Adventure!

We were up early and off on an adventure today!  There are so many things to do here in Cancun and a lot of things to do an hour or two away. With so much to do it's hard to choose - but we decided on XPlor.  It's an adventure park.  They will come get you and take you home for $70.  To save some money, get more of the local flavor, and to have more control of our day we decided to take care of our own transportation.  We caught a bus into downtown Cancun to the colectivo stand.  A colectivo is basically a minivan that runs between Cancun and some of the other towns on the Yucatan Peninsula.  It's used by the locals a lot, but there were a few other tourists.  We caught our first Colectivo to Playa del Carmen, then we had to get out and get into a different one that headed to Tulum, just a bit outside of Playa we jumped off at XPlor.  We had a blast!  The main attraction were their zip lines.  They were 2 courses of them, each had 7 lines.  The first one had a lot of water, in fact for one of the segments it was a long winding water slide.  Several of the other lines went over water, through waterfalls and landed in water.  So much fun!  The other set were much higher and longer and Mike and I were able to go tethered together.  Great views from up there!  I think we traveled almost 3 miles by zipline.  After that we swam in a river that went through a cave, they call them cenotes - there are stalagmites and stalactites everywhere - thousands of them.  We ended in a huge circular pool of water, the sides were about 100 feet tall and had water rushing down them - like being surrounded by a water fall.  So amazing.  I'm not sure how much of it was man-made, but I think most of it was natural.  We also went on a 'jungle adventure' we drove lawn mower type tractor vehicles through the jungle and into caves.  That part was a bit cheesy - but we had a good time.  We then went back out to the highway and when we saw a colectivo heading toward Playa del Carman we waved our arms - if they have room, they flash their lights and stop (although their definition of 'room' is different then mine).  We made it back to Playa and then took our final colectivo back to Cancun.  We did some window shopping downtown before hopping on our bus back to our resort.  It was an exhausting but exciting adventure!  We ended with a yummy Mexican dinner that Mike photographed.

On our way into XPlor, we wore these attractive orange helmets and our bathing suits all day

Part of the caves

One of the water falls, you can see the ziplines running through it.

We didn't get many pictures, everything involved water so our camera stayed in our locker most of the day.

Mike's dinner at Kuh-Nah

a roll with butter that was seasoned with corn fungus and wrapped in a banana leaf

compliments of the chef, a cheese empanada made from blue corn

tortilla soup

skirt steak with beans and guacamole served with rice

cocoa bean flan