Cozumel Diving

Well the diving certainly makes you for the shit island. The coral is huge and very beautiful. There is quit an abundance of fish as a small area is marine protected, whatever that means. I don't get why they think protecting such a small area from fishing will spare the much larger area, i mean ecosystems are connected right. Animals aren't aware of where they can go and where they can't right? So if a turtle or fish steps outside of that area the it can be killed?!

Well anyway there seemed to be healthier coral and more turtles say than in The Corn Islands,  which is not protected. One Turtle approached me and hit my camera with its head seemingly unbothered! Another let me sit by our and watch it eat. I have never been that close to a turtle before.

What made this place super fun to dive in as well were the strong currents. You just floated and they pulled you along like you were flying, shooting past huge coral walls that drop off to 300m. These currents are also what make this area great due diving, giving it great visibility, and cleaning the ocean perhaps helping to maintain healthy coral.

Whale Sharks

Once a year, during the Mexican summer in July and August you can come to Holbox island, take a boat 22km north on the Gulf of Mexico, and right in the middle of the sea (which is as calm as a lake!) you find Whale Sharks and Mantarays cruising on the surface feeding on the plankton. This is why they come here. To feed! The water is green and murky too because the sea in the Gulf of Mexico is only 15m deep, even at 22km out! 

These creatures are amazing. They are so gentle, you can swim right up beside them and look in their eyes. Infact one swam right into me and brushed me out of the way with its mouth! You never touch them and try to keep 2m away although they are not shy and it is hard to not get too close at times. You have to swim fast to keep you with them... It's great exercise. 

Thanks Mariela, your traveling tips have never been wrong yet! 

The Cenotes

The Cenotes used to be coral reefs millions of years ago. Then there was a huge meteor that struck the Yucatan Peninsula. This caused vast destruction and also it blasted underground tunnels deep into the Mexican land. Several million years later an ice age covered the land and froze they oceans. The sheer weight of the ice collapsed the land in on itself into the underground tunnels. These formed openings, ways into the underground tunnel network that stretched for hundreds of miles. These openings are called the Cenotes. 

When the ice age finished the ice melted and filled the tunnels amd openings with water. Over millions of years these tunnels and caves slowly filled up with fresh water filtered through the land. Stalagmites were formed as the rain filtered through the land and dripped through calcium deposits left from the coral reefs that formed. This has produced fabulous Stalagmites that you can find throughout the entire cave system. 

The fresh water that flows from the cenotes flows into the sea, and sometimes mixes with the sea water. One of the reasons Bull Sharks can be found along the coast is they like the fresh water, they are the only species of fish that can also live in fresh water too. Really they are attracted to the fresh water because of the fish it brings with them. 

The cenotes are, in my view, one of the seven wonders of the world. Truely stunning:

Peten, Guatemala...El Remate and Tikkal

This was my last stop in Guatemala. After an amazing week sailing around the Rio Dulce with Tomasz I ended up here on a recommendation from Mariella. It was a good recommendation. She told me to go to a place called El Remate and swim in the lake (with crocodiles!) and see the view of the Crocodile mountain, meet her friends from the family run hostel and restaurant...at first I did none of this, but then because of the overpriced hotel accommodation in The Tikkal area and lack of camping space that was still hugely overpriced (like $15 for a leaking tent without any rain cover) I had to come back to the nearest town, which just happened to be El Remate! The guides at Tikkal had told me that it wasn't worth leaving and going back because of the expense of travel (going there and back) because they were all in it on it trying to make the hotels money and getting me to spend the maximum amount I could whilst at Tikkal.(this really annoyed me about the whole Tikkal thing) For example it cost $3 for tourists to get to Tikkal on a local bus and half that for locals! Then when you are there you have to pay $20 to get into the park (only $5 for locals), $20 more for a guide, and of course if you stay the night add on another $40 atleast. Still I didn't listen to anyone and hitched a lift back to El Remate with this really cool family who were fascinated by my 8 months of travel through Central America. They were super lovely and I hope they are reading this! Thanks for the lift!

Model Tikkal

I really really wanted to see a crocodile, but unfortunately I wasn't lucky enough

It is a pretty cool place Tikkal...it is just the number of tourists there, you don't feel like you are discovering anything new.

Tikkal...these were built as a temples...they used to sacrifice people at the bottom during the last few years of Mayan times...corruption in a society...what would have made this much more enjoyable is to have read a lot on the history of this civilization before going

Neptune at Tikkal (Alfred, my nephew, better be happy with this)

Me and Neptune at Tikkal

This place is literally in the jungle...must have been so overgrown when discovered. I think it was 600 years after the Mayan Cities were abandoned that the ruins were discovered.

Towering high...if you clapped the sound echoed off these two temples...they are aligned to the sunrise

Mayan ruins appearing out of the jungle

The lake by Peten, simply stunning

Like a peer out of a film hey?

The crocodile shaped mountain at El Remate

Mariella's canoe, I wanted to row around the lake and see a few crocodiles, but it had a hole in it and could have sank at anytime!

Mariella's friends at Casa Roja and the guest house

Guate! July 7th...

Guate is what the locals call Guatemala city, for short. I really didn't know what to expect after the craziness of Honduras and Tegucigalpa. I guess i was expecting a dangerous city where many muggings and bad things happen. The reality of it is though is that they seem to take the security situation a little more seriously. For example there are secure bus lines the green metro and the blue bus that everyone takes because you have to go through check points where there are police and turn styles and the blue bus only let's you on with a card. This significantly reduces the chances of bus robberies like what i experienced in Honduras. There are of course still problems but this seems to happen on the red buses that are the hop on hop off style that allows anyone.

Guate's streets and buildings look old and worn out. Like no one has really bothered to upkeep them for years, probably because they haven't! There is an old disused train running through the city that is overgrown with grass and there is a museum with the train that used to run on those lines in a train Depot in the centre of the city.

The couch surfers i met in Guate all had cars though, it's just the way you get around there. The public transport isn't that great, doesn't run late so if you want to be able to get around easily you need a car. The problem with this is though when on a night out. Most people seem to drink and drive. Some people i met here seem to think it makes them better drivers. It is a crazy mentality, if what i have been brought up to believe about drinking and driving is true.

The most interesting part of Guate for me was 6th Street. Here loads of entertainers come to perform and make money. We saw these amazing break dancers. There also seems like there is a really cool underground party scene.

I was fortunate enough to meet some amazing people in Guate specifically Kevin and his two friends Ana and Mariela. I had a good night out with them on the Saturday and then got to stay in Mariella's amazing house. It was beautiful. She had her own part to the house and then there was this amazing garden with a yoga/meditation tree house. Kevin also took me and Ana up the Volcano Pacaya on the Saturday, which was a bit of a disappointment because we had to pay the guide 20 dollars, but all he did was take us on a walk that we could easily have gone on...

The other guy i met in Guate, who i couch surfed with for the first few days was the bloke called Raul. He was just a bit weird really. His house was empty, no food or furniture, in a gated community on the outskirts of the city, so not really close to anything. He was hardly there so quite a few nights i was just left sitting in the house on my own not sure what to do. He was clearly gay but for some reason he felt he needed to tell me. I kinda realized by the end he was not really my friend either. He just wanted me to teach in his English school as it looked good to his pupils. Also i basically ended up taking the lessons, it was weird because for some reason Raul didn't want to and was texting on his phone all the time... It made me appreciate how shit it is actually when you are with someone and they are on their phone the whole time. The final straw with him was was when he offered to give me a lift to Antigua. I thought he was going to show me around but it turned out to be a family foto shoot in the town, which i wasn't invited to, and then as soon as this became apparent he just dropped in the park with all my stuff, and said bye! He was just a pretty crappy host really.

However i did enjoy taking his English lessons, even if maybe he was just using me for free teaching! I wouldn't mind doing more English teaching.

Cozumel and Playa del Carmen

Getting off the bus and walking through the streets of playa del Carmen I immediately had the feeling of being in some Spanish holiday resort. There were burger restaurants, American bars, souvenir shops, many well fed Americans, British holidaymakers, a town square with some local music playing put on for the tourists and some Aztec Indians dressed up so the kids could get their picture with them. The streets were clean and newly built. No building was older than 30 years. Basically there was nothing Mexican about it. I wanted to leave immediately. So I got my ferry ticket to Cozumel in the hope this was an untouched hidden gem with long white sandy beaches. How wrong i was!

So this is the tropical paradise of Playa Del Carmen, it stank...to be fair though atleast the sea weed is a completely natural unavoidable thing here, unlike the town...I guess you could say this may have been the most naturally beautiful thing about the place

The first thing that bothered me was the unfriendly people in the queue to the ferry, a couple with a huge red suitcase who had just come from a week in an all inclusive holiday resort with a private beach in Playa Del Carmen (apparently much nicer than the shitty beach with stinking sea weed that we were standing next to). Reluctantly they spoke to me (I tried to tell them about my adventure but I could see they would just never get it) to tell me they had a great deal on this for $100 a night. (all inclusive you see) I said I could only afford $10! To which the the girl replied it was what you save up for to go to a place like that -  yeah right. She said I was on a different budget cause I was traveling. True I guess, but still who wants to pay $100 a night for some manufactured holiday, a lot of people by the looks of Playa Del Carmen. They assured me Cozumel was much nicer and the American boyfriend had had family there for years -  it's always a bad sign if a place has become an American retirement spot!

Then on the ferry I was met by stewards with fresh make-up and clean uniforms. She wouldn't let me take my backpack on the ferry but insisted I put it in the luggage cart. I said no because I didn´t want it thrown around as it might break the remains of my laptop! Eventually she called someone over who escorted me to the location of the bags where I could leave mine, about 5 metres away. It was as if I had broken one of the ten-commandments by the looks on her face. This made me think of that shitty cargo ferry I took for 7 hours to get the Corn Islands, just how different and underdeveloped, but more fun it was. The next bad Omen for Cozumel was the constant adverts playing in the passenger lounge telling me about all the deals I could get if I go to Jerry´s burger bar, or some bike rental place. Apparently with my boat ticket I can get a huge margerita that looks like it could quench the alcoholic thirst of 10! Or you could get a free shot of Tequila if you went to the Mexican themed bar, it would make you feel just like you were in Mexico. (just go to the real Mexico for Gods sake) This just all made me feel massively depressed and I immediately knew I was not going to like this place.

However, my couch-surfing host is an amazingly awesome guy. He met me in his rented out Volkswagen Beetle infront of the ferry port. This car was old, it looked like it could fall apart at any minute, no hand break, gears you could only guess at, a steering wheel that wobbled and never went straight, and a clutch that barely functioned. Still for an old car it was pretty nippy! I got up to atleast 100km/h when I drove along the coastal roads. We had also stopped off for a crate beers that we ended up consuming while driving round, a little irresponsible but fun nonetheless. First we drove along the main Cozumel beach front. From Playa Del Carmen I had seen sky scrapers in the distance, I hoped this wasn´t the dream island, unfortunately it was. It was like driving along a rather shitty Hollywood Boulevard. There was a Cartier shop, next to a gift shop with Mexican nick-nacks, followed by an American Bar and fake Tacos restaurant, and then a huge Hotel. All this is built up for the cruise ships that come through, 8 a day! Que Horrible. Still I enjoyed being with my host, he was wonderfully eccentric and smart and the best host you could ever ask for. I believe he had deliberately hired the car just to show me around.

We drove all around the island, to the very northern point where there was some hippy rasta bar and waves crashing on the rocks. Unfortunately Cozumel has no real beaches, absolutely nothing like the beaches of Little Corn Island. I have to stay that place is yet to be beaten after all the places I have been to in the Carribean so far it stands out far far more in natural beauty. Still I am going explore it a bit on Edgar's bike and do a dive tomorrow morning, then leave to Tulum and maybe this really remote but amazing sounding place called Xcalak.

Edgar in his VW Beetle!

Stopped off at the beach

Me behind the wheel, I did not drink and drive! (actually I did, sorry Mum and Dad, it isn't illegal here and I was fine)

LOL...so there is a church next to Edgar's house that worships very very loudly ever evening...Edgar has put up with it for too long, so instead of joining them he is attempting to beat them on sound level and bought a Centauri 2, Alien speaker that goes God knows how loud...actually God probably does know because he blasts some damn good music into the church next door and completely drowns out their sounds...he makes a special effort to play a really loud song during a sermon or prayers so that people get the message more! Actually to be fair he isn't a dick about it, he only plays loudly when they are singing loudly.

Are we in Spain here?

A big concrete block of a hotel, just sprawling blocks of offices, shops and hotels

Some crappy American themed bar

And another...that's right get drunk and stop yourself from being bored in this shitty place!

Americans getting their holiday snaps...

It concerns me that this really is someone's cup of tea...

So the deal with this is is that aged American tourists get off their cruise ships for a few hours to see Cozumel, and also to restock on their extremely expensive medications that cost about half the price here...this is part of Edgar Llimbo (my couch surfing hosts job) he is a GP and he basically has to treat these people coming to the island and prescribe them whatever they need to keep themselves alive for the next two weeks of their cruise

The only cultural thing I could find on this island...a Mexican grave yard with varying sizes of family graves...

It was a bit like a small town...

Not every family was rich...

I'm not quite sure who this was meant to represent...the matriarch of the family?

This family literally built a church for themselves...who knows who the Gonzalez´s were or are?