Here is a screen capture from the GoPro video my son took on our snorkle trip to hunt down El Tiburón Ballena Poderoso.
We were amazed, enthralled, astounded, stupefied, stultified, and enchanted. We were also beat up by the pounding boat ride.
There were five in our party, so we paid only a few more pesos to get the boat to ourselves, which meant we could leave the dock at 06:00 instead of 07:00. We had to race from the Gulf of Mexico, East across to, and out into the Caribbean. Near the Yucatan, the Caribbean is deeper than the GoM, so the waves are bigger. On our trip, about five feet vs three feet. I'll be sixty in Feb. and it's been years, decades, since I put my body through that kind of trauma for four hours to get there and back. I've also made no secret of the fact that I get sea sick as soon as the lines are cast off.
I was doing alright on the trip out, until my first jump and the Sun, swallowing a big mouthful of ocean, and the pounding and the waves all converged to make me feel sick. I threw up while in the water, just before climbing back into the boat. Wild, I don't actually have a big problem with sea sickness. I am very well acquainted with it. I feel bad, I toss it over the side and all is well for the next hour or so. Usually it's better to just let it go and say good bye to it sooner, rather then later. I have never been sick in the water before. I felt all better after that, but it sapped my energy on the trip home and I suffered such sore muscles the next day. I burned slightly through my long sleeved dive shirt so I fell easy pray to a cold and finally, a little (a lot) Montezuma's revenge.
Still, the island is a beautiful place, the people are incredible and we enjoyed ourselves immensely. The tiburóns were like moose of the sea; they just ignore you and do their thing undisturbed, too big to feel threatened by us mere mortals.
Ceasar, of Gama Extreme Tours, hooked us up with a friend to drive us, the next day, to Valladolid, where we found a beautiful AirBnB with guest membership to the pool of Maison de Marques, next door.
What luck, there was a honey festival going on in the central square. We are going to steal one vendor's method of handing out honey samples. They opened a box, pulled out a frame of honeycomb, and used a small plastic spoon to scoop a little gouge out of it. We visited cenote Zaci and enjoyed the local flavors and prowled around an old ruined monastery turned museum.
Between my unfortunate condition and my son's work demands that kept him as tied to his phone and a computer as I was to a nearby baño, we missed out on the Mayan ruins. Rumor has it that the dozens of tour busses that pass through, jam the streets and stop for an hour on the square from Cancun everyday, all dump thousands of tourist at the ruins, so it's not as great a visit as it could be.
-Will
