Day 6: Cozumel, Mexico

Wednesday, June 28

On Wednesday we sailed into Cozumel, Mexico!

In my “perfect world” I probably would not choose to have 3 ports of call all back to back to back like this (might have been nice to have a low key “at sea day” in between), but…. geography. 🙂 Given the layout of the ports + a 7 night cruise, it makes sense that it was planned this way.

However, when planning this trip, we did give some thought to the fact that this would be Port Day 3 in a row- with my sister’s 4, 6, and almost 8 year olds along. Also, our previous day’s port excursion (in Belize) was a very long one. Therefore, we had chosen a much shorter excursion outing for Wednesday, with a bit later start as well. This turned out to be a very smart choice, I think.

We didn’t have to meet until ~9:15, so I jumped in one of the hot tubs for a while around 7:30 before breakfast and showering.

We met downstairs on the dock to check in for our submarine tour- only to realize that I forgot our excursion tickets way up on Deck 9 of the ship. Ugh. Ivan raced back through the security checkpoint, etc. and got them. Fortunately, the tour guy was able to start getting the rest of the participants situated in the meantime and was able to wait for him.

We loaded onto a medium sized boat to head out to the Atlantis submarine for our tour. Yes, a submarine tour… just a week after that Titan submarine imploded…. 😬 (Our tour guide assured us that they had been operating without incident for decades.)

Then we pulled up next to the sub, crossed over and had to descend down into it via a big ladder.

This was cool! I had never been inside a submarine before. The tour description said we would get down to 100 feet of depth!

We each had a big peep hole window to look out. Immediately we could see fish and other things swimming by. I figured all the kids would get a kick out of being underwater- it’s sort of like snorkeling or scuba diving, without actually having to get wet or know how to breathe out of a tank. 😉

I learned another new thing here! So, I had always sort of assumed that the fish and coral reef appeared brightly colored even deeper under the water. Turns out that, no! At great depth, limited light reaches below the surface, which affects how we see the color.

They explained how when we see coral reefs in National Geographics, the photographers have usually used special diving lights and/or camera filters to capture the “bright colors” we see in the photos.

Inside the submarine, they had color strips pasted above each window that ranged from bright red, blue, yellow, green, etc. when we were above the surface. Once we were below the water though, these same strips now appeared to be muted colors of brown, grey, and green (similar to the coral), due to the decreased light. Our guide flipped on the bright overhead lights inside the sub for a moment, and boom- we once again had the bright red, blue and green colors on the strip! So interesting.

The submarine moved all around and we had cool views of all different types of fish, various coral reefs, and this amazing sea turtle!!

The guide said we got lucky, because you don’t always get to see a sea turtle on this trip, obviously.

We also passed the point where the island of Cozumel technically “ends” (like the point in the ocean I mean, where it officially stops being part of Mexico anymore).

Also, we got to view this big, old shipwreck, a 150 foot long ship that sunk in 1999. Cozumel is a huge hotspot for scuba diving, and apparently this shipwreck is a very popular place for divers. They can actually go inside to explore.

The deepest we got was to 103 feet. Here’s photo evidence:

I really enjoyed this! The whole tour from start to finish only lasted a couple of hours, it was a brand new experience for all of us, air conditioned and comfortable 😉 and engaging for the kids and people of all ages.

Headed back to land:

We were off the boat by around 11:30 a.m. and back to the dock. Here’s a really nice shot of the ship:

And me:

At this point, the wheels of our afternoon fell off just a little bit, although don’t worry- it all ended up working out fine in the end.

Since we were in MEXICO (i.e. Ivan’s home country and also home of the Best Food in the World), we had hoped we could go find some real Mexican food after the tour! We had several hours until we needed to be back on the ship. We had assumed we could just walk down the street a ways and find some restaurants or taquerias or something.

We also thought that perhaps we could take a taxi to a nearby public beach to just swim and hang out for a while.

Both of these ideas ended up basically fizzling out.

First, the port area is kind of like a big maze/ trap. They practically box you in to a mall-like area full of gift shops and overpriced touristy restaurants like Senor Frogs. Once you finally manage to leave that area, you are further boxed in by streets lined with taxis…. that are charging approximately 6 times what a taxi should cost in Mexico.

It also seemed that there were not really any PUBLIC (aka free) beaches nearby- at least not that we could get to without paying an exorbitant amount. Apparently most of the nearby beaches are part of “beach clubs” where you have to pay a (high) daily rate just to access them.

Most are all-inclusive and also include some sort of resort food. (And who knows how good the food is at those places…. we really just wanted a regular, authentic, Mexican restaurant!) The beach club thing might have been fine if we had the whole day open and we were looking for a place to go all day, but we were not about to pay those prices just to go to the beach for an hour or two.

So after a few confusing moments on the side of the road where some of our group of 11 started to get into a taxi, and then got out again after Ivan found that the guy was not budging on the price, we decided to scratch the beach.

It was also approximately 98 degrees outside in the sun and very humid during all of this, and my Irish nieces and nephew were practically melting before our eyes. lol.

We decided we would just give up on authentic food this time (not a big deal- we go to “real” Mexico often, anyway) and eat something at one of the tourist trap restaurants instead. But after finally finding one that could actually house 11 of us and sitting down, we realized it was: a) still super, super hot in there, b) extremely noisy (meaning we wouldn’t even be able to talk really), c) highly overpriced and d) probably not even going to be very good food, anyway.

We could literally see our ship from the restaurant, where we had access to the already-included “free” restaurants, with air conditioning. So we ended up apologizing to our server and getting up and walking out (we hadn’t ordered anything yet) and just going back to the ship for lunch!!

IT WAS A VERY GOOD CALL.

And, although we maybe “missed out” on some time in Cozumel, we spent the rest of the afternoon just relaxing and enjoying the ship! Many other passengers were still out and about on excursions, so the pools, restaurant, pool deck, etc all had just a fraction of the usual people. It was very, very nice.

The littles went to the kids club for a while in the afternoon, too, which allowed them to just have some downtime out of the heat. The adults all got a bucket of Coronas and retreated to a big empty area at the front of the ship, looking out to the ocean beyond. We just relaxed and talked a while.

Dinner Wednesday night was “Mexican themed”, so I ordered a carne asada dish.

The attire that night was supposed to be “Colorful 70’s”, but we didn’t have any 70’s clothes to pack, so just opted to wear our most “colorful” options we had along. 🙂

After dinner, we wanted to go to the 7:30 show, some sort of “rock” themed music and dance show called “Can’t Stop the Rock”. Ethan agreed to babysit my nephew (just turned 4) for a bit since he didn’t really want to go back to Kids Club.

At the show and sitting by my nieces:

Afterwards, my sister and brother-in-law took their kids back to their rooms for bed, and Ethan agreed to extend his babysitting gig over there for a while! He sat out on the balcony in my sister’s adjoining room (after they got the kids to bed in the other room) so my sister and brother-in-law could join us for a drink in one of the lounges.

My sister and brother-in-law turned in before we did, so we moved up to the English pub in the Royal Promenade with my parents for a little while longer. I think we headed up to our room around 11:30. I stepped out on the balcony to check out the waves by night:

Another good day! Not without a few hiccups, but isn’t that always just part of the experience???? 😜