The Yucatan

For our holiday this year we decided that we’d had enough of multi-leg flights and arriving like zombies and as such picked somewhere that was one flight away.

We chose Mexico, or more specifically the Yucatan peninsula flying into Cancun which is only (!) a 10 hour (ish) flight from London.

We flew with Thomas Cook airlines which I suppose is on the budget end of carriers as it’s essentially a charter flight, and from what I overheard it seems a fair percentage of the people on the plane were in the ‘Let’s go to Cancun and not leave the resort hotel’ package types, which is pretty much what we wanted to avoid.

Anyway, it’s a plane, it got us there and back even if sod all was included food/comfort wise and a Twix costs £2 while in the air – can’t grumble on that one!

The Plan

The plan was to do a sort of self researched tour of a few places, skipping as much of the touristy bits as possible.  So we picked our places and booked hotels, but looking into travel between these places seemed problematic, transfers were either non-existent or really expensive, with the remaining options being using local buses and the like which seemed not very holiday like at all…

So I figured it would be best to hire a cheap car and drive ourselves, which was a brilliant plan (in the end) but was rather cocked up by yours truly, more on this in a bit.

Arrival

We arrive at the airport (2 hours late dues to delays) a little tired and proceed to go and pick up a Hertz pre-booked car, at which point I realise that I haven’t read the small print – the price quoted includes no insurance or other waivers and a credit card is required for a large retained deposit.  Cue confusion and annoyance.

Anyway, it was eventually all sorted out with a different and helpful car rental place around the corner which although it looked a bit shady was actually pretty sound (cheers Dollar!) and we were on our way, 3 hours late, in a thunderstorm, no sat-nav, only a vague map to guide us and facing a 3 hour drive to get the last ferry (yes, we had to get a ferry) in a new car and on rather shonky Mexican roads….

After a bit of fun navigation, slightly exceeding some speed limits and far too many speed-bumps (Mexico has roughly 12 trillion of them, generally without warning) we made it to the ferry town of Chiquila with 15 minutes to spare.  Parked the car, nearly killed the local bloke carrying our bags and hopped on the ferry across to Isla Holbox with a thunderstorm on our heels.  It was a bit surreal to say the least..

Almost as surreal as having a golf cart as a taxi at the other end to get to our hotel, checking into a room with a name of Mapache (Racoon), at which point I went to sleep.

Isla Holbox

We woke up, wandered out to breakfast and were met with this:

Which was a surprise because we didn’t realise we were on the beach, having arrived in the dark!

Isla Holbox is a long strip of sand with a small town at one end and beaches on both sides, with the better ones on the north where we were.  The hotel we were staying in was called Casa Las Tortugas and was lovely

The food was pretty awesome as well, especially as Katy is a big fan of her seafood

Not to mention some nice sunsets

and good views from the restaurant/bar

Holbox (pronounced Hol-Bosh) is well known as a laid back retreat and a bit hippy-ish, with lots of Yoga classes available, which funnily enough I didn’t fancy.  It’s also very close to a place for swimming with whale sharks, something I’ve always fancied, so Katy and I booked in the trip and hopped on a boat the following morning with a few other people, mostly mexicans.

It was an hour or two to get out to the feeding spot where the Gulf of Mexico mixes with the Caribbean causing an ideal plankton feeding zone – it was a bit lumpy on the way out as well which didn’t help some of the people on the boat.

Here’s a couple of good pictures, but they don’t really give you a sense of scale

There were about 20 or so sharks trundling around and we hopped in and out a few times, thankfully we’d on a whim bought an underwater camera at Gatwick, otherwise I don’t think we’d have any pictures.  We also had a close call with a Manta Ray which was awesome.

On the way back we saw some dolphins having a bit of an orgy (really) and then did some snorkelling on a small reef where we saw some nice fish and even a turtle, which I chased around for a bit trying to get some good pictures.

On the way back we stopped at this idyllic inlet beach place and had a quick lunch of Ceviches and took some pictures, here’s a picture of Katy looking very nice  in a bikini.

We then headed back to our hotel and jumped in the pool.

We spent the next day just chilling out, sunbathing on the beach and generally mucking about in the sea at every opportunity, we also took a stroll or two through the town and had some beers and the like, all very laid back, which was nice, as we would be heading off to our next stay the following day.

Driving in Mexico

I’ll take a slight diversion here to explain something about roads in Mexico.  Generally they are at least sealed tarmac, or at least the main ones are, however there aren’t very many of them.  Here’s a map of the Yucatan with every main road illustrated.

As you can see, they are pretty sparse, a thin strip of tarmac with no lights in a big straight line through the jungle with very few road signs.  Also you’ll be hammering along and all of a sudden you’ll hit a town with minimal warning and you have to drop to 15km/h due to the vicious speed bumps (topes in mexico), then back to full speed as you exit the town.  Apart from the 180D which is a toll road all the roads weave around the countryside, shared with big trucks and full of potholes – it makes driving interesting.

If you are driving through the Yucatan and you look up an estimated time on Google Maps then take the number and double it, and you’ll have roughly how long it will ACTUALLY take.

Having said that, once you get used to it it’s quite easy to get around, you just have to accept that sometimes you won’t see a sign for 100km and then it’ll show a sign for the place YOU JUST CAME FROM.  Perservere!

Merida

We checked out, got the ferry back to the mainland and found the car, surprisingly well parked from the mad rush to get to the ferry several days before, loaded up and were on our way.

The drive to Merida took about 5 and half hours, when it should have really taken 3 and a half, this was possibly due to a lack of confidence on my part in navigation, mainly to do with the 3 massive thunderstorms we drove through reducing our speed to about 10mph as we couldn’t see, and slightly because the roads where so rubbish – still it was fun!

Anyway, Merida is the main city in the Yucatan peninsula, built by the Conquistadors on the ruins of the Mayan city of T’Ho once they conquered it and enslaved the locals.  These days it’s a biggish city with some very nice old colonial architecture, a thriving population and a really weird grid based road system.

The place we stayed was really cool, old style crumbling colonial architecture with which looks tiny from the front, but goes waaay back, very pretty really.

We spent the day wandering around the town, looking at all the architecture and trinkets you can buy and also drinking a lot of nice coffee, partially because it’s the thing to do, and partially because the coffee places had really good air conditioning and I was hot!

Uxmal and Ruta Puuc

About an hours drive way from Merida to the south east is a set of Mayan ruins known as Ruta Puuc, the largest of which is called Uxmal (Oooshmal), so we dug out the map and drove down there, thankfully on some decent roads.

Uxmal itself was awesome, and empty, apart from us there was only 4 crazy russians running around on a site of a couple of sq. km so you can do the weird clap/squeak thing with the pyramids – basically stand about 50m out from the bottom of a big stepped pyramid lined up with the stairs and clap, the acoustics bounce it back as a sort of squeaky noise – and we were able to climb up one of the other big pyramids to get a good view.

Keeping on going down the same road you will find 3 other ruins of smaller sizes, all with great detail, and all almost completely empty.

After this we drove back to Merida, getting stopped at a random police roadblock on the way, being british you are not used to seeing cops with guns all over the place, I think they thought we were suspicious because we may have been american!

Chichen Itza

From Merida, we kind of knew where Chichen Itza was as we’d pretty much passed it on the way to Merida, but this time we knew where to go for the toll road, which meant that a trip that took us an hour and a half coming in took us 40 mins going back – if only the toll road was sign posted we would have taken it both ways!

Chichen Itza is rather touristy, and the hotel we were in was full of Americans and Chinese, but at least it was right next to the entrance to the ruins – also the rooms were huge, with a jacuzzi, alas non functioning….

We chilled out for the day, had some food and decided to head into the ruins, to be met quickly with loads and loads of stalls selling a wide range of various trinkets, which was a bit disappointing to be honest – I understand that the locals want to make some money out of tourism, but it really was a bit over the top and kind of took away from the experience.  The same could be said for the ruins – although they were impressive, things are less impressive when you are being jostled by a tour group of brash and very loud texans and it’s impossible to get a photo without 30 people doing the ‘lets lean on the pyramid’ style photo.

I’d say it’s worth doing, but only as a kind of tick it off the list style thing, much like the pyramids and sphinx in Egypt, just to say you’ve done it.

I’d honestly say that the best ruins to go and see are the off the beaten track ones, Uxmal in particular was a lot better, only a few people around and you can actually climb up the pyramids and get a sense of the scale and awesomeness of being on a massive stone pyramid stuck in the middle of dense jungle.

Laguna Bacalar

So, we left Chichen Itza, preparing ourselves for a nice long drive south towards the border with Belize, the roads were as usual a bit ropey, but we passed through some pretty little towns as we headed south.  Navigation this time was a little easier as we were heading towards the major town of Chetumal, even if we weren’t actually going all the way there.  There was an interesting point where we had been feeling positive having found a dual carriageway that looked practically new. However, it suddenly stopped  for no apparent reason (we later learned it was actually still being finished..) and no sign posts on where to go.

So, in the middle of nowhere and with no-one else around, I took the only road available in the hope that it would eventually take us south again and after some guesswork in the town of Felipe Carrillo Puerto we were back on the main road which runs between the Belize border and up to Cancun, this meant it was a bit faster and better maintained than the smaller roads.

We found the place we were booked into by seeing a small badly positioned sign facing the wrong way.

Hotel Rancho Encantado is actually really nice, our room was HUGE, as was the bed and it couldn’t have been better positioned, surrounded by forest and on the edge of the lagoon itself.

Laguna Bacalar is basically a huge fresh water lake fed by underwater streams via various cenotes, it’s 54km long and only 2km wide at it’s widest point and runs pretty much north/south.  Because of it’s limestone base and freshwater feed there are only a few types of fish in there and the water is an amazing azure blue, it’s perfect for swimming.

While we were there we relaxed, ate too much, played in the hammocks on the pier above and generally chilled out.  We also took a boat tour around the lake where we met some very friendly mexican girls (they gave me beer at 9am) did a bunch of snorkelling around various cenotes (katy and I were in first as usual) and went to this place with sulphurous sand that is apparently good if you spread it on your skin, I just swam around… 😉

It was very relaxing, even the bit where we couldn’t agree who was the captain of the pedalo.

Tulum

Tulum is about halfway between Bacalar and Cancun on what is probably the most travelled and best road in the Yucatan, so it only took us a couple of hours to drive north to Tulum in the morning, we checked into the lovely Posada Luna Del Sur, a cool place up in Tulum town.  Tulum is split into two pretty much, the town bit which is up on the main road and the beach bit which is, unsuprisingly, on the beach and has lots of resorts and so on.

We had some awesome local chicken in a really dodgy looking place with plastic chairs, full of locals, always a good sign, then had a wander around town, driving down to the beach road to get our bearings.

The next day we went to the Tulum ruins, the only mayan constructions situated at the coast and spend the morning there, it was lovely, with some great views and a lovely little beach.

You could even go down to the beach for a swim, but unfortunately they don’t tell you this in advance, so it’s pot luck whether you are properly dressed!

We spent the next day just chilling out on the various hotel beaches, even if you are not a guest you can still go and sit down if you buy a drink or two, I think they are happy for the business.  We actually got quite lucky one day which was fun, we had massive storms overnight and thought that sod it, we’ll go down to the beach anyway, just as we got there the weather cleared, we had a lovely morning and then just as we were about to go it started chucking it down, well chuffed!

For our final day in Tulum we arranged to do a Cenote tour, which actually turned out to be amazing.  We were picked up early in the morning in this old 4×4 by a lovely couple who you could really tell cared about the environment and weren’t just into it for the money which to me made a big difference.  It was pissing it down with rain but we didn’t let that phase us – we drove off to Cenote Dos Ojos, being the first to arrive as we were pretty early  Dos Ojos means ‘Two Eyes’ because there is an attached cave system with two openings that looks like eyes, it’s also one of the longest cave systems in mexico.

So we arrived in torrential rain, wandered through the forest to a slippy wooden ladder, carrying snorkel gear, and climbed down into the caves, which was cool in of itself.  Down at the bottom was a platform where you could enter the fresh water system in a massive cave, so we hopped in and headed deeper.

None of the pictures we took can do it justice because of the low light levels, but it was brilliant as we swam through these beautifully clear water caves with stalagmites and stalagtites all over the place, bats fluttering over our heads – we came to a few spots which were open to the sky with tree roots hanging down, it was kind of spooky, but ace.

From there we drove to an empty beach protected by armed guards because it’s a turtle nesting site, with all the egg caches marked out so they don’t get damaged.  Our guides knew the people there though so we could get in, we were the only people there.  It was a beach on a smallish bay about 2km across with a reef about 1km out.  Bear in mind that at this point it was still chucking it down and quite windy, but we decided to go for it anyway and swim out to the reef, here’s a picture of the sea we took while snorkelling out

Once we got out there the reef was amazing, and the current and waves rocking us back and forth was something I remembered enjoying when I’d been scuba diving many years before, we spent about an hour out there until the current brought us back into the beach.

From here we went to what actually looked like a mucky pond just along the cost, but actually was a cenote fed river with some amazing wildlife in, in rare occasions you may even see a manatee, but we weren’t that lucky.

All in all an amazing day.

Cancun and home

So it was time to come home, we checked out, drove up towards Cancun, pleased that we had decided to stay off the beaten track based on just how built up all the areas closer to Cancun were, dropped our trusty car off and headed for the airport.

All in all, the Yucatan was an amazing holiday, and I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a mixture of culture, history, beaches and wildlife – just keep away from Cancun!