Booking Memo SheetMaya World Yucatan, January 2012
Marvellous Mextrotter Yucatan tour January 2012: 2500 km of Maya sites!
I did the Mextrotter Maya World Yucatan trip at the end of January 2012. I am interested in ancient civilizations and this tour covered about 2500 km of Maya sites in Mexico. From my privileged seat in the minivan (being the only single in the group, I got offered the passenger seat in the front which allowed me more chances to ask questions to our charming guide/chauffeur Anya). All my cotravellers were German speaking, so I freshened up my high school German a lot, but alas, I did not acquire much of Spanish. We visited Tulum (where I got a highly educated English guide for me alone), Chicanna, Calakmul (a not so much visited site which features the highest Maya temple at 44m, where we saw lots of monkeys, boar, pawns and deer roaming in the forest), Palenque, Agua Azul and Mishol-ha falls, Champoton, Campeche (after having a marvellous fish dinner with our feet in the sea sand), Uxmal (near the site we visited the home of a traditional Maya family where we learned some interesting cultural aspects form contemporary Maya culture), Merida (where had a tequila party around the pool on the top floor of the hotel), Chichen Itza (the busiest site we visited), two cenotes (where we had an exotic cool dip), Valladolid (small cute town where we had our “last supper”) and National Park Rio Lagartos (where we had a mud bath covering ourselves with grey, sticky, oily mud all over: we ended up looking like the Mad Men From Borneo). At the end of the tour I had booked three extra nights at Club Akumal Caribe at Akumal, on advice of one of Mextrotter’s excellent assistants. This place was just 20m from the sea shore, and with the great coral riff at only 50m into the sea): a rather remote place for doing some snorkeling and finding many fish I would like to get into my aquarium.
In the end, I really felt boosted by the combination of the Maya cultural tour and my few days at the beach. I can really recommend this formula to everyone, of all ages and cultures.
Lieven de Winter