Mexico - Part 3 - 2010/10

If the first 2 part of our trip exceeded our expectations the last part certainly disappointed. It was actually my idea to spend the last few days of our trip relaxing on the beach. Maybe not such a bad idea in theory but I've managed to make mistake of booking an all-inclusive resort called Occidental Allegro, located on the Island of Cozumel. The problem is that we are not really made for all inclusive beach holidays and we both get bored after about 45 minutes on the beach. The resort itself wasn't bad, it wasn't great either, pretty average, but located on a very nice beach. The problem was that it was 16km from the town (the only town on the island) and full of Americans.

The Cozumel Island is the location of the Ironman event in November and is located very close to a reef made famous once by Jacque Coustou who had shown the reef to the world for the first time as part of his documentary series about the best diving spots in the world. Having checked the reef myself I have to say that it's not in the same league as places in Australia, Bali, Thailand or even Zanzibar.

On our second day we rented a car (what else than an old VW Beetle, otherwise known as a Mexican Ferrari) and drove around the island to check out the sites and the Ironman course.

There weren't very many interesting places to see on the island so we completed the drive in a couple of hours. The Ironman course didn't look too exciting - it's a flat road around half of the island, 63km in total, so the course is 3 laps. The road surface is quite bad in places and the winds blowing off the see tend to be strong. Combined with the temperatures and the high humidity I can imagine this makes for a tough race.

Other than that we swam every day, I went for a snorkeling trip and 3 days passed . In the end even the free drinks have lost their appeal.

San Miguel - only town on the island

San Miguel - only town on island

For the last couple of days before flying back we were staying in Cancun, which is the most known tourist destination in Mexico. The narrow strip of land called "Zona Hotelara", as the name suggests is full of large tourist resorts full of european and american tourists. We were staying in one of he largest ones called Royal Sands.

Despite my reservations regarding the touristy Cancun the places was actually quite nice and the Hotel, with large studio apartments good range of pools and activities and a decent restaurant, was better than the place we stayed at in Cozumel. The beaches were great and clean and the water blue and warm, so it's not a surprise why so many tourists make Cancun their primary destination. We wouldn't want to spend 2 weeks here, that would be too boring for us, but we would certainly consider stopping here again for a couple of days.

Unfortunately we both came down with a cold pretty quickly and didn't get a chance to enjoy some of the activities. It was actually quite funny as in the 30C heat everywhere we went we had to carry a large box of tissues. One night we had enough energy for a long walk along the beach and came back with some spectacularly large shells.

Overall it was a great trip and we were lucky with the weather and the choice of locations. In retrospect maybe it would have been better to spend a little bit more time inland and in Cancun and give Cozumel a miss, but it was a very successful trip nevertheless. We learned a lot about the ancient history of the region and even our Spanish improved a little bit.