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| The Mendoza Family |
Saturday, I got up fairly early and went to the beach. I had hoped to get there before the wind came
up, but it got windy early that day. It
wasn’t cold, so I did lie on the beach for a couple of hours, enjoying the sun,
and then went back to Rossy’s for a shower.
I packed up my belongings, said goodbye, and trundled my suitcase a
block and a half to Avenida Benito Juarez, where I found a taxi
immediately. My taxi driver was a
friendly guy and he gave me a local’s perspective on nearby attractions on the
way to the hotel.
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| Lobby of Viva Maya |
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| Our Room |
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| Main Pool at Viva Maya |
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| Sun Shelters |
Erika’s plane didn’t get in until 3:40, but I wanted to be sure to get to the hotel before she arrived. Hoping to miss the temptation of the lunch buffet, I arrived at 2:45. They met me with a glass of champagne. The desk clerk gave me a wrist band, told me he would finish checking me in later, and hurried me off to the dining room because lunch was over at 3:00. I managed to select a healthy lunch of fruit and salad, which was probably a good thing, since my room wasn’t ready and I downed a couple of pinacoladas while waiting in the bar. I finally got a room around 4:00, although I had to wait a while longer for my very sweet chamber maid to finish making up the room. I went back to the lobby to wait for Erika and spent a frustrating hour and a half trying unsuccessfully to connect to the internet. The wi-fi seems to be overwhelmed by the number of guests trying to use it. While I can connect to the network, I never seem to be able to get any internet on either my computer or phone. Data roaming doesn’t function, either, so I am incommunicado. Erika arrived just in time for dinner. We had dinner, wandered around the complex, drank a couple of fruit drinks and then went to bed early because Erika had had a long day of travelling.
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| The Main Bar |
Sunday we had breakfast and then went to the beach for a little while. We swam in the ocean and then tried to lie in the sun, but kept getting thrown off our chaise lounges by people who claimed we had taken their places. Finally, we gave up and went back to the hotel. It was our intention to go downtown and check out the prices of excursions outside the hotel, so we ate an early lunch at the snack bar and then rode bicycles into town. We explored a bit and talked to a couple of dive shops about excursions to Cozumel. Unfortunately, the travel agency owned by Rossy’s friend was closed on Sunday. We finally booked a snorkel trip in Cozumel for Monday.
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| The Adult Pool |
After riding our bikes back to the hotel, we ate lunch again (fortunately, I was eating mainly fruit) and then lounged about, trying different fruit drinks until it was time for dinner. We had dinner reservations at Hacienda Don Diego, the Mexican restaurant at the hotel. We had tacos al pastor for an appetizer and I had a rolled, stuffed skirt steak with flambeed bananas for dessert. We were served strawberry margaritas with dinner. Then, just as we were finishing dessert, the manager came over to our table and slammed down a couple of shots glasses. Next, he produced three bottles of tequila. His hobby was producing flavored tequila. We sampled mango, coconut and pineapple tequila. I liked the mango best, so he then poured me a full shot of that. Usually I suffer when I drink tequila shots, but these went down very smoothly. Neither of us was in the mood to do much after all that alcohol, so we skipped the evening show and went to bed early again.
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| The Cozumel Ferry |
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| The No Problem, Our Dive Boat |
Monday, we walked into Playa del Carmen and took the 10:00 ferry to Cozumel where we had booked a snorkeling excursion. We booked the trip through Scuba Playa and went with a company called Blue Angel. The dive boat met us at the main ferry dock and then took us to their dive shop where we stopped for a few minutes while the divers got outfitted. They have a small hotel, dive shop and restaurant. It was a pleasant spot. Downtown Cozumel looks like any other place where cruise ships dock. There were the usual expensive tourist traps and jewelry stores. Cozumel is very flat and the coast is mainly rocky. It is, however, surrounded by reefs and the continental shelf drops off sharply there, making it a famous dive spot.
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| Erika on the Way to the First Reef |
The first place we visited was a reef that was fairly deep down. We were the only snorkelers and we went with our own guide named Bernie who didn’t speak much English, but was good at finding wildlife to show us. It was overcast, which made it hard to see a lot, but we did see quite a bit of large sea life including a nurse shark, three eagle rays and several large sea turtles. The bubbles rising from the divers below us made a fantastic show against the cobalt blue water. I think that was my favorite part of that first spot.
The second reef we visited was much shallower and the sun came out at that point, which was a good thing because we were pretty cold after that first swim. Bernie put a piece of pineapple in his pocket and we were mobbed with tropical fish of many types that followed him everywhere, even when he dove down deep. We could see much better in the sunshine and I enjoyed swimming with all the fish. I felt like I was swimming in
Finding Nemo. At times, fish would swim right up to my mask and look me in the face.
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| Blue Angel Dive Shop Complex |
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| Playa del Carmen at Sunset |
After our second snorkeling session, we returned to the dive shop complex and had a nice lunch of delicious grouper fillets. Then we took the 5:00 ferry back to Playa del Carmen and walked back to the hotel in plenty of time to make it to our 7:30 dinner reservation at the Miramare. The Miramare is a Mediterranean restaurant on the second floor near the beach. The whole thing is covered by an extremely lofty palapa. I had a cold avocado soup, followed by cheese ravioli with sage and chicken breast stuffed with cheese and spinach. Dessert was strawberries in Grand Marnier over vanilla ice cream.
We went to see the show after dinner. The theme of the show was a “Mr. Maya”
contest. The four contestants were a 65
year old Italian named Giuseppe, a Canadian in his early 20’s, another very
attractive Canadian in his early 40’s and an 18 year old Canadian who often
looked mortified, but was a good sport and always managed to make a good
effort. There were various contests,
including one where the men worked with a female partner to pop balloons by
smashing them between various body parts.
Giuseppe won by a mile. His wife
was a trooper during the balloons smashing contest, especially since they were
slipped one filled with whipped cream.
Viva Maya is located in the hotel zone within a gated community called Playacar. Besides hotels, this community also contains many very nice private homes and a couple of shopping areas. After lunch, we walked over to a bird sanctuary, but declined to pay the still entrance fee. We could peek through the trees and see that there were flamingos, spoonbills and scarlet macaws in there.
I am in the process of working with an architect to design a major remodel of my home which will include a complete reworking of the exterior, so I spent some time photographing the houses I liked to share with my architect. I found more houses I liked in that one afternoon than I had in years of looking at houses in California. I guess it's safe to say that I like modern Mexican architecture. Fortunately, my architect does, also.
I felt a little better in the morning and the dreaded Montezuma's revenge had not materialized, so we got up early and went to swim in some more cenotes and snorkel with turtles in Akumal Bay. I got to practice my Italian, as our guide, Alessandra, and the rest of our party were Italian. Our first stop was a park called Hidden Worlds. This park includes access to Tak Be Ha, the third largest cave system in the world and the largest wet cave system. At Hidden Worlds we were provided with wetsuits, masks and snorkels. We climbed down through a small opening to find ourselves in an underground cavern. 
While Rio Secreto had amazing formations above the water, the wonders at Hidden Worlds were mostly below the water. They had done an admirable job of lighting the underwater features and it was cool to swim past and get an idea of just how deeply those caverns reach into the earth. There were numerous little fishes that came to nibble on our skin when we paused for more than a moment. Roots from the trees above grow down through the rock until they reach the water level and then they stop. We snorkeled from chamber to chamber through narrow passages. Once again, I bemoaned the lack of an underwater camera.
For some reason, I was expecting Akumal to be an estuary with a lot of mangroves, so I was unprepared for the gorgeous beach and beautiful blue water that greeted us when we arrived. Akumal is a public beach and there is fabulous snorkeling right off the beach. Green sea turtles come there to graze on the sea grass that grows on the bottom of the bay. The turtles are numerous and fairly unfazed by the humans splashing about and gawking at them. Turtles are not the only life in Akumal, either. We saw a couple of different types of squid and lots of fish. There is a coral reef very close to both the shore and the surface, so the visibility was good and we saw many types of fish. The water was very warm and shallow and we were pretty comfortable snorkeling without wetsuits, even though we were pre-chilled from our swim through the caves.
Our guide would signal when she found a turtle and then we would form a wide circle around the turtle so that we could all see her without kicking each other in the face. One large turtle decided she wanted to surface and swam straight at me. I backed up as fast as I could, but she passed within inches of my face I've swum with a lot of turtles, but have never been nearly that close before. I could have easily touched her.
