mexico

So finally some time to write about my Mexico trip….

The trip was great. We arrived on Cinco De Mayo, dropped our stuff in the Villa and headed for the pool, for a Margarita! They have a great pool bar where you can sit at the bar and you are in the water. It’s great for when you have too much to drink, because if you fall off your stool you end up in the water. Don’t have to worry about hitting the floor…ok, you do have to remember to hold your breath, though. 😉

Over all, the trip was very active. The first day we hung out at the pool and the beach (The pool over looked the beach. The sand was only a few steps away from the pool). Then the second day (Sunday), there was a welcome party. They had free drinks for an hour. We definitely had our share and then coasted through the rest of the day. After that we played a lot of beach volleyball. Monday we rented a van and traveled to Tulum to see the Ancient Mayan ruins. It was pretty interesting, but there wasn’t that much there. I think you have to go further inland to see the big stuff. After that we went to a small lagoon Yal-Ku in Akumel where we went snorkeling. It was cool, we saw a lot of fish and interesting stuff. Mike and I literally scared the crap out of a fish too. We were swimming around together when we saw a pretty big fish swim by. We started to follow it and bam! He left a smoke screen. Needless to say we both stopped following him. 😉

After the snorkeling we stopped at restaurant for lunch called La Buena Vida (The Good Life). Let me tell you it was the good. Right on the beach.. We sat and had lunch over looking the ocean with a sea breeze blowing. They had these cool platforms up in the palm trees where you could sit too. You have a great view of the ocean from there! When you wanted drinks they served you via a bucket on a pulley. They had hammocks as well. I could have spent the whole afternoon there eating and drinking. But we had a cheese party to go to 😉 So we eventually headed back to the resort just in time for the party at 4. The resort served various cheeses wine and of course margaritas.. After the party we surprised Dan with a birthday party. I won’t post any of the pics from that. We don’t want any incriminating evidence published online. Haha!

On Tuesday we went Zip Lining at a place called Selvatura. It was really cool! They have cables running from tree to tree in the jungle. There were 11 of them, I think it was like 3 miles worth of cable or something like that. How it works is you have a rock climbing harness on and it is connected to a pulley that goes on the cable. You wear gloves with an extra piece of leather that is attached to the palm. This is your brake. On some of them you get moving pretty fast too. After that we went on a 10 minute bike ride to Cenote. Underneath Mexico there are thousands of caverns formed from water and when one of the gets too close to the surface it collapses and forms a Cenote, or a water filled sink hole. Parts of it were 21 meters deep. There they had a zip line into the water and you could cliff dive. The cliff dive was about 30 feet high. I did both and nearly did a back flop on the dive. Ooops. 😉

Wednesday, we hung around the resort and did some activities there like more tennis, volleyball and of course swimming. Then in the evening we went into town (Playa del Carmen) where we had dinner at a great restaurant Yaxche. It was off the main drag, had excellent food and they didn’t attack us as we walked up. On the main street every restaurant had someone out front trying to rope people in to their restaurant. I don’t know how many times were heard guys call Dan “Mr. Clean”.. Plus, one guy had the guts to say, “Let me rip you off.” Something must have been lost in the translation… After dinner we went to a club called The Blue Parrot which was pretty cool. They had an awesome fire show. Although, I found out on Sunday that someone counterfeited my credit card and that is pretty much the only place I used it outside the resort. On the upside, my bank PSECU did a great job at catching it and denying the charges.

Thursday morning three of the 4 girls headed home. That meant that we were left with the 3 guys and one of the girls. Everything went down a notch then. We played some more tennis had great dinners at the restaurant, hung out at the beach, played more beach volleyball and went snorkeling right out front of the resort. It was pretty amazing too. You could step right into the water and you were in a coral reef. We saw sea urchins, conk shells, coral, tons of fish, crabs, eels, etc… You could swim out past the main part of the reef where it was a bit deeper. I was just hanging out there and was thinking it would be cool if something bigger or more exotic would swim by, it would be really cool. I started thinking… “hmmm, I wonder if there are any sharks around here?” when I turned around to start back and all of the sudden a bunch of small fish from the reef started swimming directly towards me. My heart starting going a bit faster, because I was thinking if they are swimming at me there must be something big over there! Turns out it was a fish about a meter long, but it wasn’t anything harmful. I don’t know what kind of fish it was but it had a blunt nose. It looked familiar but I don’t know exactly what it was. But, no shark! Pfeww!
So, Friday night we had another great dinner at that restaurant and relaxed and got ready to leave in the morning since we had an early flight.

It was a great week.. Maybe next year we’ll go again. I might get a week from my parents so we can take more people. Wanna go??