Mexico — Sun, Sea and Snorkelling

Naomi & Kate
Aug 26, 2017 · 10 min read

(Kate did her first title and as you can see, she’s gotten really creative with this one).

Playa Del Carmen — Tuesday 23/5/17 — Tuesday 30/5/17

The gateway to Capitalism.

Naomi: After Cuba we purposefully spent a week in Playa Del Carmen so we could bask in glorious Capitalism. I hooked Starbucks up to my veins and visited a Sunglasses Hut three times to have my glasses polished. Because I could. Playa Del Carmen is basically Cancun but on a smaller scale and jam packed with Americans who say things like “oh I come to Playa Del Carmen because it’s more authentic and I want to get away from all the Americans in Cancun” hmmm, right. We stayed in a dorm room at a “party hostel” because Kate wanted to get her techno on for her birthday and we had the pleasure of staying with a very interesting Canadian. She was in her 40s and couldn’t go more than 6 seconds without making sweeping age related statements like “Oh but you’re a different generation to me!”, “things weren’t like that 10 years ago” or the pure gold “I don’t have to stay in hostels, I can afford hotels but I’ll only stay there when I take another person like my Mom”. I never found out her name or anything about her as any usual small talk openers used in hostels were met with “Why do you even want to know? You don’t need to know that honey, do you really think we’re going to see each other after these few days?”. She also turned the light on at 7am just so she could eat some crisps. Whyyyy.

Half an hour south of Playa there is a beach called Akumal where you go and snorkel with sea turtles off the beach and it was awesome! On the way back we took a taxi as there were 5 of us so it was going to be the same price as taking the local bus. We all sat on top of each other in the back whilst the driver drove at 200km/hr and took selfies for Snapchat and not realising we understood Spanish captioned his photo of us with something along the lines of “Got a gang of tourists in the back who have paid me all this money! woooo :-D”.

Me and my mate Clive

Kate: We used our best Cuban negotiating skills to bargain with a man in shop to buy some snorkels for our Mexican part of the trip as we figured it would be a good investment. In Mexico, things in shops with set prices don’t actually have set prices.

Cenote 1/5000

We visited quite a few Cenotes around Mexico and decided to skip a lot of the Mayan ruins as we were a bit Mayan-ed out after Guatemala and Belize. Cenotes are fresh water limestone pools and cave systems with lots of fish that are awesome for snorkelling and scuba diving. There are over 5000 in the Yucatan Pennisula alone and we managed to visit about 10. We visited two open top cenotes near Playa Del Carmen, the water was the clearest water I have ever swum in! We got so many cool underwater pictures and videos but I managed to lose the Go-Pro at Glastonbury containing the 7000 travel pictures from the first 3 months, so you will all have to imagine what it was like underwater there!

We did a day trip to Cozumel Island where we hired a moped and drove the 60km around the island, stopping off to snorkel different reefs along the way. The island had a lot of “private beaches” where some sort of restaurant or bar has been set up on the beach and you have to buy drinks and food to be allowed to swim in the water!

I sped us around the island at 15kmp/h. NEED FOR SPEED.

We only ate Mexican food for one meal in Playa. Our diet mainly consisted of Chobani yoghurt and trips to the Chedraui supermarket where we would buy a whole roast chicken and some salad and eat it dine-in (This is a normal thing.)

Tulum — Tuesday 30/5/17 — Sunday 4/6/17

Naturals.

Naomi: Tulum is still more touristic than most of Guatemala, Belize and Cuba, but it has a cooler, slower, “hippy” vibe going on and enough hipster cafes to satisfy our avo/chia/decafsoylatte withdrawal needs. Up until this point all of the hostels we had stayed in had all been pretty good, no real complaints but Hostel Che in Tulum prompted our first tripadvisor review so far. Check it out here and never stay there.

Cenote 2/5000

Kate: Before the horror of Hostel Che we stayed in a super nice hotel on the Riviera Maya for a couple of days (a Birthday gift from San and To — thanks heaps!). We sipped a cocktail or two by the pool, gorged ourselves on the hotel food, visited some more Cenotes and failed at kayaking (again). The hotel air-con stopped working one night so we requested our $10 of mini-bar charges be complimentary — we really showed them!

We went out for an amazing meal at a place called Kitchen Table in Tulum. It is in the jungle and doesn’t have electricity, it runs on wood fire and iceboxes! A recommendation from one of Naomi’s friends who happened to know the manager, which worked in our favour for getting a few free cocktails! It was the best meal of travelling and in true backpacker style we blew our whole daily budget on a plate of octopus and seared tuna.

Kate says this was her favourite meal only second to the blended beans. Hint to anyone getting her a food gift, she LOVES blended frijoles.

Bacalar — Sunday 4/6/17 — Tuesday 6/6/17

Naomi: Bacalar is a huge lake which has the nickname Lake of Seven Colours due to the variance in blue as you move across over the lake — from crystal clear blue in the shallows to black where the lake drops into a 180 metre cenote (facts provided by K Hetherington). I reckon Bacalar is definitely one of the most beautiful areas we have seen so far AND it’s home to stromatolites which are only found there, Western Australia (and maybe a few other places). Stromatolites are rocks made by cyanobacteria and are considered “living fossils” and some of the oldest living structures on earth. I spent ages snapping pics of them and boring backpackers with facts about them I’d learned from Bill Bryson’s book on Australia. We didn’t make many friends in Bacalar.

One of the hundreds of photos I took of the cyanobacteria. Email me for more, I’ve got the rocks photographed from all angles.

Kate: Bacalar is definitely one of my favourite places we have visited so far. The lake is amazing (it looks like crystal clear paradise sea water) and our hostel was on the lake front, perfect for relaxing and chilling out and providing more opportunities for failing at kayaking.

Two of the seven colours.

Merida — Tuesday 6/6/17 — Sunday 11/6/17

Kate: Our Cuba experience still very fresh in our minds, we decided to skip the 16 hour bus ride to San Cristobal (as originally planned) and stay only in the Yucatan peninsula in the south of Mexico, never more than a 5 hour bus ride between places and reduce the number of places we visited. So our next stop was Merida.

Official mode of transport

Merida is the capital and largest city in the Yucatan state with a population of about 1 million. Merida instantly felt more authentically Mexican than our previous stops. In Cancun, Playa and Tulum most Mexicans speak English but in Merida it was a much smaller number; the food, drinks and hostel were a lot cheaper and most restaurants were Mexican.

We ate the traditional Yucatan cuisine (see pictures) and went for some Botanas. Botanas are small dishes that the restaurant/bar gives you for free (until you say no more) when you order beers. Two beers each was enough food to stuff us! The place we went to for botanas was the Mexican equivalent of an Australian RSL club where there’s a tacky band playing ‘Despacito’ and Mexicans line dancing to it with huge screens broadcasting the soccer.

We went to the cinema and saw Wonder Woman in Spanish, there was enough action and lack of dialogue that we could understand what was going on. We continued our movie day and rode bikes we had hired to a cinema café “the most hipster place in Merida” where they had a free screening of Eat Pray Love with Spanish subtitles. Naomi: They then went around and asked everyone their opinion on the film in Spanish so we ran away before they got to us.

Safety first. In Mexico a hi-vis vest acts as a magical shield to protect your cranium in place of a helmet.

Kate: We also visited some more Cenotes in Merida. These Cenotes were underground cave systems, offering something different to the open top ones near Playa and Tulum. The form of transport between the Cenotes was a horse drawn rail carriage(?), the most interesting form of transport I have seen yet!

#PINTACUZAMA. We have a time lapse of this journey but I don’t know how to put it in the blog, so just visualise it for a moment please.
Cenote 3/5000. Lara Croft having a paddle in the underwater caves trying to collect medi-kits.

For 3 days in Merida there was torrential rain so we spent a lot of time buying Glasto outfits online and I guess we were actually quite lucky to not encounter the rainy season until our last week in Mexico.

Isla Holbox — Monday 12/6/17 — Thursday 15/6/17

You’re meant to stand between the letters and act at the letter ‘L’ to complete the word. We didn’t find this out until after and just thought how unfortunate it was that that particular letter had fallen down….

Naomi: Isla Holbox is an island off the North coast of the Yucatan peninsula most famous for the whale sharks that inhabit its waters for six months of the year. After the encounter with sea turtles and rock bacteria (woo!) I was all set to get my David Attenborough on and go swimming with whale sharks. The season was perfect, the weather was sunny and everybody at the hostel who had been on the trip came back smugly swapping stories about how it was the best experience of their liiiiiiiives. So we parted with about US $120 each (the tour organisers had to prise the money out of my reluctant grip whilst I made an audible sob of grief at having to part with so much cash for just one day) and we set off on a boat with 6 Mexican people. We were assured that all boats at this time of year saw whale sharks. It took 2 hours on nauseating water to get to the whale shark “area” and by this point five out of eight people on board were vomiting over the side (thankfully we’d loaded up on prescription anti-nausea meds so were okay). The boat motored around in the choppy seas in this area for about an hour before the captain said “oh we won’t see any today so we’re going to head back!’. HEAD BACK?! WHAT! BUT BUT BUT…..DAVID HASN’T SEE HER WHALE SHARKS! (was what I replied in my head).

Private pool (JK it was chocker but Kate is a sneaky instagram photographer).

Kate: As a consolation prize we jumped overboard and swam with manta rays for all of 5 seconds, I didn’t really consider this dangerous until I jumped in and a manta’s barb was right in front of my face and my first thought was “this is how Steve Irwin died”. None of the Mexican’s wanted to swim with the manta rays so essentially paid $120 (actually they were Mexican so probably paid less than half of this) to vomit and then float about in water with a life jacket on for 5 minutes as a “rest” from vomiting. Getting back to the hostel after the tour, turns out we were the only boat not to see whale sharks that day! Just our luck!

One of the other major things to do on the island is a tour to see bioluminescence at night. The tour seller told us the exact location of the bioluminescence, how to get there and how to find them so we saved our 600 pesos and went ourselves.

We went to a dog shelter and took some of their dogs for a walk to do some greater good for the community. My dog had the worst limp ever and I winced every time it tried to put it’s foot on the floor. Morale of the story: don’t ever do anything nice. Way to end on a high.

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