¡Feliz Navidad! At time of release, it is officially Christmas Day in England AND Mexico. This blog will tell you of our travels in Isla Cozumel.
What really draws the tourists to Mexico’s largest island (you heard right!) is the scuba diving available to the area thanks to the mesoamerican reef that sits along it. That’s what brought us here too, and it was really amazing, but what captured our hearts was above sea level. Isla Cozumel, beyond having a great feel and vibe to it, and beyond having sunny beaches with white sand and clear waters, and beyond having a jungle interior full of Maya ruins, exotic birds and cenotes within… ok well there’s nothing exceptional beyond those things, but that’s enough, right?
Make a cuppa, find a comfy seat, lean back and go “ahhhh”… because it’s time for part 2 of ‘Yes We Yucatan!’.
Day 3 – Cozumel
We awoke at 7am, a bit fuzzy from the previous night’s Margaritas. We were to be at the dive centre for 8.30, but it turns out Cozumel is about 100 times bigger than Isla Mujeres and you cant just stroll anywhere, so we were at a scooter rental place at 8am and 15 mins later we’d had pastries and iced coffees and were blazing it down the circular road at an astonishing 40kmph to our scuba guides. With a group of Americans and our Mexican guides, we set sail for a reef of some sort.
We had 2 dives that morning and both were bliss. The water is as clear as it comes and the coral formations are massive! We scuba’d through lovely gaps between it and saw amazing tropical fish, barracuda and the highlight was a couple of big old stingrays! It was some great scuba and just amazing to be in the underwater world again. It feels sub par of me not to have brought a GoPro to photograph underwater and I can really only apologise. I promise to up my game next time!
Our main activity for the day out of the way, we scooted to a ‘beach club’ for the rest of the afternoon. We ate tacos, calamari, drank beer and sat on sun loungers with our books. The heat is just outrageously lovely and we made sure to fit in a couple of hours of beach lounging with our books each day on Cozumel.
That night, we were so dead on our feet (relaxing in the sun with beer is TIRING) so trudged, half awake, to a local taqueria where the lighting, music and ambience were simply terrible, but the food was cheap, traditional and banging. The waiter wasn’t really willing to explain what was what so we picked a couple of items off the menu (without descriptions) at random and amazingly Billie managed to snag two vegetarian dishes while I got some meaty tacos.
Best night of sleep we’ve had!
Day 4 – El Cedral
Billie put me in charge of today’s plans, and I decided that I wanted me some jungle time and some wildlife to photograph. I’d read a load of bird tour articles and they were all quite secretive, but one listed El Cedral as a meeting point. El Cedral is a small village in the jungle, close to pretty much nothing else, so I figured there were birds there, as why else would they meet there? Luck would have it, there was also a cenote and a cave. If birds didn’t show themselves, we had alternative activities, so we set a course for El Cedral!
Such a lovely town… and where Mayas settled many hundreds of years previously. We were in jungle territory here, so I was happy. After a quite sketchy moped along a rough track, which Billie had to walk the last KM as it degraded too much for safe 2 person scooting, we arrived at the entrance to the cenote, which also had a trail leading off it to the cave system, apparently 2km away. I led us fown the trail – the plan being to visit the cenote after to cool down.
The jungle trail was awesome to walk down and it felt a bit like being back in Costa Rica. Sadly, birds weren’t presenting themselves in droves, but we saw some and Billie, eagle-eyed as ever, was the premier wildlife spotter. It was I, however, who spotted the bird of the walk – a Summer Tanager, red all over and lovely. It wasn’t hard to spot, as it flew straight over us then settled on a branch. It was generous enough to stay there long enough for a decent snap!
The cave at the end of the trail was huge and very cool! We took some snaps and headed back for the cenote. We didn’t see a single other soul on the trail. Very quiet and special!
The cenote was a different kettle of fish, and had Americans showing up with tour guides every 15 minutes, but that didn’t stop us jumping in and enjoying the cool water which smelt quite strongly sulphurous. It was so beautiful and refreshing, the bats living above the water made for quite the soundtrack.
I should probably explain what a cenote IS, having only just learnt myself. Fair warning, this story goes back 66 million years. So, remember when that meteor hit that earth and killed all the land-dwelling dinosaurs? Well, that hit the Yucatan Peninsula, believe it or not! It had a significant amount of shrapnel, understandably, which shot into the ground making perfectly circular holes hundreds of meters deep. Over the next few million years, some of these closed up or whatever, but some ended up filling with water and becoming cenotes, lovely deep pools of fresh water, often in caves with excellent little holes in the ceiling you can jump into them from. Excellent.
We headed back to town and I suggested that we find some hummingbirds at some of the gardens in the village. We’d learnt from Costa Rica that hummingbirds are attracted to big, colourful flowers and the endemic ‘Cozumel Emerald’ hummingbird is supposed to be abundant, so I was quite hopeful. Immediately the gardens proved to be the fruitful birding destination, rather than the jungle. I snapped the Cozumel Emerald a few times as well as the Yucatan Woodpecker (endemic to the Yucatan peninsula as the name suggests). I was super chuffed to snag pics of these endemic species! The only one I missed was the ‘Cozumel Vireo’, but as I’m not ACTUALLY a twitcher, I thought I did pretty well.
It was while I was snapping these beauties that Billie decided to learn to scoot once and for all. She hopped on and was scooting up and down the road with reckless abandon and I couldn’t have been more proud.
A beach club and dinner later and our heads hit the pillows at maximum velocity.
Day 5 – San Gervasio and Punta Sur
Argh! Our last full day on Cozumel and we hadn’t done two of the main attractions! San Gervasio (Mayan ruins) and Punta Sur (the south point of the island, duh, and also a National Park, beach and lagoon combo). Bravely, we decided to do both AND to do so while driving around the entire island (which took nearly 2 hours) so we could see the East coast, which is undeveloped and lovely.
We set off for San Gervasio first. Maya ruins that, before being ruined, were the main settlement on the island. These were particularly important for fertility and every Maya woman on the Yucatan peninsula was expected to pilgrimage here at least once in their life, which is bonkers to think about really, as it was hard enough to get there via boat and scooter. The entrance gardens were a birding spot so we hung around for half an hour for me to snap some more avian beauties.
The ruins themselves were super! Not huge pyramids, but really cool to see and interesting to learn about. Quite mind boggling to imagine an acient civilization walking around on that very ground, sleeping, eating and sacrificing to placate the gods. To make this section more exciting we have a game to play, called ‘spot the ignuana’. There’s one in each picture below!
And what would a game of spot the iguana be if it wasn’t followed by a game of spot the Billie!
Culturally sated and feeling extremely fertile, we started the hour long scoot to Punta Sur. Very sore bums and an hour later we were on pristine beach once again, with nachos and beers in hand. Relaxation didn’t last long, though, as it was 3pm and the beach area closed at 4! We wanted to snorkel at the reef here as it was reportedly super. We had to swim fairly far out – a couple of hundred meters perhaps, but then it was reef for 500 meters along the coast which we lapped up. It was quite hard work but the tropical fish and couple of up close stingrays were so worth it!
We left the beach for the lighthouse, which we climbed and took some snaps of each other and the lovely view of the lagoon!
We nipped around the lagoon on a mini boardwalk where we saw a Roseate Spoonbill, which was on my list for the area. We only saw it from a distance, but worth the snap… Just look at that bill!
It was another hour to scoot back home and my bum would take a couple of days to feel normal again. We headed out for a lovely italian dinner and a bottle of white wine. As it was our last day in Cozumel, we topped it off with margaritas, which were enormous!
The next morning we would ferry back to the mainland and take a 4 hour bus (on which we had to stand!!) to go to the amazing Bacalar. A sleepy town sitting aside an incredible turquoise lagoon which is fed by cenotes that live under the water. There we will spend Christmas 🎅. As usual, a sneak peak pic for you.
Merry Christmas one and all!