After two fantastic, but busy days of sightseeing, I was ready for a laid-back day on the beach in Costa Maya, Mexico. I had pre-booked a beach and snorkeling tour through the ship, but things didn’t quite work out that way. They worked out a lot better.
I was a bit bummed because I was having such a great time with my shipboard friends, but they hadn’t chosen the shore excursion I had booked and paid for in advance. Also, we’d had such great snorkeling on Little French Key, I didn’t think today’s tour could add anything to that. I was sitting in my cabin pondering this when the phone rang. “Sir, I’m sorry to inform you that the excursion you signed up for today has been canceled. Sea grass has washed up on that beach, making it unusable.” Big smile on my face.
I found my friends. Their plan was to catch a taxi into town where there was supposed to be a beach that was clear of sea grass. Here’s the entrance from the dock to the Costa Maya shopping center you have to walk through to get to the taxis:
As we were walking to the taxi stand, Christina and Eric caught up with us. We had first met them a couple nights ago when an elevator door opened and they were both kneeling on the floor looking down. Christina had accidentally dropped her phone down the crack between the elevator and the hallway on a different floor before the doors closed. They were peering down through that crack now to see if they could glimpse her phone at the bottom of the shaft. They couldn’t. Long story short, they reported that the ship’s crew had happily retrieved the phone for them (unbroken!).
Anyway, we all caught a passenger van taxi into town and were pals for the rest of the day, and the rest of the cruise. The beach we found was crowded, but very nice to swim:
From left to right, that’s Bobby, Christina, Stephanie, Joe, and Eric.
After a couple hours in the sun, we walked to a restaurant recommended by a ship’s crew member. The food and drinks were delicious, and seemed very reasonably priced, so we ate our fill. Prices were in pesos, but we all exercised our math skills (or our smart phone calculators) to estimate our bill. It turned out to be a lot more than we bargained for. Going exchange rate (if I remember right) was 15 pesos to the dollar, but the restaurant was only giving 10. No amount of arguing would change their policy. Oh well, lesson learned for future travels.
As we walked back from lunch, someone said we should check out a really swinging bar, but it wasn’t exactly what we expected:
One more adventure for the day: we had noticed other people riding these “banana” boats:
A speed boat tows it to the middle of the bay and proceeds to do its best to throw you off by executing hairpin turns at high speed. Surprisingly to me, several in our party wanted to try it. I didn’t go because a) I volunteered to stay behind and watch everyone’s possessions still on the beach, and b) I had no interest in paying good money to get thrashed. I did catch a long distance shot of our folks on their ride:
From back to front that’s Bobby, Eric, Lynn, and Christina. Sure enough, they all got dumped at least three or four times (the speed boat always wins). But they came back exhilarated and laughing, so maybe it wasn’t so bad.
We’d had about all the fun we could take, so we were glad to head back to the ship and clean up in time for dinner:
The next day, I was back on the tourist trail with another, and completely different Mayan ruin, plus one of those “it’s a small world” experiences that are hard to believe. I’ll describe them in my next post.
A note for avid readers: In real time, May 4th today, I'm headed into Canada. I don't know what sort of internet connectivity I'll find there. It could be as much as two weeks before my next post.
No comments:
Post a Comment