We started our Mexican adventure on Isla Mujeres, a 30min ferry ride from Cancun. The island is only 7km long and 600m wide and you can easily drive a whole round in a golf cart (there's hardly any cars there, just golf carts and scooters) in an hour. The first day was dedicated to something pretty unusual for us - we just lazed around on the beach drinking cocktails! And we actually quite liked it :) Playa Norte is one of the best beaches in the Caribbean so we couldn't say no to this. And it was beautiful, very warm water (31C), white sand, no waves... just perfect!
We also did some dives again on Isla, amongst them an Underwater Museum, where artists have installed statues and stone structures to create an artificial reef. Different but actually quite a nice dive.
On our last day we decided to rent a golf cart to explore the island (our dives were only scheduled for the afternoon so plenty of time to drive around). And all would've been going so well until we came back to our cart after a short excursion to some Maya ruins and found it was gone and another cart parked in its place. As this other cart looked pretty much the same and the key also worked we decided to just take this one instead of ours. The real surprise happened when we tried to return the cart, as the guys there told us that ours was from a different company (in our defense, with very similar logos). We explained that somebody had actually taken our cart and asked them to just call the other company to arrange for a swap but they didn't like that idea and instead asked us to drive around to find ours. Which was no option for us as 1) there are more than 500 golf carts on the island 2) our dive boat was scheduled to leave in 15min... So we decided to park the cart close to the dive shop, go diving and hope everything would turn out fine in the end.
But when we arrived back from our dive we found that the cart was gone again! We 'lost' the second one as well! We now had no other option than to go back to the golf cart company and to hope for the best. We've paid for the cart in cash and all they had was Stefan's Australian driver's license so we already talked about just fleeing the island, lol. But funnily enough when we got to the hire company they told us that our cart had been found and returned and all was good. They did ask us where the hell we'd been for more than 4 hours but Stefan just smiled and left the scene as quickly as possible. :)
Isla Mujeres, beautiful island, perfect for lazing around on the beach and snorkelling, just don't hire a golf cart or don't ever leave it standing around somewhere...
Our next stop was the island of Cozumel, known to be THE scuba dive destination in Mexico and it truly was. We've never seen so many dive shops in one place and dive boats going out in the morning, it was crazy. If you're not a diver, Cozumel is not really worth visiting, as it was off-season as well, there really was nothing going on with most restaurants and bars being pretty deserted at night. But if you're diving you shouldn't be drinking anyway so for us it didn't matter at all. The diving itself was pretty amazing, beautiful corals, turtles, lots and lots of fish. Most dives are also drift dives which means the boat drops you off somewhere and you let yourself taken by the drift without even moving a fin, very relaxing. We also met some more lovely people on the dive boat, two of them recommending an island and dive shop in Honduras, apparently one of the best dive destinations world-wide as it's so close to the second largest barrier reef in the world. So, of course, we'll be there :) Stefan also celebrated his 100th dive in Mexico, rumours say that you have to do this dive naked, so he was sure to not tell anybody, haha.
We then took the bus to Tulum, known for its beautiful beaches, Maya ruins right next to the beach and so-called 'cenotes'.
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| Tulum - The Mayas knew a good spot to build their temples |
Cenotes are basically holes in the ground where the limestone collapsed to expose underground water or river systems. The Yucatan peninsula is full of cenotes and in former times the Mayas used them as freshwater source but also for sacred purposed as for them cenotes were the entrance to the underworld. We decided to dive two cenotes, the Pit and the Temple of Doom - the names sound a bit scary and I have to say it actually also was a bit. The Pit was pretty much a huge water hole in the middle of the jungle, 120m deep with liquified hydrogen sulfied (looks like fog) at about 30-35m. It was truly out of this world. Here's some photos I stole from Google, so you can get a bit of an idea what it looked/felt like.
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| Entrance to 'The Temple of Doom' |
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| The Pit |
The second dive started off with a 3m jump in full dive gear into this little opening in the ground, a little challenge in itself. We then ventured into tunnel systems inside the cenote. Our guide beforehand always assured us that the entrance would always be in sight, but it wasn't or at least I didn't see it at some stages anymore. But you forget about all this as the inside was truly spectacular as you dive through stalactites and stalagmites. The really cool thing in cenotes is also the so-called Halocline, where the colder freshwater on top of the cenote mixes with the warmer saltwater below. For about half a meter your vision gets really blurry and you can't see anything anymore. The whole experience was just completely out of this world - amazing! We do have to say though we prefer the ocean, so no worries, we won't get into cave diving :)
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| The "After-Ruins" party in Tulum ;-) |
The rest of our time on the Yucatan was spent exploring the countryside and its many many Maya temples. First stop was Tulum, which was just so very pretty sitting right on the beach. Then we took the bus to Coba which is such a big area it's best to hire a pushbike and pedal through the jungle - a cool experience in itself. The Coba ruins are also famous for the only Maya pyramid that is open for climbing, it was really quite an exhausting effort to get up there and getting down was nearly worse. Just see for yourself how much fun it was:
Next stop Valladolid, a beautiful little town, its architecture influenced by Mayas, Mexicans and the Spanish. While walking around in the town we stumbled into a chocolate factory (in fact the Mayas were the first ones to produce chocolate) and a tequila distillery.
Then it was time for the most famous Maya ruins of Mexico in Chichen Itza. This site was truly the most spectacular and interesting. Here's the marvelously restored pyramid which everyone might recognise.
However, what almost fascinated us a bit more was the incredible acoustics the Mayans built into the site. By clapping your hands three times in a certain spot in front of the temple the echo from the temples surrounding was sounding like somebody was crying the Mayan god's name "Kukulkan" - truly amazing. It's really hard to describe, there might be something on Youtube about it?! Stefan was also greatly fascinated by the "Basketball court". The Mayans had a game of great significance not only as a sport but also for ceremonial or ritual reasons. In the "Grand Final" or "Superbowl" the losing team would also lose their head(s), pretty tough isn't it.
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| The huge ballcourt in Chichen Itza with our great guide |
During our tour we also met an American who was visiting Chichen with her own driver, she then offered us a drive on to Merida which we gladly accepted, saved a few hours on the bus. On the way we stopped at Izamal, an old colonial town where all inner-city buildings are painted in colonial yellow. In Izamal we also climbed the Kinich Kak Mo Pyramid which is the biggest structure in the Yucatan province and the third biggest in the whole of Mexico.
In Merida, the capital city of Yucatan, we stayed for 3 nights, visiting the Maya museum which was a bit disappointing actually. As a foreigner you pay 3 times the entry fee and then pretty much half of all signs and descriptions as well as all the short documentaries are in Spanish only... So three times the price for less than half of the museum?! We do speak a little bit of Spanish but not enough to understand museum talk.
We then decided to hire a car for our last few days; there were some sites we wanted to see which were not on the bus route or just a bit hard to get to. First stop Celestun, known for its huge Flamingo population. Unfortunately it was off-season for the Flamingos as well; where you can usually see tens of thousands (that's at least what the guide told us) we saw 32 - I counted. It was still pretty nice to see Flamingos in the wild and we had a nice boat ride, so all good. Celestun also has fabulous seafood bars on the beach, so you can guess where we spent the rest of the afternoon.
Still not having enough of Mayan rock piles we visited Uxmal, another pretty impressive site. It's really amazing how much the ancient Maya already knew and with what precision they built their cities. I personally absolutely loved all the astronomy aspects.
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| Marlene getting into the game at the Uxmal court (although the Mayans
were only allowed to use their joints - hips, elbows, etc.) |
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| Sometimes it feels like you are rediscovering an ancient culture, awesome. |
Our last stop before heading back to Cancun was Progreso, a little holiday village on the Gulf of Mexico. More beach, more cocktails, more seafood - nothing more to ask for really. I found a new favourite drink in Mexico - Micheladas! It's sounds really strange but it's the most delicious mixture of beer, clamato juice (tomato & clam juice), lime and spices. Yum!!!
