May 26 to June 2

We couldn’t decide where to go this vacation. As little as three years ago we could fly into Cancun for $350. This year it was tough to find anything for less than $600 on Sun Country or American and Delta was $900.

I discovered that it only costs $500 to fly from Minneapolis to Grand Cayman. Crazy, isn’t it? Airfare is cheaper to the Caymans than Cancun. We looked at going to Grand Cayman but for one reason or another it didn’t work out. Maybe next year.

Last November I got a great deal from Sky Auction for the Westin Lagunamar in Cancun and I liked the resort. I got the same offer from Sky Auction so I booked the Westin again for $330 for the week.

Unfortunately two days before we were to leave I got an email from Sky Auction saying that the Westin was no longer available. Really? In May? How can that be? Sky Auction gave me several alternative resorts to choose from. The Royal Sands appeared to be the best option so we took it. I drove a hard bargain though, since I was going from the Westin which is a 4 star resort to the Royal Sands which is a 3.5 star resort, they gave me a $100 Sky Auction credit.

We flew Sun Country into Cancun. It was a direct flight so we departed Minneapolis at 6 am and we were in Cancun shortly after 10 am. We got our luggage and cleared customs and immigration. I was a little worried about clearing customs because I was carrying a CPU that I bought off Ebay for the dive shop owner’s computer. It was a $30 part but I wasn’t sure what customs would do it they found it in my luggage. Fortunately we got the green light.

I had used Easy Way car rental last November and had good luck with them so we rented with them again. My rental experience wasn’t as good this time but I didn’t run into any major issues.

I reserved a Jetta through their website. They did all of the paperwork then brought us out to a Nissan Tiida that was a manual not the automatic that I had requested. I was fine with the change, they reduced my rental charge according to the car and manual transmission but charged me for collision insurance. My Visa card covers damage to the car so I never get collision. I just wanted to get to the resort so I took the car and paid the insurance.

The Royal Sands

Check in was fast and painless. Once we got to our room we only had to wait minutes for our luggage to arrive. The room was nice, it was large and the beds were a little more comfortable than the usual Mexican bed. We had a TV (old school CRT), coffee maker, refrigerator, dishes and a safe. The bathroom and vanity were okay, nothing special.

My wife has a friend whose parents have a condo at the Royal Sands and they love it. I think my wife liked the resort a little more than I did. It’s not that I didn’t like the Royal Sands but compared to the Westin Lagunamar, where we were supposed to be staying (and I had stayed six months earlier), it wasn’t as nice.

Since we were up at the crack of dawn most days to go diving we didn’t use a lot of the amenities at the resort.

Both of the Royal Sands pools were nice. We stayed near the smaller pool so we lounged at that pool. The beach area is beautiful, miles of white sand beach and turquoise water. We took several forty-five minute walks along the beach after we returned from diving. Since it was off season we didn’t have a problem getting a paylapa and the resort. The waiters were attentive but not obtrusive.

We didn’t eat many meals at the resort. We had buffet breakfast just one morning and lunch on our last full day. The breakfast was good, $13pretty much what you would pay at most resorts. Lunch was mahi tacos and they were very good. We regretted that we did not have more chances to enjoy lunch at the Royal Sands.

What I liked most about the resort was the grocery store. To call it a grocery store is an understatement. It was a grocery store, coffee shop, and liquor store all rolled into one.

Our stay at the Royal Sands was good. We didn’t have any problems, all of the staff was helpful and friendly and the waiters were excellent. We would definitely stay there again.

 

Dining in Cancun

As I mentioned above breakfast at the Royal Sands was a little expensive but good. Normally I would have ordered just pancakes but they were $8 so I opted for the breakfast buffet for $13.

The mahi tacos at the Royal Sands were far and away the best lunch we had while in Cancun.

I brought my wife to my favorite restaurants from the previous November. We ate at Taco Grill, La Pizzeria Pizzara, and Mr. Papa’s. They were all good but our meal at La Pizzeria Pizzara was the best food that we had at La Isla. We had a grilled shrimp pasta and a margarita pizza.

I brought Karen down to the Forum by the Sea shopping center to have lunch at Carlos and Charlies. The food is decent and we had a seat at the rail so the people watching was good.

We had two really nice dinners while in Cancun. The first was at Captain’s Cove.

 Captain’s Cove is a large restaurant located directly on the lagoon. We were seated at the railing overlooking the lagoon. We ordered the seafood special, they brought a large platter of seafood that included lobster tails, muscles, scallops, grilled fish and clams. Everything was really good.

I didn’t know it but the entertainment at the restaurant was provided by the crocodiles that gather in the lagoon below the railing where I was seated.

I happened to look over the raining while we were dining and saw a ten foot crocodile looking up at me. I didn’t feed him so he literally moved from table to table looking for food, just like a begging dog.

The other really nice restaurant we ate at was Limoncello, also located on the lagoon. The interior is leaded glass and stained wood. It was so nice inside it made me wonder how they protect it during a hurricane. The food was good but I didn’t see any crocodiles.

Dining in Puerto Morelos

We had lunch in Puerto Morelos every day after diving, so it gave us a chance to eat at some of our favorite restaurants.

Our first lunch was La Casa de Pescadora. It’s located on the square in Puerto Morelos and we’ve eaten here several times. Karen had lobster and I had grilled grouper. Both meals were really good.

We also had lunch at Ojo de Agua twice. It’s located directly on the beach so you are guaranteed a steady breeze and an ocean view. I had chicken tacos both times and fajitas. What we liked best about the restaurant was the habanero sauce that came with the chips. It was smoking hot.

Our last lunch in Puerto Morelos was at Pelicanos, it’s located on the beach adjacent to the town square. We ate here several years ago when we stopped on the way back from Puerto Adventuras to the airport. It was how we discovered Puerto Morelos. We had grilled shimp that was very good. We were serenaded by a local musician.

 

 

Diving in Cancun/Isla Mujeres

We had one day of diving in Cancun because there was a fishing tournament in Puerto Morelos and the dive shops weren’t going out.

I’ve read about the underwater museum or Musa is the Spanish word. It’s supposed to be located near Cancun. I contacted a local dive shop and arranged for us to dive it.

We boarded the dive boat in Cancun and motored directly to south point Isla Mujeres which I found oddly funny. If you look through previous posts on this blog you’ll see that we’ve dived Isla Mujeres a lot. None of the dive masters have ever given us the option of diving Musa or even mentioned it. I think the reason most shops don’t dive Musa is because it’s only 25 feet deep. It’s more of a snorkeler’s site than a dive site.

Manchiones reef was our first dive. We’ve dove it many times before. Our dive master borrowed my camera twice during the dive. He took a picture of a dog fish. It was hiding under a rock so it is not a great picture but as you can see below it’s a strange looking fish.

The other picture was a great photo of a christmas tree worm.

We saw large schools of yellow tail snapper and grunts. We also saw a huge stingray, it had to be over six feet from wing tip to wing tip.

At the end of the dive we came across two statues. These were the prototypes for Musa. One was a man and a dog near a cabinet or bookshelf. The other statue was a fire man and the kind of weird coincidence is it has fire coral growing on it.

If you do deeper dives you normally need a surface interval of half an hour to forty five minutes between dives. You do this to allow the nitrogen to flush from your system. Since these dives were so shallow the dive master changed our tanks and we were back in the water again.

The dive master explained to us that the statues are made from full body casts of real people. The statues are made from ph neutral clay that is designed to easily grow coral. The statues were created in groups of ten that are held together with rebar.

He also told us that his girlfriend left him for the artist and she was one of the statues that we would see, he didn’t point her out though.

As we approached Musa a huge jack swam out from behind the statues. Most of the statues are covered in growth but volunteers clean several of them, for dramatic effect. As we were swimming around the statues a group of six large gray angel fish came over to check us out. They didn’t seem to be bothered by us and hung around for a while.

The final sculpture we saw was a full size VW bug with a person curled up on the hood. The dive master took several pictures of Karen and I swimming next to the VW that we will probably use for our Christmas cards.

 

 

Diving in Puerto Morelos

Even though we were staying in Cancun we decided to dive out of Puerto Morelos. We opted for Puerto Morelos because when I dived Cancun the previous November I had to drive ten minutes to the dive shop followed by a forty minute boat ride through the lagoon to the dive site. It’s only a twenty five minute drive to Puerto Morelos so it takes about the same amount of time to reach the dive site.

For some reason my wife decided that it was time to get our advanced open water certification so we booked the training with our favorite dive shop on the Yucatan mainland, Aquanauts.

We started the class at 9 am. It began with a review of the chapters we had read in our text book followed by a buoyancy refresher in the pool.

Our first dive was at El Bajo. It was our peak performance dive for certification. We demonstrated that we could control our buoyancy. During the dive we saw the largest lobster I’ve seen in the wild. We also saw a large green eel, a small eagle ray and some small turtles feeding on the sea grass.

The second dive of the day was Mini Reef. This was our fish ID dive. This was simple, both Karen and I have been learning the different fish species since we started diving.

One of the optional dives that we chose for our certification was a night dive. We scheduled it for our first day, which made for a long day.

We had several hours to kill before the night dive so we had a late lunch at La Casa de Pescadora and went back to the shop to meet William for our night dive.

We encountered a lot of sea life. We saw huge sleeping sea turtles, lobsters, puffer fish and sleeping file fish. I finally got to touch one and it is true their scales are so rough they feel like a file.

William is always pushing the envelope. Part way through the dive he had us turn off our flashlights and after a few seconds our eyes adjusted and we swam around the reef in the dark for at least three to four minutes. William and Karen swam ahead of me in the dark and as they swam through the water their fins left sinusoidal trails of bioluminescence. I had to wonder if it was a test, was William waiting to see which one of us would break first and turn our light on?

I ruined one of our dive lights during the dive. It had an insulating piece of cardboard to keep the batteries from draining between dive trips. I removed the cardboard before the dive and when I screwed the lens piece back on the o-ring that keeps the water out didn’t seal properly and allowed the saltwater to short out the light. The light died half way through the dive. Luckily William had given us spares.

It was 10 pm by the time we got back to our room in Cancun and we were salt encrusted and tired. We needed to be back in Puerto Morelos by 8:30 am so we went right to bed.

Our first dive the following day was the C56 wreck. This dive was one of the optional dives for our advanced open water certification. This was the third time we dove the C56. I had equipment problems the last time I dived the wreck. We were in the hold of the ship (of course) and I noticed that when I inhaled my air pressure decreased. That is not supposed to happen. Eventually my gauge hit zero as I inhaled and I had no air. I signaled the dive master and we buddy breathed to the surface. I’m still a little apprehensive about diving in enclosed areas.

It was a good dive. There can be a fair amount of current at the wreck but there was almost none that day. We followed the line from the buoy at the surface to the bow of the boat, then swam to the stern and entered the hold. Swimming through any wreck is exciting. You’re usually in confined spaces and sections can be dark or at least dimly lit.

We swam from the stern to the bow and came out through an opening in the front of the boat.

When we finished swimming through the hold Jose indicates to us to enter the cabin area. The last two times we dived the wreck we only did the hold and I wasn’t aware that you can dive through the cabin area of the ship. We entered the cabin area through an opening over the deck gun. The lighting was better on this deck than in the hold.

We had seen a lot of sea life every time we dived the C56. We saw eagle rays the first two times but not this time. We did see a huge barracuda, a large school of jacks and many other fish. There was a cleaner station at the front hold of the ship. I watched a trunk fish get parasites pecked off of it by smaller fish.

We finished the dive and swam up the mooring line. As we did, a group of divers were coming down. We had to let go of the line and swim around them. Jose, our dive master, was a little pissed when we got in the boat. Divers coming up the rope have less air and should have the right of way.

The second dive was Paradise. This dive was compass navigation. I had smoething happen that had never happened before. I couldn’t clear my ears so I had to come up. To add insult to injury I had to wait in the bobbing boat for fifty minutes for everyone to finish their dive and I was battling to keep my lunch down. I did it buy just barely.

The following day turned out to be our last day of diving. We were suppose to dive on Thursday but the wind kicked up so we couldn’t go.

We started with a new wreck that William had found, It was the C40. We were joined by a Canadian couple for our dives. William was diving with the Canadians and Jose was with us. There was a lot of current at the dive site so the plan was to back roll into the water, meet at the mooring line, submerge and swim to the dive site.

That was the plan but none of us hit the mooring line so when I gi there Jose was signaling to us to go down. Karen was ahead of me so I followed her yellow fins as she descended. I looked and saw the Canadians struggling against the current.

The easiest way to deal with current is to swim as close tpo the ocean floor as you can. There is less current there. Karen and I met William at the wreck. Jose and the Canadians were nowhere to be found.

William was behind a piece of the wreck looking watching a school of fjish about ten yards away. He used hand signals to let us know that there was a big shark just past the school of fish. I was thinking nurse shark but when we surfaced he told is it was a Bull Shark. I would have loved to see one.

We made our way from the C40 to an airplane wreck that was a little ways away. All that was left of the airplane was part of a wing. On the way to the airplane we came across a large eagle ray feeding in the sand. We also saw a large green, a smaller eel and many fish.

The current made this a challenging dive but it also made it fun. When we got back to the boat we found out that the Canadian couple had trouble submerging in the current so Jose stayed with them and they explored a near by reef. Once in the boat they had some sharp words to say to each other… in French. Karen and I have been there, we had a tense boat ride back after Devil’s Throat.

This was one of those dives where you are working so hard battling the current that you don’t realize until after the dive how much fin it was. It was a battle getting down seventy feet and then battling the current once we were down.

The second dive wasn’t nearly as challenging, it was called Horseshoe. There was a lot of sealife at this site. There were large schools of grunts, we found a hermit crab in a conch shell and a small yellow ray that wasn’t disturbed by is at all.

The dive started with William finding a star basket attached to a piece of coral. He peeled it off the coral and set it on his hand for us to see. At first it looked like a weed but eventually it uncoiled into a strange looking starfish.

Recap

Flight

It was nice to fly Sun Country to Cancun. We parked at Humphrey Terminal which is only a few dollars more expensive per day than Park n Fly. The best thing was we had a direct flight so we were in Cancun just after 10 am.

Royal Sands Resort

Karen liked Royal Sands better than I did because I had stayed at at Westin Lagunamar the previous November. It reinforced the difference between a three and a half star resort and a four star resort. They were both nice but everything (except the grocery store) was just a little bit better at the Westin.

The room was large but the bathroom and the furnishings were a little dated.

The resort had a great store, it had everything from booze to produce.

The pools were beautiful and the beach was amazing. The food at the restaurant was very good and reasonable priced. The employees at the resort were professional and friendly.

Restaurants

Captain’s Cove and Limoncello were our favorite restaurants.

Diving

The two dives we did in Cancun were enjoyable. I’m glad that I finally dived the Musa. The diving in Puerto Morelos was very nice, especially the C56 and C40 wreck. Jose was a good dive master and it’s always nice to dive with William.

Car Rental

I had a couple of minor issues with Easy Way this trip but no “deal breakers” that would prevent me from renting with them again.