Blogs from Campeche, Mexico, North America - page 5

Day after Valentine’s Day, we’ve just begun our third week in Mexico. We are now at our first planned destination - the beautiful white sand beaches of Isla Aguada. Surely this is heaven on earth. We have a beachfront site about thirty feet from the water. The water has a light blue green color probably due to the white sands beneath and the shallowness of its depth. Dolphins are jumping and playing further out. Water temp is reported to be about 80 degrees. When we arrived on Friday the beach was deserted. Today, many local families are enjoying playing at the beach. The air temperature is probably in the upper 80’s as we get pretty warm walking along the beach and malecon. Nighttime breezes keep us plenty cool with just a fan. Walking barefoot on the ... read more

Lots of people don´t come today to Chichen Itza......some because they don´t feel well, but many because they love Merida so much that they want to stay there and shop. It is a big modern (sort-of) city with lots of Spanish Colonial architechture. It has traffic almost as bad as Mexico City, and the noise and crowds of people on the streets is hard for me to manage. Still, our new friends go with us out to get sherbert in local fruit flavours, and we have some fun people watching and shopping. Steve and I buy outfits in the traditional Mayan style. We listen to more music in one of the sqares after dark. The ruins in Chichen Itza are big and am interesting as we had hoped. Still, after the last 7 days, we are ... read more

One of the sites that we were most excited to see was Calakmul. This is a Mayan city that rivaled Guatamala's Tikal back in the day, that had some of the tallest pyramids in this area. The ruins are now in the middle of the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve - a giant section of fairly undeveloped rainforest bordering on Guatamala. This means that, unlike most other ruin sites in Mexico, it is difficult to reach without taking an expensive tour from a nearby city; buses don't really go there. Also, since 'nearby' cities are about 6 hours away, tour groups probably don't get much time in the ruins themselves. Thus, we had originally planned to rent a car from Chetumal and drive there ourselves. Since we are still travelling with the cherubs, however, we made new plans; ... read more

Well prepared for the rough and tumble of slugging the tourist routes through South and Central America, we were remarking on just how relaxed we were getting as travellers - arriving fresh off the bus to a new city, with no map, no idea of where to stay, or even which direction the central district was. And it looked like it was about to bite us in the backside. Arriving at the bus terminal, we asked a departing tourist (Italian) about accommodation. Apparently it was all full as there was a large concert on. Rather than get an overnight bus out and miss the city of Campeche, we pulled a phone number from the Italian lonely planet of this tourist, called a hostel, and got a reservation easily. The reason for the drain on accommodation was ... read more

Opoustime Chiapas, Zapatisty a na chvilku i dzungli a jedeme na Yucatan. Jednim z yucatanskych statu, ktery az tolik neprekypuje turisty je Campeche s hlavnim mestem stejneho nazvu. Pri prekracovani hranic nekterych Mexickych statu musite projit kontrolou na prevoz ovoce. Mexicke urady tak predchazeji prenosu nekterych nemoci, ktere by pak mohly zasahnout zemedelskou produkci. Jako turosi v turos autobuse opet projizdime bez zastaveni, ale ostatnim tu ovocna policie dukladne kontroluje vozidla. Pochopitelne, ze na takovem stanovisti nechybi ani hnizdo kulometcika ci obrneny vuz znacky Hummer. Po nekonecnych rovinach, kdy musim udrzovat naseho ridice Manuela, aby neusnul pote, co predchazejici noc spravoval do rannich hodin klimatizaci, se neda jet nonstop a proto oddychujeme na jednom z bezva odpocivadel, kde vam udelaji cerstvy pomerancovy dzus nebo fantasticke quesadillas. Fakt, ze... read more