Xel Ha
Trip Start
Aug 10, 2007
1
65
92
Trip End
Dec 27, 2007
Tulum,
Mexico
Friday, October 26, 2007
We soon realised we were on "Mexican Time" again and we were eventually picked up 30 minutes late.
We followed the coastal highway down the Yucatan and arrived at Xel Ha 45 minutes later. We were shown where to wait for our pick up 5:30pm, so we had 8 hours of sun and activities to look forward to.
Xel Ha is a water nature park, on a Mayan site. There are various ruins to explore, but mainly it is the water activities that bring visitors in their 1000's.
A fish from the floating bridge
We had the 75 dollar all inclusive package and we had a ball! We started by heading to the breakfast buffet, where we made sure we had a good start to the day - including the Mexican breakfast of refried beans and fajitas!
Fueled up, we decided to do a quick recce of the park. We walked along the main river, grabbed bikes and pedaled towards the start of the river. The bikes were "modern" ones, you had to pedal backwards to engage the brakes! We peddled the "Path of Enlightenment" and found the start of the river.
You had to wear a life jacket and float on inner tubes, which looked like fun. The water was the typical colour we had now come to expect, the aqua marine beautiful blue that just makes you want to jump in.
We saw where the "cliff of courage" was, a 3.5m jump (no worries, looked like a piece of old tackie) and we slowly followed the river back to where the restaurants were.
There were 5 restaurants offering every type of food imaginable, including bars and ice cream parlours
A lifesaving hut ..... Nahoon could use one!
. We grabbed a 7up, got our snorkeling gear and headed for the river mouth.At the river mouth there was a floating bridge where there were large fish swimming near the river banks. We jumped in and snorkeled around the area, taking photographs with the underwater bag on Jule's camera.
We didn't go inside the cenotes. The cenotes are underground caves that the river runs through. The Yucatan is largely limestone and underground rivers have carved out these caverns, called cenotes. As much as it looked good, I could not bring myself to snorkel into and through the caves, so we rather stuck to the main river.
