Dinner at our favourite pre-flight burger joint, Fiamma Burger in downtown Bellingham...
My rather unhealthy-looking burger...
Catching a ride at Houston Airport on one of those zippy little airport carts. Apparently all you have to do to get on board is make a half-joking hitchhike gesture!
Breakfast at Ruby's Diner in Houston Airport. Pancakes with syrup (maple or otherwise) and bacon is a common combination on this continent!
First glimpse of Mexico!
Cozumel Airport...
From the airport, we took a USD $8pp collectivo (a common form of Mexican public transport; a shuttle bus that leaves once it fills up rather than according to a schedule) to our hotel, Casa del Mar. Casa del Mar is in the hotel zone south of Cozumel's main town, San Miguel, and very close to one of the island's two cruise ship terminals. You can imagine our excitement when we saw from the windows of the collectivo that one of the ships in port that day was Royal Caribbean's Voyager of the Seas... the very ship that brought us to North America in December 2008! We also saw lots of scooters, crazy driving and fancy hotels.
Here's our "standard room" at Casa del Mar... and the exciting view from our window at the back of the hotel! (The "superior rooms" at the front of the hotel look out on the sparkling blue Caribbean Sea and daily-changing cruise ships... for only $10 more per night. But who needs to get one when you can just visit friends in theirs?!)
Now might be a good time to mention that we weren't in Cozumel by ourselves! The major purpose of the trip was to do a lot of scuba diving, and we had coordinated the timing of it with two east coast American couples we are friends with: Ken and Liesl (who is Ben's second cousin), and Peter and Marissa (K&L's good friends). All four have previously featured in this blog - here, here, here, here and here. Ken and Liesl had arrived the day before us, and Peter and Marissa would arrive the following day, so once we had dumped our bags we set off to find K&L - who had spent the morning diving. It was a joyful reunion as we hadn't seen them since their wedding weekend 18 months ago!
Here we are enjoying a late lunch with Ken and Liesl at Paprika, a restaurant just north of our hotel. In a delightfully small-world moment, our young Mexican waiter told us he'd once had a girlfriend from Bargara, Queensland... a town that is 15 minutes away from where Ben and I met!!!
Ben's fish tacos...
My coconut shrimp...
After napping for a while in the afternoon, Ben and I took an evening walk in the direction of town to see what we could see. The road into San Miguel is alongside the ocean, and it was surprisingly quiet for a Friday night. We wondered if this was due to it being Easter Friday, but over the next 9 days we realised that Cozumel just doesn't have a raging nightlife (except for perhaps the most touristy area of San Miguel). We also enjoyed the novelty of greeting some of the locals in Spanish! (We had done a few Pimsleur Spanish lessons on mp3 before the trip.)
Our walk turned out to be 6km long, with the turnaround point being a large supermarket called Chedraui on the southern edge of town...
Foreign supermarkets are always very interesting to explore, and we bought some clothes, bakery goodies and bottled water (the only type it's recommended to drink in Mexico) before leaving at closing time for the long walk back to the hotel.
And that was our first day in Mexico. This blog entry was going to include the next two days of diving as well, but I think it is plenty long enough already! To be continued...
Catching a ride at Houston Airport on one of those zippy little airport carts. Apparently all you have to do to get on board is make a half-joking hitchhike gesture!
Breakfast at Ruby's Diner in Houston Airport. Pancakes with syrup (maple or otherwise) and bacon is a common combination on this continent!
First glimpse of Mexico!
Cozumel Airport...
From the airport, we took a USD $8pp collectivo (a common form of Mexican public transport; a shuttle bus that leaves once it fills up rather than according to a schedule) to our hotel, Casa del Mar. Casa del Mar is in the hotel zone south of Cozumel's main town, San Miguel, and very close to one of the island's two cruise ship terminals. You can imagine our excitement when we saw from the windows of the collectivo that one of the ships in port that day was Royal Caribbean's Voyager of the Seas... the very ship that brought us to North America in December 2008! We also saw lots of scooters, crazy driving and fancy hotels.
Here's our "standard room" at Casa del Mar... and the exciting view from our window at the back of the hotel! (The "superior rooms" at the front of the hotel look out on the sparkling blue Caribbean Sea and daily-changing cruise ships... for only $10 more per night. But who needs to get one when you can just visit friends in theirs?!)
Now might be a good time to mention that we weren't in Cozumel by ourselves! The major purpose of the trip was to do a lot of scuba diving, and we had coordinated the timing of it with two east coast American couples we are friends with: Ken and Liesl (who is Ben's second cousin), and Peter and Marissa (K&L's good friends). All four have previously featured in this blog - here, here, here, here and here. Ken and Liesl had arrived the day before us, and Peter and Marissa would arrive the following day, so once we had dumped our bags we set off to find K&L - who had spent the morning diving. It was a joyful reunion as we hadn't seen them since their wedding weekend 18 months ago!
Here we are enjoying a late lunch with Ken and Liesl at Paprika, a restaurant just north of our hotel. In a delightfully small-world moment, our young Mexican waiter told us he'd once had a girlfriend from Bargara, Queensland... a town that is 15 minutes away from where Ben and I met!!!
Ben's fish tacos...
My coconut shrimp...
After napping for a while in the afternoon, Ben and I took an evening walk in the direction of town to see what we could see. The road into San Miguel is alongside the ocean, and it was surprisingly quiet for a Friday night. We wondered if this was due to it being Easter Friday, but over the next 9 days we realised that Cozumel just doesn't have a raging nightlife (except for perhaps the most touristy area of San Miguel). We also enjoyed the novelty of greeting some of the locals in Spanish! (We had done a few Pimsleur Spanish lessons on mp3 before the trip.)
Our walk turned out to be 6km long, with the turnaround point being a large supermarket called Chedraui on the southern edge of town...
Foreign supermarkets are always very interesting to explore, and we bought some clothes, bakery goodies and bottled water (the only type it's recommended to drink in Mexico) before leaving at closing time for the long walk back to the hotel.
And that was our first day in Mexico. This blog entry was going to include the next two days of diving as well, but I think it is plenty long enough already! To be continued...
4 comments:
Ahh, the joys of booking cheap flights at ridiculous hours, and spending the next few days napping to make up for the lack of sleep! ;-)
Looking forward to the next few posts and hearing all about your dives!
Can't wait to see if your underwater camera worked! Hurry!
Awesome pics...what are the watermelon things?? (I'm assuming they're not real watermelons??)
Cookies/ biscuits, Rox!
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