this place is not going to be enough.
On top of this I have spent every spare minute so far drawing. There are a bunch of photos below this post which i feed in to the blog from instagram, If you want to see more photos of work im doing, places im seeing etc follow me on twitter or instagram @adamjturnbull for both. 
