We stayed in an apartment away from the main tourist street, which gave us some room to breath. It also had a kitchen and a swimming pool which made life pretty chilled out. We ended up sticking around for about a week, managing to get in heaps of diving.
Cat on the Playa:
It was good that the beach wasn't covered in brown seaweed, which a lot of the Caribbean Coast beaches are at the moment.
We were there for Cat's birthday, so we made the most of it with plenty of margaritas (you could buy a litre of tequila from the supermarket for the same price as one beer from a bar on the main street) and some good food. When we went out for dinner it started pissing down (tail end of the rainy season) so we ducked into the first restaurant we came across and celebrated with some pretty tasty Italian.
Cat enjoying a lunchtime margarita:
We don't have many photos from Playa Del Carmen, as most of our time was spent underwater. We managed four dives in the ocean, seeing a huge array of fish, plenty of turtles, coral and eels etc. The diving was really fun with some reasonably swift currents meaning you could just drift over the sea life and observe without even needing to kick.
We planned to dive to see a ship wreck one day but the harbour was closed due to rough seas, so instead we travelled down the coast a little and went diving in a couple of cenotes (caves/caverns). We were a bit nervous about this as obviously the space is pretty confined and the light restricted (pitch black at times) compared to diving in the sea, but our buoyancy skills had improved quite a lot so we decided to give it a go.
The first cenote we dove in was relatively open to the light. We had torches to attract each others attention and that of our instructor, but barely needed them to see. The light effects in the cenote are really spectacular with green and blue tints coming down through the openings in the rocks. The water was brilliantly clear with visibility probably in the hundreds of metres and there were different layers of warm and cold fresh water, as well as salt water, which often gave the impression that we were flying above the water.
The second cenote was more spectacular than the first, but also spooky as we ended up a long way underground in absolute pitch black. There were also a lot of increases and decreases in depth which made it hard work equalising our ears all of the time, but it was fully worth it as the colours and stalagmites were breathtaking. We only had a couple of minor issues with buoyancy (Cat floating up into the roof of the cavern when she pressed the wrong button on her BCD) but otherwise made it out the other end in style, to celebrate with a beer.
I wish we had an underwater camera to take some photos, but we didn't so here is a link to some photos of what we saw.
And me getting ready to go into the first cenote. The water was cold so we needed to wear two wetsuits.
