Its great being retired and just being able to do whatever we want all the time. I’m not sure its quite sunk in yet, it still just feels like a really long holiday. We’ve been here just over 2 months now, and after the first month where we stayed in a nice place near the beach in Chelem, we’ve travelled around quite a bit, staying places for a few days or a week at a time. We’ve explored right along the east coast – Tulum, Playa del Carmen, Cancun, and the islands: Cozumel and Isla de las Mujeres.
We felt this area was too touristy for our tastes, and actually just really depressing, seeing the extent to which tourism has damaged the local environment. The cities mentioned above have all roughly doubled in size every 5 years over the last couple of decades, and done so without adequate waste or drainage systems. One unique and special feature of the Yucatan is the Cenotes. The whole area has no rivers but instead an underground aquifer which is exposed to the surface in places. Its cleaned by all the mangroves and looks and feels pristine. But we learned that one of the issues caused by the rapid expansion of the cities is that polluted water is seeping out of landfill sites and into the aquifer and it is steadily becoming more and more polluted. On top of that, there is a massive problem with Sargassum seaweed on the east coast which means you can’t swim anymore, and the beaches are piled high with rotten, smelly seaweed (Ben’s blog will cover this in more detail).
A few places have escaped the seaweed invasion – Isla Mujeres was good for swimming and we snorkelled along the reef which was in good condition – so great to see! We saw Rays and Turtles and lots of colourful reef fish. I also did paddle boarding for the first time, which was easier than it looked/I feared. We also went to Xel-Ha, which is billed as the biggest natural aquarium in the world, though it is now owned by a corporate and run as a theme park. Saying that it was done well, and great fun.
Once we’d explored along the east coast, we came back inland, and stayed in a city called Vallodolid for a while. Vallodolid is a lovely city with beautiful colonial architecture, and close to lots of cenotes and Mayan ruins, including the famous Chichen Itza, with its large pyramid and “Olympic” ball court. It was very impressive.
We also travelled to the north coast to a place called Rio Lagartos, which is in a large nature reserve. It was nice to finally see a place that was quite unspoilt, and we took a very scenic boat trip up-river, spotting crocs & an amazing variety of birds including flamingos, herons, very cool-looking frigate birds, and some kind of bird of prey (not sure which).
Vallodolid also marked my first up close & personal experience with a Tarantula which had found its way into the house. Eeek! I am a real scardy cat when it comes to spiders, and Ben had to step in & catch him & put him outside.
The place we were staying in had only recently been carved out of the jungle & each morning we found different animals in our pool… large water-boatmen and a newt being the most noteworthy, though one afternoon I was sitting by the pool watching several pairs of dragonflies mating and laying eggs in the pool. It was a bit of a moral dilemma… do I put the pump on & destroy the eggs or leave them to hatch. Unfortunately I figured that even if we left them, the owners were bound to want to clean the pool before the next people moved in, so I was ruthless, cleaned the pool, and enjoyed swimming with a tinge of sadness that I’d just killed the next generation of dragonflies.
Its been getting hotter & hotter over the last month, getting close to 40 degrees most days. We have tended to want to find places with air conditioning, and stay indoors in the afternoon. Even swimming in the afternoons is too hot – just being in the sun for any amount of time is too much. It has limited what we feel we can reasonably do, but apparently this is the hottest time of year. The rainy season has just started and we have had some torrential downpours for a few hours at a time.
On the plus side, our Spanish is improving. We’ve been putting in more work and feeling more confident engaging with people when we’re out & about. We are planning to go to Guatemala to do an immersive Spanish course/home-stay next month which I hope will help a lot. We’ve also been getting into podcasts and TED talks, the Vikings box set, and I’ve been doing some of the free online EdX courses, and reading loads. I’ve also just started a bit of a health kick, as I realised that we have been drinking loads of beer and eating loads of snacks… fine on a short holiday but not really sustainable. Ben’s mum will be happy to read this as her biggest fear was that we’d become alcoholics.
We’ve now moved back over to the west of the peninsula – we spent a bit of time in Merida, which is also a great city and fun to go out in in the evenings, and we’re now just south of Merida, exploring more of the Mayan sites and more cenotes.
We're really looking forward to seeing my brother-in-law and his family who arrive for a visit in a few weeks, and after that we’ll head to Guatemala for the next stage in our epic journey.
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