Yucatán 2017 Part 4 - The Cruise

Details: Written by Tom Snow; Created: 19 June 2020

Funny how it worked out...I spent four days in Mérida, Yucatán, flew back to San Antonio and went back to work for a week, and then I found myself boarding a cruise ship bound for the peninsula I just flew away from. This was pure coincidence, of course; all my friends and I settled on a cruise leaving on a specific date and it just happened to be a week after the Rock 'n Roll Half Marathon in Mérida.

This ship was named Carnival Valor and, as usual, departed from Galveston, Texas. The cruise was hitting up the same ports as the one I took two years earlier, Progreso and Cozumel, but in the opposite order. So we set sail on Monday the 13th of November, then Tuesday the 14th was a "fun day at sea," and then Wednesday the 15th we reached Cozumel.

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Last time around I'd passed up the chance to go to the huge Xplor adventure park on the mainland outside of Playa del Carmen, so I really wanted to do that this time. So I was rather disappointed to discover that wasn't even an option this time. None of the available shore excursions looked nearly as appealing, so I settled on one that was only in the morning and involved a ride in a submarine.

This submarine spent the morning slowly moving around the sea off Cozumel's coast while we riders aboard the sub got to see all the fish swimming by. This was rather similar to something I did in Cozumel two years earlier, except then I saw the fish while snorkeling.

Toward the end of the ride the sub passed by a sunken ship which some divers were exploring.

Just like last time around, I now had the whole afternoon to do whatever I felt like in Cozumel. And just like last time, I got out of the tourist-oriented Puerta Maya cruise port as fast as I could. My first stop was a restaurant where I had some ceviche--a raw fish dish--for lunch.

I continued my hike north along the highway until I reached another cruise port, Punta Langosta. It was here that I saw this ship docked:

"Mein Schiff" is German for "My Ship." I'd never heard of this before. The German travel company TUI operates a fleet of "Mein Schiff" cruise ships and apparently Cozumel is one of their ports of call. Who would've thought that, less than a year after I took this picture, I'd actually be living in Germany and seeing ads for Mein Schiff cruises all over the place?

This taxi is a Nissan Tsuru. If it looks familiar to any of you north of the border, that's because it's the same car as the early-90s generation of Nissan Sentra. After that generation went out of production to be replaced with a new Sentra version, Nissan continued to make and sell this generation in Latin America as the "Tsuru" and various other names all the way through 2017. Compared with the early-90s original, it's mostly the same but with a few cosmetic changes like a more modern looking dashboard and grille. Automakers do this all the time in developing countries, keep making and selling older versions of their cars that they don't sell anymore in the developed world.

One of many shops selling Cuban cigars, a commodity that pulls in a lot of tourist pesos around here.

Speaking of Cuban-made goods for sale in Mexico, I was on a mission to acquire something Cuban myself, though not a cigar. I wanted a bottle of Havana Club rum, which I easily found at a liquor store. Even though I was well aware US-Cuban relations had changed for the better in the last couple years, I was still under the mistaken impression that such goods were illegal in the States, and so I wanted to be a bad boy smuggler and bring contraband back home and tell my friends "I could go to jail for having this!" During a presentation two days later on debarkation procedures, though, they mentioned that "Cuban cigars are OK," making me realize that the authorities wouldn't have a problem with my bottle of rum, either. So I did get some pretty good rum, though without the thrill of being a bad boy smuggler, which I wasn't.

Last look at Punta Langosta.

Thursday, November 16, 2017

Last time around, my entire day was taken up by the Chichén Itzá tour, so I never saw anything in Progreso itself. Before docking this time, I was informed that there really isn't much to do in Progreso besides hang out on the beach, so if you're going to do an all-day shore excursion on this cruise, Progreso is the place to do it.

Most of our big group--there were eight of us--wanted to stay back and spend the day on the beach. I and one other friend wanted to do one of the excursions and we settled on one that involved "mountain biking" in between several cenotes and going snorkeling in, I think, two of them. What's a cenote? It's something that's very common on the Yucatán Peninsula, a sinkhole opened over an underground river.

It was a bit of a drive out to our destination. We passed through a small town called Acanceh, which is a predominantly Mayan town where many people still only speak Mayan and no Spanish.

Unlike famous ruined cities like Uxmal and Chichén Itzá, Acanceh was never abandoned. It's been continuously inhabited since pre-Columbian times. And so you can see ancient buildings here, like this Mayan temple, coexisting alongside colonial-era churches and modern corner stores.

So, the excursion. We left most of our stuff, like phones, on the bus since we were going to be swimming; this is why there are no photos. At the starting point (a building with a restaurant and the tour operator's offices) we got on our bikes. These weren't the mountain bikes I was expecting. They were really just bikes made for leisurely riding around a town, and they were a few decades old. The bike I had, I believe, was a woman's bike, and the tires were ridiculously low on air. But only someone really petty would complain about such things.

We rode on gravel trails, following our tour guides, between the cenotes that are scattered throughout these lands. I think we stopped and swam in two, but I only vividly remember one. Unlike most of the cenotes we saw, this was not exposed to the surface but inside a cave. After briefly standing under a shower to wash off any sunscreen (they do NOT want any such substances polluting the water) everyone had to file into the cave through a narrow opening. Inside, there were electric lights spaced along the ceiling and walls, without which it would've been pitch dark. We walked along a wooden walkway and down several flights of wooden stairs down the middle of the cave, which ended in a wooden deck just above water level.

This is where we could jump in the water. To be honest, I got bored of snorkeling rather quickly; the cenote wasn't exactly a huge pool, and there wasn't exactly a whole lot to see down there except for a few fish and quite a bit of seaweed. And plus my snorkel didn't fit too well and I had to hold it in just the right place to keep from getting water in my nose.

After the cenote bike tour was over, we got a pretty good lunch back at the restaurant before spending another hour or so riding the bus back to the Valor.

The bus passed this on the way to Progreso. I felt like I'd been here before...oh yeah I had! This is the Coliseo de Mérida, where packet pickup for the Rock 'n Roll Half Marathon had been a week earlier.

That was the last part of the trip in Mexico; Friday was a "fun day at sea" and then Saturday morning we disembarked in Galveston.