Postcards from Paradise- Part 3

Tuesday
Tuesday we woke early and headed to Isla Mujeres for the day.






Isla Mujeres is a tiny island just off the coast of Cancun. Isla Mujeres means Island of Pretty Women, or something like that. I guess when it was discovered by the Spanish, they thought the women there were pretty. It is very quaint, with lots of fun little cement buildings and tourist traps.






We all piled into 3 taxis, there were 12 people in our Suburban. It was funny how packed we were so I took a picture. We paid $35 to go to the ferry, so we decided we would ride the bus home rather than taking the taxi. On the way to the ferry, we passed a convoy of 4 vehicles. The front and back vehicles were trucks. In the back of the trucks were 2 soldiers each, with machine guns that were pointed at the traffic. One of the soldiers watched us as we drove by. His face was very intimidating. It kind of scared the kids. I thought about taking a picture, but I didn't want to make the soldiers angry.








We rode a ferry over to the island. It was fun to sit up on top in the open air and watch the beautiful blue ocean. The color of the water here is amazingly bright teal blue.

Then we rented 5 golf carts to drive around the island together. Jordan was really excited for this part because he has always wanted to drive, but he was too young. Now he has his driver's permit, so he was able to drive part of the time. My family ended up having the slowest golf cart, which is funny, because the same thing happened last time too. It drives David crazy, and I told him it must be to teach him patience. He's not very patient when driving. We drove around the island, stopping at all of the tourist traps.

We stopped at the site of a tiny Mayan Ruin.They have fenced it off, and charge an outrageous amount to go see it. We have never bothered with that, but we always go just outside and feed the iguana's that live on the cliffs nearby. We brought some bananas to feed them, and they ate them all, including the peel!

We swam with a shark! Ok, so it was a nurse shark, and it was very docile. I'm not even sure it had any teeth! It had really cool skin though. It was rough, like sandpaper.

We stopped at a turtle hatchery. In Mexico, when a turtle lays her eggs, the government goes and digs them up as part of a conservation program. Turtles aren't very careful where they lay their eggs, and sometimes they lay them below the high tide line, which will kill the eggs.

Sometimes they are dug up by predators, and if the eggs make it to hatching, very few survive the trip to the ocean. The government digs them up, and puts them in a safe place. The sex of a turtle is determined by how deep it is buried, so they bury them carefully to make a good ratio of male and female. Then when the eggs hatch, they either give them a safe trip into the water, or they keep them until the turtles get bigger and have a better chance for survival.

We stopped for lunch at an amazing restaurant called Zama. Actually, it's not just a restaurant. It's more of a resort. But it's not a hotel, just a pool area and eating area. The food was excellent, but the best part was the pool! You could walk from your table, over to a ledge, and jump down about 5 feet into the pool. At first the staff wasn't going to let us stay, because they said we had to spend a minimum of $20 per person on food and drinks to swim there. My brother-in-law Mark told the waiter, "We're not going to spend $20 dollars each, but we have 25 people here. Every one of us will order lunch. Are you sure you want to send 25 people away from your restaurant today?" The waiter agreed that was a stupid thing to do, so he let us stay. The kids loved it! They spent about 2 hours jumping, doing flips, canonballs, etc. into the pool. We will definitely go there again next time.

After that, we went to Dolphin Discovery where the kids swam with dolphins. When we asked the kids what they wanted to do in Cancun, they said right away that they wanted to swim with dolphins ( well except for Jordan, who wanted to drive the golf cart). We've never done that before. It cost $100 per person, so we told them they would have to pay for it themselves. They have been saving for several months. Kallai and Taliah have been doing odd jobs for neighbors and grandparents, mowing lawns, saving birthday money, etc. and they were able to earn enough to do it. They got to kiss and hug the dolphin and ride on it's belly. They got to shake hands with it, and watch it jump and swim under water. They got pushed by it while riding a boogie board. They loved it!

We had planned to go to the beach after the dolphins, but by the time they were done, and we had gone through the high pressure sales meeting to buy pictures of the experience, we were all exhausted. We decided to skip the beach and head home to relax in the pool. After riding the ferry back, we went and waited for the bus. We waited and waited and waited. Finally one of the guys with us (Jeff, my sister's brother-in-law's brother) who spoke Spanish went and asked some of the locals about it. He was told that a bus would come, but the last few had been full, so they hadn't stopped. Finally after about 30 minutes one came. The crazy thing, was it wasn't really a bus. It was a van with all of it's seats taken out. It had a bench that ran all around the outside edge. We piled 18 of us into the van. It was going to cost us 75 cents each to ride that bus to the main bus route, and then 50 cents each to ride the real bus back to our hotel. The bus driver offered to take us all the way back to our hotel for $30. We talked him down to $25 and decided to go for it because it was only $2.50 more than it would cost to take the bus and have to wait at the busstop again. Plus it was cheaper than our morning taxi, and we had more people in the vehicle! When he pulled up to our hotel, he was really sneaky and didn't pull all the way up to the doors. We think he wasn't really supposed to go into the hotel zone, and had been trying to make a couple extra bucks on the sly. Oh well.








Later we went to swim at the pool. It was nice to get into the cool water after a really hot and sweaty day.