A scale model of Xcaret.
The aquarium.
Reef sharks!
The underground “river”.
A few animals!
The night show! This place is huge, and filled, and this isn’t the high tourist season…
These guys are playing a soccer-like game with a flaming ball.
A few photos from our day in Cozumel!
A lizard on the road at Akumal. (no ruins)
Here’s a bunch from Tulum, on that semi-rainy day.
Chichen Itza!
The cenote Ik Kil.
Ek Balam. We’re a little sad that we didn’t have more time here. We wanted to get home before it got dark so we weren’t driving in Mexico…in the dark. Cool place.
Both Miranda and I were taking auto-bracketed photos, and we have some HDR software…so here’s some funky modifications on a couple of the photos from above!
I have a few more photos on my underwater camera, but we’re so close to being done!
We woke up…well, you know the drill. Made breakfast, packed our stuff up, said bye to our host and got moving to Cancun. We’d decided to take a bus downtown Cancun and cab to our hotel a move that saved us $50 versus busing to the airport then cab to the hotel, a shorter distance.
Thankfully, unlike our last day Hawaii last year, this hotel was lovely. Check in was easy, we found our suite quickly and met a really nice lady in check in line up. A quick lunch at the hotel restaurant and we’re off to the pool! And the swim up bar.
I think we swam, read, drank, swam, goofed off for a good 3 hours before we went back to our overly air conditioned room. A shower, an attempt at a nap and we left again by shuttle to a circus show!
Actually, first, dinner at Hacienda Sisal restaurant. We ordered guacamole (predictable), empanadas and tosadas. The food was good, but the guac was brilliant. We finally found the guacamole of our dreams!
The show was Deseo, apparently a new show roughly last year. The production quality was low-to-moderate, but the skill of the performers was all very high. There was one act in particular where the guy starts on a balance board with a ball under it, and by the end he’s standing on… 6 rolling tubes stacked on top of each other. The tubes were all perpendicular to each other, such that he could have fallen off in any direction at all, but he stayed up there for a good 10 seconds before coming down. They had a live singer who was excellent, and a group of acrobalancers who did an amazing set. Great show, well worth the time and effort and money!
I’m going to roll into the next day, since I have an actual keyboard now (home!). Up at 7am again, a quick breakfast at the TradeWinds (hotel restaurant) and we gave our last pesos to the cabby to take us to the airport. The Cancun airport is laid out well, and has all the services you might want near the departure gates.
The plane ride was hectic. Very very bumpy and scary. But we made it. Vancouver is cold, but not as cold as I expected. Brisk. We had Memphis Blues for dinner, and now we’re trying to make it to 9pm. We can do it!
I’ve got a few more photos from Chichen Itza/Ek Balam and a couple underwater photos and photos from the hotel. Hopefully I don’t give up on them! 🙂
I think I hit Publish on 6 posts this morning. You have a bunch of reading ahead of you. No photos here, unfortunately, have to figure out where I am on those!
Posted from WordPress for Android
One last photo of breakfast. 🙂
Posted from WordPress for Android
I have a few things on my phone for you. 🙂
5th Ave at night.
Our cafe Tulum, protecting us from the rain.
Cycling Tulum.
My special promotional Corona.
M’lady insisted we eat at McDonald’s one night.
Looking for gifts for our cat sitters. 😀 (these are every where)
Water spout off shore on our drive around Cozumel.
Adrian and Rooster Scooters.
We forgot to get photos of us driving, so here’s Miranda afterward. 🙂
Best place to eat. Make sure your Spanish isn’t bad. Home of the bitchy waitress who refused to slow down her speech for a couple tourists who were trying their best. But at 120 pesos for two tasty meals and 2 drinks (around $10), we’ll accept some amount of abuse.
Posted from WordPress for Android
We set our alarms for 8am since we could sleep in today. Woke up naturally around 7 anyway.
Got up and walked down to the unnaturally quiet 5th Ave for breakfast. We’ve been making breakfast most every day because it’s easy, relaxing and we don’t have to start our day by finding a place to eat (occasionally stressful), but today we wanted to out. We went to a bar/restaurant place called Pea Vela, mainly because it was one of the only places open. I had a tasty chicken/chorizo burrito and Miranda had…vinegar, egg and cheese soup with green peppers. It was a little potent, but better once you strained the liquid down and put it toast!
Our plan for the day was to go to Xcaret. There are 3 super “eco parks” in the area that dominate most of the business and advertising. They are so prominent that they have road signs on the highway that look like regular highway signs taking you to a town or city, and more frequently displayed too. Every tour agent in the town aggressively wants to sell you a trip here. We had to pick one and go, because it’s just so in your face.
Afterwards, I would categorize Xcaret as a zoo. A zoo with dolphins, sharks and manatees you can swim with. A zoo that’s blasted out part of the land underground to create a river you can snorkel in (not that there’s anything to see…not much life in a man made river). A zoo that has 5 buffet restaurants in it and a night show that makes the price of entry worth it. If you were really into it, you would need least two days too see the entire place. Holy crap.
We’re both glad that this place wasn’t the highlight of our trip though – it’s just to much, and being here makes your North American guilt flare up pretty bad. You know, if you have such a thing.
Hooooowever. We paid extra to swim with the dolphins. They have a number of optional extra activities and choose to do this one. Then we choose to upgrade to the dolphin “Primax” package for a special, for you only price of $30 USD. We upgraded mainly because the group size went from 12 to 4 (but there is a few other perks as well), definitely a worthwhile upgrade. They give you a 15 minute intro and then in Primax you have 45 minutes of playing with a few dolphins along with a dolphin trainer. I don’t know our guys name, but he was amazing and full of energy. I believed that he loved his job, particularly since he put all that energy in, and we were no where near our wallets to tip. 🙂 (which is commonly expected every where you go here).
We had already decided beforehand to pay any price for the photos of this event. You aren’t allowed to bring your own camera in, but they have a few guys taking pictures and video. We hadn’t expected to be asked to (almost) buy our experience again for those photos. Ouch. Obviously we don’t have their statistics, but it reminded us of the toll highway – half your prices and maybe you’ll get more than double the number of customers. Anyway, we bought the photos, averaging out to $3.50 per photo, and I’m not saying how many photos there are. They’re brilliant, they’re amazing and when you see them you will enjoy them, damn you! 🙂
This place has a few well thought out organizational systems in place. They have people with cameras all over and when they take your photo they also scan your wristband. At the end of the day, you can scan your band at nearby kiosks to see and buy all your photos for the day. They have buses after the night show to take you home, and because of the bands they know how many buses they’ll need to bring everyone home. Not their first rodeo, this place is very well orchestrated.
Today was our last full day in Playa. Tomorrow we gather our things and bus up to Cancun for a day of relaxing.
Posted from WordPress for Android
Up early today, this time with an alarm so we didn’t miss our ferry. 645 local time. Ferry at 8. Don’t miss it, or our snorkel tour wouldn’t wait for us.
I like snorkeling on my own. It’s easy, relaxing and you can do it whenever you like in a place like this. You don’t need a tour to go snorkeling, just some inexpensive equipment and an idea of where to go. However, I like taking a tour as well. They serve drinks and food, often drive you places it would be difficult to get to yourself and provide a fun place to relax in between swims. We booked with Cozumel Watersports. The boat crew was fantastic – they had a very explanatory speech before the swim, good communication and helped out well with people who needed it. This area has a mandatory life jacket policy, which is irritating and understandable. I like swimming down to see things closer. They don’t want yahoos wrecking the coral. These guys have the same policy, but the jackets weren’t the foam type I’m used to, but were more like the inflatable jackets airlines use…And you didn’t have to blow them up! Got some fun photos from this trip, had a rather strong marguerita and some fresh guacamole on the ride back.
Their dock is at a beach bar, La Palapita DenMedio Beach Bar, so we stopped to enjoy some food and plan our afternoon. This place was really chill, and while again the food wasn’t blow me away amazing, I really liked it here. A nice place to put your feet up after a solid swim.
We had a mind to rent scooters and drive around the island. We mentioned this to our tour guy Fernando and he made a call. While we were eating, scooters were driven to the restaurant for us to rent…That’s pretty badass.
The entire trip around the island took about 3 hours at about 40 km/hr. Which is as fast as Miranda’s 50cc would go. My 250cc would go much faster, but there was no way I was going 100km/hr on a rattling Mexican scooter. We had a rain shower in the middle of our ride, which was hilarious! The island is 90% circled by a terrific bicycle path…Which is also used by scooters, a lot. This is wicked safe and separated from regular car traffic for the most part. 5% is coming into San Miguel on a 4 lane road with lots of space. That last 5% though is a little scary – driving through a Mexican town streets on a scooter. As Miranda put it – a 2 lane road with 4 lanes of traffic on it. If we did this again, I’d do it over the entire day as there are so many cool beaches and natural landmarks to see along this road that we drove by, including a lighthouse and another set of ruins.
We managed to navigate our way through town to find our guy Adrian of Rooster Scooters. He was super nice and the three of us drove 2 scooters back to the ferry.
I wrote a few blog updates as best I could (still on the phone, remember…) and we got home and all but passed out from a super long day in the sun.
Friday is Miranda’s birthday!
Posted from WordPress for Android