Travel Diary: Riviera Maya & Yucatan, Mexico
Normally I don’t write travel blogs (mostly because it is a lot of work), but I’ll make an exception after my last trip. There are a couple of reasons for it. It was one of the longest vacation that I have taken and probably the best planned one so far. I spent a lot of time researching every small detail and all of it paid off...Sukriti approved!
We spent ten days in Riviera Maya and Yucatan peninsula and it was a memorable trip. It was a good mix of a lot of travel, sightseeing and RnR and was divided in three phases:
- Day 1–2: Cancun (Riviera Maya). Typical beach stuff. RnR
- Day 3–7: Yucatan Peninsula. Hectic. Tiring. Fun!
- Day 8–10: Playa del Carmen (Riviera Maya). Typical beach stuff. RnR.
The trip was ideally divided to make sure we got over the intense fatigue of the days/months leading to it, then traveled to the limit and ended with a relaxing time to make sure we didn’t require a “vacation-to-get-over-the-vacation.”
Days 1–2, 8–10: Riviera Maya
Riviera Maya is located on the east coast of Mexico and has a long highway running along the Caribbean coastline. The areas of interest are Cancun, Playa del Carmen and Tulum with small day trips to islands like Isla Mujeres or Cozumel.
It is entirely commercialized with several dozen resorts across the Riviera starting from Cancun all the way till Tulum. Most of the resorts are great with private beaches, lavish swimming pools and an “all-inclusive” option.
Most of our time here was spent relaxing at the beach, soaking in the sunshine, reading books and doing activities at the resort. We spent one day roaming around Isla Mujeres, which is a small island where we rented a golf cart and enjoyed the old city surrounded by the ocean.
Also worth mentioning are the Mayan ruins of Tulum which is another day trip from Cancun or Playa. They are not as great as the ones in Yucatan, but they are located right next to the ocean and hence extremely beautiful.
Days 3–7: Yucatan
Yucatan is a beautiful state built amidst rich, dense tropical forests once the home of the Mayans for more than two millenniums.
Yucatan, today, has built itself as a place for tourists. It has even developed alternate highways connecting the major locations in the state. The tourists usually take these routes and end up paying heavy tolls (we payed a total of around $100 in this trip). The highways are smooth and almost empty presumably because most locals take the original routes through the villages which are not as convenient as the highways.
This part of the journey was a busy one with exploring magical, colonial cities (Valladolid and Izamal), driving through a cosmopolitan city (Merida) and visiting a lot of Mayan ruins.
Valladolid: An ancient colonial town once occupied by Spanish, it is a nice place to spend a day or two visiting cathedrals, its central park and a couple of museums; it is best explored on foot. On our second day, it rained heavily and we thoroughly loved it because the weather was just perfect to enjoy the showers (something which we have forgotten after living in California where it either rains in winter or not at all) by the pool in the evening. We did sorely miss the Indian tea and pakoras.
Izamal: The uniformly yellow walls, iron lampposts and the clippity clop of numerous horse carriages give a quaint ambience to this town. It is much smaller than Valladolid and can be covered in 2–3 hours even on foot. This city is also famous for the fact that Pope John Paul visited the San Fernandino Church here in 1993.
And if that was not enough, there were a couple of Mayan pyramids there! They are not restored completely and we were able to climb up to the top and enjoy the views from there. I liked Izamal better than Valladolid, though Sukriti preferred the latter.
Interspersed between the two cities, and Merida, were our visits to the Mayan ruins — the best part of our journey. We visited a lot of sites: Chichen Itza, Ek Balam, Uxmal, Kabah etc. and each one of them offered a different flavor of the once-flourishing Mayan empire.
Ek Balam was discovered only a few years back in ‘97, hence it is still being restored and not as popular as Chichen Itza or Uxmal. Perhaps that is why I enjoyed the most here. The crowd was minimal, the ruins are deep in the forest and we could still climb up the central palace (Acropolis) unlike at more popular places like Chichen Itza, and oh, the view from the top!
Chichen Itza is of course a must visit — it is one of the seven wonders of the Modern world (which makes my tally of these wonders to 3; the first two being Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China). It was once the central city of the Mayans with full fledged markets, palaces, an observatory and temples. El Castillo, the main temple, is what defines Chichen Itza. It a symmetrical pyramid with 91 steps on each side and one step at the top equalling a total of 365 steps—the number of days in the Mayan calendar. They were good! Just not good enough to predict our survival post 2012.
It is very commercial; there are an endless number of souvenir hawkers inside the site, all the ruins are roped off and it gets swarmed with visitors from tour buses by late morning. We reached there at 9am to beat the crowd.
We spent another day visiting “Puuc Route” located near Merida. It has a lot of Mayan sites like Uxmal, Kabah, Palace of Sayil etc. cheif among them being Uxmal. Its reputation is mid-way between Chichen Itza and Ek Balam. Not as famous as the former, not as small as the latter. The architecture of Uxmal is totally different than the other two; it has less pyramids and more open space. While we could not climb the central palace, we did get to climb a couple of other buildings here, which offered impressive panoramas.
The other sites on this route are Kabah, Palace of Sayil and Labna. They are much smaller, and are still being restored.
We concluded the Puuc Route with Grutas de Loltun (the caves of Loltun) where we saw a lot of stalactites and stalagmites.
To summarize, we explored a lot of Yucatan in the five days and thoroughly enjoyed it. Mexico has done a commendable job in keeping the entire state in a great condition with good and clean highways and proper road signs—we could have covered our entire journey of 800+ km from Cancun -> Valladolid -> Ek Balam -> Chichen Itza -> Merida -> Puuc Route -> Grutas de Loltun -> Merida without GPS if we wanted to (and that includes driving inside the cities of Merida and Valladolid to/from our hotel).
General Notes
Food: Prepare to eat Subway or Pizzas if you are a vegetarian. We carried a lot of food with us and by the end we were craving for Indian food and tea (luckily we found an Indian restaurant in Playa del Carmen operated by an Indian who retired from the bay area to the Riviera).
Car: All big American rental companies are available there. Driving was a smooth experience for us but I did read blogs mentioning they were mugged by ‘fake’ policemen.
Language: Predominantly Spanish with little understanding of English. However we didn’t face a problem. In fact, I had a good 15 minute conversation with a server at Woktowalk all just using the Google Translate app. God bless Google!
Money: US dollars are accepted at most places, however it is costlier. We found withdrawing money in Pesos from ATMs to be more economical. The ATM service charges were not that high.
Cellular service: We chose the easier option by activating international roaming from AT&T. It cost us $90 for both our phones with unlimited text and 420MB of data.
