Yucatan + Carribean - Caught in a hurricane, nearly arrested, swimming with whale sharks!

Made our way up the Yucatan peninsula starting at Tulum a nice backpacker destination with apparantly amazing beaches, skipped straight through Playa del Carmen and Cancun and onto the island of Isla Mujeres. I guess we lasted about half an hour in Cancun before we wanted to leave it.

So driving on a cramped damp sweaty local bus from Palenque to Tulum one night we got caught in crazy crazy rain. Restaurants and roads flooded along the way. Little did we know until the following evening(after we had gone swimming in the sea may I add) that this was the middle or end of hurricane Alex. We were wondering why the beach there was so sandy and windy and deserted! One thing I´ve noticed with this trip is everyone we meet has travelled quite a bit before. Most people have done a few big trips over the last few years and have a lot of stuff to compare it to. The age group is generally our age but have also met some people who are just 19 or 20 and on their second or third big trip. These two girls last year had travelled Brazil to Mexico over land and they said Tulum was their favourite beach for the whole thing. Unfortunately it didn´t live up to its name when we were there. Another great thing about this trip is at every hostel people have reccomended the next place to go to, so for the last month we´ve walked into a new hostel in a new country and known a good few people there and always have a group to go with!! Dave, Kirby you´l be laughing at me with this!! Always looking for a big group!! Sometimes there´s up to 10 of us moving onto the next place which is cool. And always a good mix of nationalities although you do find the hotspots where certain countries hang out!! Some places have lots of Argentinians, some lots of Israelis, some lots of German and then randomly ul bump into a Irish person in the middle of the jungle that lives just down the road at home!!

One day we did a day trip from Tulum to visit some ruins and dive in some underwater caves called cenotes. This is a picture of them. http://www.google.com.gt/images?hl=es&q=cenotes&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi
Anyway, to make a long story short, we had a group of 8 of us and made a deal with two taxi drivers to drive us to the first place, wait, drive us to second place and drive us home. We bargained with them and agreed on a price. But after we got out of the first place they started arguing that the price was too low. This argument went on for a while until we decided to give them what we thought would be a fair price for the first leg of the journey and send them on their way. Well they weren´t too happy with this so they called the police. Now when an agreement is made in any part of the world people usually stick to it. In the whole of Mexico everyone is friendly and not one person had tried to rip us off in the whole month(unlike in parts of Asia!!). The other taxi drivers around here and also the staff working at this place were on our side and willing to help us out when the police came. Of course the policeman arrived, didnt give a shit cause he was just going to get a cut and didnt even say a word. We kinda had to pay them then and ended up getting some nice drivers to bring us down to these cenotes which are underwater lagoons, crystal clear waters. We realised we should have paid off the policeman and sent the taxi drivers on their way!!

Cath, a friend I worked with in NZ two years ago was flying into meet us a few days later and travel until mid august so we decided to hang out and wait for her at Isla Mujeres this amazing little island off the coast of Cancun. Five of us left from the hostel here and spent our days on the island drinking rum, eating good food and chilling out on hammocks. Cath arrived and we did a tour on a boat to dive with these whale sharks. http://www.google.com.gt/images?um=1&hl=es&tbs=isch%3A1&sa=1&q=whale+sharks&aq=f&aqi=g1&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai= I dont have an underwater camera so this is how big they are! It was amazing. They were massive. We´d swim on by them at the same rate watching them ducking and diving in the water eating plankton. Two of us went in the water at a time with the guide. There was small fish just gliding along on the fins of the shark and underneath the fins. I was swimming with a canadian guy and at one point he got to swim between the mother and her baby. Some of these are up to 10 metres and we were within an arms reach of it. Well worth doing besides the seasickness. Half the boat threw up including myself due to the water still been rough from the hurricane. And these sharks are vegetarian so not even sure if theyd enjoy the vomit!!

Photos up at http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=187718&id=509199014&l=a3c402389e