Yucatan Trip: Flamingos and Mangroves

This is part 3 of my chronicle of a recent trip to the Yucatan Peninsula.  I'm writing it out partly to share the story with friends and family, and also for anyone researching their own potential trip to that area.

We are a family of three, with one 9-year-old girl.  Ours is a teacher-supported family, so we can't afford lavish vacations, but travel is a priority for us, and we sacrifice other things in order to make room for it.  So, our trips are designed to be affordable, but we also try to keep it relatively comfortable and fun for our daughter.  Gone are the days when we strapped on some giant backpacks and headed to a post-communist country during the off-season with no plan, staying with someone we met in the train station.  But we are also not satisfied with an all-inclusive resort hotel on the beach.  We want to learn about the history and culture of a place, to explore and engage with it.  So, our trip is different from most that I have read about online.

For this trip, we rented a car and had our budget hotels scheduled between Merida, Tulum and Cancun.  After enjoying Uxmal, we headed to Celestun on the West coast of the peninsula.  By this time, we had figured out that the pages of google maps directions I printed out before leaving were completely useless.  I had a Tomtom Via that usually can't find a signal, but on this day, it directed us to our destination very reliably, taking us on small two-lane roads through a number of little towns.  This gave us a chance to see how people live outside of the larger city.  If we had it to do over, we might have spent a day in Maxcanu, which looked really sweet.  Most of these villages were made up of thatched roof huts and crumbling adobe houses, but in the center would be the remains of a large Colonial building that was obviously once a beautiful symbol of affluence.  We saw people on their bicycle-carts; the main form of transportation.  Often, these are laden with wood or foliage just gathered in the jungle, and the driver would have a machete.

A house in one of the villages.

Since we in the U.S. are in constant conversation about our economy, this trip was a reminder that U.S. citizens have a very different idea of poverty than most countries in the world.  Also, our lifestyle is completely dependent on consumerism, and we don't know how to go out and gather resources from our surroundings.  These peoples' lives depend on their ability to hunt, gather, and to live in clusters where resources are shared.  The villages are full of cisterns that collect water, and we saw some that were raised up with spigots underneath.  Once we saw someone showering under one of the spigots.  We saw freshly butchered chickens hanging in windows, a dead cow in the bed of a truck probably on its way to be turned into food, and a lot of people offering their fruit or tamales in their front yards.  Luckily, fruit trees grow everywhere there, so it is a major part of the diet.  Juices of all kinds are very popular and are served in restaurants.  They can contain prickly pear and aloe, along with more common ingredients.

So, we arrived in Celestun and found the nature reserve where we hired a boat to take us out to see the flamingo nesting grounds.  The cost for a boat was more than double the amount stated in the guide book, and it was nearly $125 for 90 minutes.  An Austrian couple were standing in front of us, experiencing the same sticker shock, so we asked if they would like to share a boat.  We pooled our money, which still cost us $75, but I think it was worth it.  The boat took us on a long ride out to the flamingos, which was an indescribable experience.  As we approached the nesting grounds, there was a thick line of pink across the huge body of water.  As we got closer, we could see the individual birds.  The driver cut the engine and we just floated around as close as we could safely get to these amazing creatures.

After that, we were taken on a beautiful tour of the mangrove forests, through little lagoons and waterways, and finally docking at a spot where we could get out and explore.  Some people from other groups were swimming in the crystal clear water and we got close-up views of all kinds of loons and cranes.

It was a very satisfying tour, and when it was over, we went into town to play in the ocean.  I'm not sure we found the normal area for swimming.  As we looked for parking, a man approached the car and spoke to us in very quick Spanish, helping us to find a suitable parking spot.  We gave him some change, and he led us to the beach where he handed us over to another guy.  This guy asked us for more money.  We asked, "Por que?!"  He said, "For a boat!"  We managed to explain that we had no interest in a boat, but only wanted to come to the beach, so he walked away.  I think we had found a place where boats come and go, but we spent a little time enjoying the beach and water anyway before heading to Merida.

This was a second trip to Merida, and I wrote about the city in my first segment, so I won't go into it.  But we stayed at a small family-owned hotel called Hotel Casa Nobel.  It is in a more affluent area of the city, just a few blocks from Paseo de Montejo, which is a whole street of beautiful buildings and the Museum of Anthropology.  As usual, the exterior of the hotel blends in with everything else, but the interior is a little oasis.  The room was clean and comfortable, the pool is small but just right for us, and the courtyard is nicely landscaped and a very peaceful place to relax.

Next time, I'll write about our trip to Izamal and Valladolid, and introduce you to cenotes.

Yucatan trip!

I'm going to begin writing about our recent trip to the Yucatan Peninsula in February 2013.  I'll write about it in multiple entries, partly because my spare time is limited, and because we fit so much into our trip that I want to cover, it would be overwhelming to put it all into one document.

We flew overnight from Seattle to Denver to Cancun, arriving at 5:25am.  We had scheduled a rental car and they were supposed to pick us up at 7am.  When we arrived at the airport, the sun was just beginning to rise, and the taxi drivers told us that our rental company didn't actually open until 8am.  Luckily, a few other people had made the same arrangement with the same company, so we all waited together until the shuttle came.  While we waited, we soaked in the warm air, watched the sun come up, heard increasing and unfamiliar birdsong, and watched an animal that looked something like a capybara, but smaller, running around in the bushes.

We had paid for the rental car online, or so we thought.  It had been remarkably cheap, which was a deciding factor in choosing to rent a car rather than use public transportation.  However, the fee we had paid did not include insurance, as it turned out, which is vital.  (Do not rely on your car insurance or that provided by your credit card!)  But, the insurance cost was more than triple the cost of renting the car, and the total we paid came out closer to $600.  This was a shock, but by the time we got this news, we were in Mexico, at a rental car counter, and utterly exhausted after traveling for over 12 hours overnight.  Also, they gave us an SUV instead of a compact, which added significant gas cost on top of the rental.

Despite all of that initial disappointment and sticker shock, once we were on the road, it was smooth sailing and we were grateful for a vehicle that could contain our luggage and allow Anouk to sleep comfortably during the 3 hour drive to Merida.  Had we taken a bus, the trip would have taken much longer, and we would not have had the opportunity to see all that we did over the next 2 weeks.

*Note: We paid about $40 in tolls.  It would have been less if we'd had pesos, and we could have taken a smaller road without a toll.

When we arrived in Merida, around noon, it was not exactly what we expected.  Coming from the relative affluence of the U.S., our expectations of the capital of the State of Yucatan were very different from the actuality.  Buildings are run-down, half built, dirty, and with walls or rooftops that sometimes look like they were blown off in a tornado and just left that way for years.  Streets are crowded with people, cars and motorcycles shifting lanes and honking unpredictably, and all of the architecture and streets are very old.  The directions I printed from google maps proved useless.  Streets were numbered, but we couldn't make sense of it because we would see 14th and expect the next street to be 15th, but there would be no 15th, yet we would cross 63rd and think that would lead us to 72nd, which didn't work out either.  Later, we learned that all even numbers go one direction and all odds go the other.  When you know this, it makes getting around supremely easy, but that first day, we were sleep deprived and very lost.  We finally just followed traffic to the City Center and found our hotel almost by accident.  The exterior matched the rest of the city, but when we stepped inside, we were pleasantly surprised to find beautiful courtyards, a pool, and and a nice, clean room.

It was lunchtime, we were hungry, and we didn't want to fall asleep early in the day.  So, we headed out onto the streets to find food.  We ate at a chain restaurant called Los Trompos, which was very satisfying.  I was surprised how hard it was to make sense of the menu items, despite plenty of experience ordering and eating Mexican food and Mike's half-Mexican background.  I know the names of meats and veggies, but had to guess at the way the food would be cooked.  I don't think I ever ordered something I really didn't like, though.

After our late lunch, we hired a man with a very emaciated horse and carriage to take us around the city.  We were so tired, this worked out well.  We could just relax and look around, making note of things to go back to later.  After a long and circuitous walk back to the hotel, interrupted by hawkers insisting that we look at their wares or directing us to follow them to one of the Mayan cooperatives, I literally passed out in the hotel room and slept for about 12 hours.  That was our first day, and I've already written a much longer entry than I intended.

This is the oldest cathedral in the Western hemisphere.  Spanish colonizers tore down Mayan temples and used the stones to build this structure.

*Our hotel was the Dolores Alba, and I would recommend it for budget travelers like us.  However, the food at the hotel restaurant was absolutely awful.  Mike and Anouk ended up going to a nearby Dominoes for dinner while I was unconscious.  The continental breakfast was fine, however.