Playa Del Carmen

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Originally uploaded by theslaad.

At around and hour further along the coast from Cancun, Playa Del Carmen is the most touristy place that we have been so far on our whole trip. Lots of the Mexican people speak English, something that we haven't come across elsewhere, and everthing is around twice as expensive as in the rest of Mexico. But there is a stunning blue Carribean Sea and nice white sand beach here.

When we arrived we walked around getting extremely sweaty, trying to find somewhere cheap enough to stay. Our guide book and the internet had been no help so we had been a bit worried that we'd end up spending far too much money. We have ended up in a $50 a night place, not quite the $16 a night we paid for our time by the beach in Vietnam!

We went for a look around the town, which mainly consists of a long pedestrianised avenue one road back from the sea front. Playa is a new town that was built to accomodate people who were taking the ferry across to Cozumel, but has grown into a resort in it's own right. As a result there is no plaza or cathedral or any of the other features typical of every other Mexican town. The avenue is full of expensive restaurants and souvenir shops, not much else. As we were walking along a guy asked us if we were interested in going diving. After we had been talking to him for a while he offered us a special promotion! As we were English, married and over 30 we could go for a 90 minute sales presentation and breakfast at the Mayan Palace Hotel and in return he would give us a snorkle and dive trip, 2 ferry tickets to Cozumel and a bottle of tequila & a bottle of kahlua for just $20, not bad we thought.

So yesterday morning we were picked up in a taxi and taken a bit further than we realised to the hotel. We then spent from 10 o clock to around 1:30 listening to a lady trying to sell us a timeshare in their hotel. Except she said empatically that it isn't timeshare, but a vacation club! We said no to her, then her manager came and offered us a deal, we said no to him, and when we thought we'd escaped and could get our gifts another guy started offering us reduced packages, we said no! In the end we got our tickets and stuff though. The time spent was irritating, but didn't matter that much to us, but we did feel sorry for the people who were in the taxi back with us who had spent a day of their 6 day holiday being hassled.
In the evening we went down to the beach to watch the beautiful lunar eclipse. We thought that it was pretty cool that there might be people at home watching it at the same time as us. It wasn't quite as impressive here as it was still quite light, but got darker for watching the full moon return.