The one thing I didn’t see when I went to Puerto Morelos in November 2023 was the botanical garden (Jardín Botanico Dr. Alfredo Barrera Marín). I decided to do that on my way to Cancún even though I knew that there wouldn’t be much more than greenery to see this time of year. I’ll have to go back in summer when the garden is in bloom. But what I really wanted was the two-hour nature walk!

Speaking of two hours, OMG, the driving to PM. It should have been quick, but there was a section in construction where we were crawling along at maybe an average of 5KPH. What a nightmare! I was so glad to be able to stop halfway to Cancún.

This structure was several stories tall and quite rickety, but it was worth climbing for the view. Speaking of climbing, thanks to my having access to healthcare now, I’m in the best shape of my life. Turns out I wasn’t out of shape these past few years when I would breathe hard and have chest pain at the slightest bit of cardiovascular effort. Rather, that was a symptom of my very advanced thyroid disease combined with the insulin resistance I got from it. A Canadian doctor would have never caught that. I remain grateful for my life here!

These are the only flowers I saw on the whole hike, right at the very end.

It was getting late and I wanted to have dinner with my friends in Cancún, but I knew exactly where to go for lunch in Puerto Morelos, so I still detoured for a refreshing passionfruit juice and some creamy pasta with shrimp at La Choza. While I waited for my lunch, I texted the hotel to let them know I was going to be late.

Monday’s drive to the Riviera Maya was uneventful, even the bit going through the outskirts of Tulum. I am disappointed that I didn’t think to stop to see the ruins, but it’s not like I had to see everything on this trip.

Akumal is nothing like any beach community I’ve visited in Mexico. Think of Banff — a rich enclave in a national park, highly developed, with a lot of rules and high expenses. Totally worth visiting, but definitely not the kind of place I’d want to stay for more than a few days. I opted to stay in the pueblo rather than right at the beach (where there really were no affordable options anyway). Thanks to yet another great deal, I stayed at El Último Maya, a hostel-like hotel above a restaurant where you have a private room but there’s a shared outdoor space. This was the perfect location for my brief stay in Akumal. My lovely host got me settled and the first thing she did was book a snorkelling tour with Sergio for me the next day. I haven’t found any social media for Sergio, but if you’re in Akumal, everyone will know who you mean, or you can email me for his Whatsapp number. His nickname of the Turtle Whisperer is well earned!

That done, I headed to the beach.  Google Maps makes it look like a straight shot, but you actually have to detour to use a pedestrian overpass (more about that below).

It took me too long to understand that the only way to get to the water was to pay for a day pass. I thought I could just wander and eventually hit water and beachfront restaurants, but that’s not the case. Before buying a pass ($150!) I decided to check out the Akumal Dive Shop to see if they had an activity I could do late Tuesday afternoon, after snorkelling with Sergio, and which might involve more snorkelling. I don’t know what kind of service I was expecting, but the fellow proposing the exact perfect thing right out of the gate was not it. It wasn’t something I had even thought of as an option. I paid a deposit, and after that asked about access to the beach as it was late in the day and I didn’t need any services. As a paying customer, I was given a bracelet to access the beach.

The beach was lovely.

The only restaurant I could see right on the beach was Lol-Ha, so I went in for lunch and a drink.

My tamarind mezcalita was amazing (and it better have been for nearly $300!).

My shrimp tacos with chipotle and pineapple salsa were dreadful, but I blame the local shrimp, not the restaurant. Thank goodness I had plenty of pico de gallo and habanero as well to dress them up.

I stayed for a good long while nursing my mezcalita and just enjoying the salt spray.

To drive from the pueblo to the beach, there is an overpass, along the side of which is a fabulous mural (and also a shaded walking path).

The pedestrian overpass was terrifying. I thought I was going to have a panic attack coming across it on my way to the beach, but was much calmer on the walk back.

I mean, this looks SO SAFE, right?

I had a nap when I came in. By the time I was ready for dinner, it was pouring rain, so I did not head out in search of food until past 8:30, not realising that everything in the pueblo closes early! The Último Maya restaurant below the hotel was closing up, but graciously made me some quesadillas with al pastor, giving me four instead of three when I asked for corn rather than wheat tortillas. They really hit the spot with a cold beer!

The next morning was chilly, so I was glad not to be heading back to the beach until midday.

The host provided me a simple breakfast both mornings — fruit, buttered toast with jam, weak coffee — at a reasonable price, but I needed stronger coffee, so I decided to head out and see if such a thing was available in Akumal. The village is pedestrian friendly and has something I’m not used to anymore, HILLS.

Turns out excellent coffee was just kitty-corner from the hotel!

Sergio came to pick me up late morning and suggested we take my car, which was parked on the street in front of the hotel. He said that parking and my day pass were all included in his shockingly low rate of only $600 for an hour of snorkelling. I wasn’t super keen on taking my car to the beach because my evening activity involved alcohol, but I didn’t argue since it wasn’t like I’m a heavy drinker and driving the short distance sure sounded easier than dragging our gear on a combi.

Before getting on a lancha to go to the dive site, I was taken through the list of rules (which included no flippers for guests!) and also the underwater signs for various sea creatures. Sergio explained how turtles would come up from the bottom and rise above the water. I paid attention but did not believe I would see anything of what he was describe. HA.

He surprised me with a video of my snorkelling adventure. You can check it out on Instagram, but here are a few stills.

I was told to stay rigid like a board, with my legs absolutely not allowed to dangle down. I’m so buoyant I can keep this pose indefinitely even without a life jacket. I’d learned from the Puerto Morelos trip to have a UV-resistant diving top, but hadn’t found a matching bottom, so I did end up cooking the back of thighs. I’ll definitely be looking for a pair before my next adventure. This is my own snorkel, but Sergio insisted I use one of his masks, saying that mine would fog up because it’s plastic. I used mine later in the day and, to be honest, I didn’t find much of a difference.

I couldn’t believe it when I saw my first turtle, a small youngster, and that it did exactly what Sergio said it would do, feed, then go up for air. It was amazing!

At one point, I felt something brush by my foot and thought it was another snorkeller. I looked behind me only to discover that my entire big toe was in the mouth of a fish about two feet long! I must have not tasted very good because he promptly spat me out, LOL!

And then came this magnificent fellow, right at the very end, and I cannot believe he was captured so clearly.

I was trying to be respectful and keep my distance, but he came right at me and very deliberately pet me with his flipper. Again, I cannot believe that I have that on video.

Even though we’d come out on a lancha, we swam back to shore.

I got some restaurant recommendations and ended up at the Turtle Bay Bakery. There, I briefly spotted a woman who looked very vaguely familiar, but she was quickly gone and out of my mind.

I ordered  what ended up being a truly fabulous jalapeño, habanero, and avocado burger with a watermelon and pineapple juice, which really hit the spot after all that exercise after a small breakfast. I was shocked when I asked for the bill that a mystery woman had paid it!!! Had to be the woman I’d spotted coming in. Who was she? The mystery stayed with me until I headed home on Saturday and I realised that she was a French woman I’d assisted at the car rental on Friday who was having cash flow issues! I’d given her a tip of buying extra insurance to have less deductible frozen, which must have solved her problem. I had completely forgotten about the exchange but must have made an impression. What were the odds we’d wind up at the same restaurant in Akumal five days later?! The universe works in mysterious ways!

We’d gotten a late start snorkelling, so by the time I finished lunch, it was time for my next activity, a sunset cruise on a catamaran!

We were offered beer or palomas. Since I was only going to have one drink, a paloma felt like the more special option. Yum! We also got chips, guacamole, and fruit.

We stopped at a bay to swim and snorkel. There is outlet here for a cenote, so there is a mix of warm salty seawater and cold fresh water!

I really enjoyed my swim even if I didn’t see more than some small fish.

What a very special day!

For dinner, I ended up having mediocre pizza with yet another paloma.

I love how you can just open up a restaurant from your kitchen in Mexico.

I was hoping for ice cream or chocolate after dinner but there was nothing open except a small beer store, so I had to settle for this.

The next morning, Wednesday, I headed back to the café for coffee and debated my next move. Returning to the beach wasn’t appealing and I had to check out by noon anyway, but I also couldn’t check in at the hotel in Cancún until 3PM.

The answer finally came to me, and I’m glad it did so very quickly, allowing for an earlier departure than planned from Akumal because, spoiler alert, the one-hour drive back to Puerto Morelos would end up taking twice that long.

My quick stop in Akumal was exactly what I was hoping it would be. Again, it’s not an area I’d want to come back to for an extended period of time, but snorkelling with the turtles is truly something to put on your bucket list, especially when so much care is taken to keep them and their nests safe and undisturbed.

The last week of February, I finally got my first proper, zero work, full-week vacation in nearly a decade! Building and running a successful business is hard graft, but there’s nothing I’d rather do!

The vacation I planned had three parts:

-city break in Valladolid
-snorkeling adventures in Akumal
-social time in Cancún with my bestie flying in from Illinois

I really wanted to stop in Valladolid as it was getting to be more than a tad embarrassing that I’d never been there in my nearly eight years of living in Yucatán. That’s like living in Montreal and having never visited Ottawa or Quebec City!

The most exciting part of the trip had to be that I could rent a car. I picked it up Friday afternoon before I was set to leave. I get absolutely insane deals as a long-time user of Booking.com, and there was no exception with a car rental. No one could come close to price matching me for the nine days I wanted to rent, not even folks renting their own personal cars. The only disadvantage of using the third-party site was that insurance was also with a third party. So while I had full coverage, there’d be more hoops to make a claim and I had to have $14,000 frozen on my credit card versus the $2,000 if I’d booked directly through Alamo, none of which was a big deal considering the savings I got. I booked a manual transmission Chevy Spark and got an automatic Nissan Versa as Alamo doesn’t do small cars or manual transmissions, never mind that they were offered on the website. It’s surprising how hard it is to get a manual transmission now when renting in Mexico when it was the norm the last time I rented, pre-pandemic. My biggest concern with the Versa was fuel economy, but it ended up being surprisingly fuel efficient.

Having a car, I packed up nearly everything I owned and considered getting a trailer. 😉 The yoga mat was to supplement the hard Mexican beds.

I worked so hard that week and wasn’t sure I’d be able to take off after my Saturday morning HIIT class, but somehow, I did.  I decided to take the more back roads/non toll route way to Valladolid, just to enjoy being on the road under a bright blue sky. This ended up being a great choice, except for a super rough section coming out of Tizimín where the potholes were the size of Canada.

I’d been lead to believe that Valladolid is small and sleepy, but the amount of traffic in centro when I arrived rivaled traffic in Mérida. The free municipal parking lot in front of my hotel was full, but, thankfully, I found paid parking around the block. I stayed at Casa Rico, again a booking.com deal. All the reviews had told me to prepare for a noisy stay, but surprise, it was super quiet the two nights I was there. I had a plain room at the back second floor, with a great view coming up the stairs.

I went for a walk in search of dinner. The amount of people in centro, through the whole stay, was disproportionate to the amount of things to see and do in Valladolid proper and thoroughly unpleasant. I don’t think I’ve ever seen crowds like that in the touristy part of a historic centro before, and probably because it’s so small, just two blocks in either direction from the main square.

The cathedral was lit up and looking very pretty as I stood in the central plaza being deafened by the squawking of hundreds of birds.

I wanted Yucatecan gastronomy for dinner, so I selected the restaurant at the Mesón del Marques.

I really wanted queso relleno, but they make it with eggs, so I settled for zac ko’ol, or pebre, shredded chicken with an assortment of odd ingredients in a corn-thickened chicken stock. Only in Yucatán can you sit in a darkened restaurant not knowing if your next bite will have raisins, capers, or olives! It was really, really delicious, especially with a local artisanal beer, but way too much for me to finish. The only disappointment was that the tortillas were your stock commercial yellow ones, not handmade, as I would have expected in an establishment like this. When I ordered, the server said, “OH, you’re local!” after I pronounced my meal name correctly (sack kohl, more or less)! Not pictured is the big bowl of creamy habanero sauce that was brought to me after that was established, which finished the dish off perfectly.

I wandered around some more after and found a great gelato spot where I was served in French! He had almost no options left at that late hour, but a scoop of grapefruit was just what I needed after that rich dinner.

I had a surprisingly good first night in Valladolid, sleeping all the way through, and for nearly 10 hours! I’d really been at it hard in the weeks prior and I had a feeling I wasn’t going to end up doing much in Valladolid, despite having plans to hit up some cenotes.

First thing I did Sunday was move my car from the paid parking to the city parking, where I was directed to spot by a police officer, which was to be an important detail.

Then, I decided to try the restaurant across from my hotel that had a breakfast buffet, where I had a fabulous meal with the fishes. The buffet had my favourites like panuchos, chilaquiles, and enchiladas, plus egg options, waffles, pastries, and more. The only disappointment was that the only coffee they had was weak cafe de olla with way too much sugar.

I was just finishing up when my phone rang multiple times. I was very confused and put the number through Google, and it was my hotel! It was way too loud in the restaurant to call them, so I tried WhatsApp, and they were very responsive.

Do you have a Nissan Versa, they asked me?

Oh no.

You’re badly parked and they are about to tow you if you don’t get there right now to sort it out.

WTAF

Thankfully, I had requested the bill, so I was able to pay and get out of there right away. Went next door to the parking lot and there was a whole bunch of police around a white Nissan Versa just like mine except it wasn’t my car. 😂

The cop said you’re parked absolutely fine, unlike this dumbass (pendejo). I better be after all that parking practice! 🤣

I ended up doing pretty much nothing on my lazy Sunday in Valladolid. I think I ended up taking three, if not four, naps! I was so glad to have this break before the real vacation started, so I could take full advantage of it.

I stopped at tourist information to see if there was anything in the city that I didn’t know about (mostly a couple of small private art museums) and there really wasn’t, so that cemented my plan to just enjoy a lazy city break and recharge my batteries.

My one stop on Sunday was the chocolate history museum, which is a bunch of life-size dioramas with narration in several languages. It was disjointed, but still very interesting and made me realise that I take chocolate for granted as cultivation and preparation is really labour-intensive and done on a shockingly small scale. I also didn’t realise that chocolate as a food is as recent as it is — it was a beverage for most of its history, and a bitter spicy one at that until the Europeans started adding sugar.

It was interesting to see how cocoa beans were once used as currency.

I didn’t realise there are so many varieties of cacao pods:

I saw a video about a Yucatecan chocolate farmer who has to meet very strict Belgian standards, later explained by this graphic showing that Belgians are the largest chocolate consumers in the world!

I had to buy a bar of chocolate after all that, even if they’re made in Mérida!

Not sure how I ended up at a Chinese restaurant for lunch, Dragon House, but there I was, and, SURPRISE, it was the best Chinese food I’ve ever had in Mexico. They even had the correct noodles rather than using spaghetti like most places do. I had a special with one egg roll, one side, and two mains. I picked almond chicken and curried pork. Both dishes were well flavoured with tender meat and plenty of vegetables. Valladolid’s culinary scene was so far nothing like I’d been told to expect.

Valladolid has a cenote right in centro, around the corner from my hotel, but I ended up not going because it was chilly all weekend and cenotes are COLD.

The one thing the tourist info lady had told me not to miss on Sunday was the nightlife on La Calzada de los Frailes (Friars Causeway), Valladolid centro’s pedestrian street. This pretty pink building stands across from its entrance.

Traditional Mayan home that was restored during a refresh of the street in, I believe, the 1990s.

As is normal for me on these kinds of city breaks, I walked so much all day that I found my appetite and needed pizza. I ended up at Finisterre.

I ordered a margherita pizza with a Bohemia oscura and was shocked that this was without question the best pizza I’ve had since returning from Europe. I’m still dreaming of it nearly two weeks later.

Monday morning was cool and drizzly, with most of the city shut down, which was expected as Monday tends to be descanso, especially in more touristy areas that stay open on Sundays. There weren’t many options for breakfast, but I found myself in yet another beautiful courtyard enjoying chilaquiles with really good seasoned chicken. Ha ha to everyone who told me to expect to eat poorly in Valladolid!

I’ll finish off with a couple of shots of my pink room at Casa Rico. How pretty! The bed was a bit better than average.

I had no reason to hang out in Valladolid, plus I was about to lose an hour as I crossed into Quinatana Roo, so, refreshed, I packed up the car and hit the road again, bound for the bucket-list-worthy adventure that lay two hours southeast of me.

I have been an internet customer of Izzi since I moved to this house in the autumn of 2017. At that time I picked Izzi because it was much less expensive than its major competitor TotalPlay. For the next several years, I was a very happy customer of Izzi — they kept giving me higher speeds than I was paying for, the service was infallible, and customer service was a dream. I had no reason to look elsewhere.

But in the last year or so, I started to have daily micro outages that culminated in a 36-hour national outage that told me it was time to reexamine my loyalty to Izzi. This major outage was only the third in nearly eight years, but the lack of comment and updates from Izzi about this major interruption was unlike the company I’d known to this point. A little research told me that a change of modem would likely fix the intermittent short outages, so I contacted them to schedule this service. I was shocked when I was told “Oh, there’s been an issue with our cabling in your area for a while and we’re working on fixing that, so we’re not addressing individual client concerns at this time.” Excuse me? What was with this new Canadian-telco-like lassitude?!

I did some research and discovered that TotalPlay was now a better deal than Izzi. I could get the same type of package — phone, cable, internet — for the same price, but with five times the download speeds and twenty-five times the upload speeds! I promptly scheduled TotalPlay for the next day… and they were a no-show.

This left me with two other providers to consider, TelMex and Starlink. This was the first time in my life that I had meaningful competition within the same country’s telecom providers. I’d left Telus for Verizon once, but the switch from Bell Mobility to SaskTel was like changing the proverbial quatre trente sous pour une piastre as Bell Mobility used SaskTel’s network.

Starlink was immediately rejected as I didn’t move to an urban area to have spotty satellite service, so that left TelMex as the third real choice. I went on an expat forum as well as my neighbourhood Facebook group and asked others for their recent experiences. The majority of the stories were the same, TotalPlay installation can be difficult to schedule, but after that, the service is great. TelMex will set you up quickly, but leave you without service for weeks, similar to Canadian telco service levels. So I rescheduled TotalPlay, and this second time, they showed up.

The tech was pretty friendly. I explained my current setup and asked if we could just reuse Izzi’s cabling. He said yes and no, that he had to bring in his own cables to the TotalPlay equipment, but if after I left I wanted to disconnect additional cabling from the Izzi modem and plug it into the TotalPlay modem, I could, but that couldn’t happen when he was there for Reasons. With Izzi, I had “entradas” in the living room for the TV and the master Deco of my mesh system, one in the guest room for guests to hardwire, and then the main line leading to the modem in my office. He was replacing two of those, office and living room, so that just left the guest room that I could hopefully still use with Izzi’s cabling plugged into TotalPlay’s modem. I was also only allowed two entradas, so that eliminated my request for him to add a third upstairs. I asked him to run the office entrada where I have my current mess of wires but requested that he change the location of the entrada in the living room so I could flip my furniture! Side note here that I am going to have to do a post about that because, wow, the change was so impactful as to be almost equivalent to moving!

Satisfied that we had a plan and that my mesh network would continue to serve me, I let him work… for six hours. When he came to my office, I went to the living room and moved furniture around. By the time that was done, he was ready to set up the TV and the new cable box. I use an Apple TV device, and like with Izzi, there are conflicts between the cable box and the Apple TV, so I can’t have both plugged in at the same time. My Apple TV is ancient and on the fritz, so a project in the near-term is to reexamine if I even need an Apple TV or if I can get all my streaming apps (including Apple TV+) through the Izzi cable box. If so, then that’ll simplify things greatly. But in the meantime, he set up a switch for me to make it easier to go between both services. What I like about the cable box is that it came with a bonus speaker. My Samsung TV audio is really not great and the speaker really makes a difference, so I’m motivated to switch to the cable box.

The switch also enabled us to hard wire my Apple TV and main Deco (with my own ethernet cords). To our immense surprise, the Deco just switched to the new service without my having to set up my mesh network again! So I still have the main house network name and password that, while secure, is MUCH easier to type in than the TotalPlay password. That just left my Ring doorbell to set up, which is a whole Thing that involves a repeater and yet another network… but that network also did not need to be set up again! The switchover ended up being so much easier than I expected, even if I have a lot of excess cabling to deal with.

The surprises kept coming, though. Not satisfied with just giving me a bonus speaker and switch, the tech pulled out a phone as well, which was most certainly not included in the installation. It’s identical to the phone Izzi gave me, but I knew they’d want theirs back as it was part of the installation package. I thought we were done at this point, but the tech had a final surprise. I’m not sure how he did this without my noticing, but… he had installed a third entrada upstairs, with a Wi-Fi repeater! I now have excellent service upstairs for the first time. Before, I could just barely connect to my mesh system. I ended the day giving the tech twice the tip I’d initially planned to give him.

I lived with the new service for a few weeks and it worked great, so it was time to cancel Izzi, and I wanted to do that before my next bill. I kept putting it off because it involved a phone call and going to the office in person, but today being the day before the next bill was set to be issued, I had to get on this task! I called and got through the phone tree easily thanks to all the steps being printed on the website. There was a 10-minute wait to speak to a rep, so I took the option to have them call me back, which they did within the promised 10 minutes.

The rep I finally got ahold of spoke very quickly, but I only had to ask him to repeat himself twice in the whole call, so it wasn’t too difficult of a task to deal with him. He tried to do the retention spiel on me, and I cut him off saying that tech support didn’t want to retain me as a client and I already have new service installed, so it’s too late. To his credit, he stopped talking and said he was going to put me on hold while he generated a folio number for me to take to a branch in person to return my equipment. That was a quick wait, and he slowed down enough for me to catch the very long folio number in one try. He then told me I had to go to the office today, confirming that my new invoice will be generated tonight so I’d have to pay $1,000 when today my account balance was zero. So that was very kind of him, more like the Izzi customer service I’m used to.

I then quickly packed up the modem, phone, cable box, and remote control, then headed to the nearest Izzi office, which is at Gran Plaza. I did not have to wait to see someone there, but I did have to wait for a manager to go through my last technical support chat. She was Not Happy. I hope the tech doesn’t lose her job! I knew that day that I should have probably escalated the call and Izzi would have given me the moon, but I’d already made the decision to switch and TotalPlay was just better value at that point, so it is what it is.

As I was heading upstairs from the Izzi office to get tacos in the food court, I was stopped by a TotalPlay rep wanting to sign me up for service! I told her I’m already a customer, and she told me to remember the booth is there if I ever have any issues. Really, other than that blip with Izzi tech support, telecom service in this country has been a dream after the absolute nightmare that was dealing with telecom in Canada!