February 6

On the days that I don’t formally write a blog entry, it’s because I don’t feel like there’s anything worth recording. While we’re still at the resort, which means that we spent the day at the pool, or walking along the beach, of course in the sun. When the sun disappears behind clouds, since the internet hardly ever works, I write these blog entries. They’ll be posted in about a week, because that’s when I’ll have internet access again. I’m sorry I can’t update even this every day. But hey, give me a break. I mean, I AM on vacation (at the moment anyway) after all!

After thinking about options, we decided that we didn’t want to spend all day inside or on the beach again today, and so we reserved places on a tour that goes to Xel-Ha and Tulum, two places with Mayan ruins and other activities. When we left in the morning, we were planning on spending four hours at Xel-Ha with the bus, and then going to Tulum for about an hour and a half for the rest of the day. The guide told us that if we felt like we wanted to spend more time at Xel-Ha though, we could just stay on instead of going to Tulum. It’s supposed to be beautiful, and a fun thing to do for a maximum of about 45 minutes, but we were planning on going anyway.

When we got to Xel-Ha, after a briefing on the bus of all the incredible activities we were going to be able to do, we were all very excited. The tour cost only $90/person, and included the hour bus transportation both ways, snorkeling gear for the whole day, inner tubes to raft down the river, kayaks, unlimited food and drink, lockers and towels. The only things the resort offered that weren’t included where Snuba, snorkeling lessons (uh, seriously??) underwater trek (you walked along the bottom of the ocean with sort of an outer space suit on your head. A glass bubble so that you could still breathe…for about an hour) and a dolphin encounter. Of course the things that everybody is going to want to do, but still, overall it was an amazing deal.

We’ve already done the dolphin encounter, and since we got free snorkel gear we decided that snubaing and the sea trek weren’t really worth it. Unfortunately, the water proof cameras were $25 and we weren’t about to pay that, and so most of the day is undocumented, because it was on or near water and we didn’t want to bring digital cameras there. We started the day on tubes down the river, which lasted about an hour. They had a “cliff of courage” you could jump off, which I thought was a little bit lame, because it was only 12 feet above the water. We have a diving board that high. We messed around there for a little while, and then kept floating. They had two ropes across the river you could walk on if you wanted, but there was a really long line and we decided it probably wasn’t worth it.

After tubing we had a free brunch and then went snorkeling for a while. Mom went to kayak, but they were sit-on-tops instead of sea kayaks and she decided she didn’t want to do that. After we finished we were short on time because we had to make it back to the bus at a certain time, or it would assume we wanted to stay and leave without us (and come pick us up in another two hours). We rushed around getting dressed and trying to find the place to return the snorkel gear and managed to go in three separate directions and get completely lost. Long story short, we didn’t make the bus, and so we wandered around the resort for a while.

It was on the coast, but most of the park was in the jungle, and it was really pretty to walk around the whole place. We visited the sacred ponds of the Mayans, and walked out to the beach and had some piña coladas and strawberry daiquiris (virgin of course) while we killed time. It’s not the end of the world that we missed Tulum, because we probably would have been interested for about half an hour, and then wandered around the beach there instead of in Xel-Ha. Though I was disappointed, I realized it probably wouldn’t be a whole lot different from what we saw at Cobá, so I accepted it.

The downside of the whole thing was that the 45 minute drive at the beginning of the day, turned into 2 hours in rush hour traffic at the end of the day when everybody was exhausted from the sun and a long day. We crashed almost right away, and plan to spend our last day here (tomorrow) at the pool and on the beach. Then we’ll be travelling for 14 hours on Sunday.