Matt took this cool panorama with his phone.
On our way back in the kayak, Pierce and I (after winning the race to the buoy, never mind that the other teams may not have known we were racing) got confused and raced back... to the completely wrong hotel and section of the beach. We figured it out though and paddled back down half a mile to the right resort, no problem!
Then for a long time the kids played in the pool and ocean and the adults relaxed. It was wonderful! I realized at one point that I should take some pictures to remember the resort. Here is the "hot tub" in the middle of the pool. It wasn't very hot and it wasn't open after 5:00, very disappointing to Matt, but the kids played there endlessly.
Colby was the hero of the vacation - he was soooooo nice to Zoe, even when she was a total pest. Thank you Colby!
The pool is gorgeous.
The shady chairs tended to be taken by someone's towel, but sometimes we got one.
They offered a free intro to scuba diving - here Teresa and Spencer are trying it out. Matt and Pierce tried too but waited until the last day and didn't get a chance.
The little stand on the right here was an important one - free ice cream! I can still taste the delicious mango ice cream, mmmmm. They rotated flavors all the time so we had to eat a lot of it.
This might be the clearest picture of an agouti from the trip. We did feed them any time we could, I'm guessing most people do.
The toucans might have been my favorites.
I tried to take a video of the toucans eating their lunch - we love how they eat! They pick up a berry and then toss it back to the back of their beak. So cool.
And sometimes we could find monkeys in the trees! There were a bunch of them that afternoon that we watched for awhile. Just hanging around the hotel.
Some big birds in the same enclosure as a gorgeous swan - they might not be ugly birds, but they are certainly ugly compared to their neighbor the swan!
Grandma and Grandpa had the room on the beach (yellow building), and we had the next building over (red). It was kind of far from the restaurants, but we loved the walk, and I think staying by the beach is best.
Notice the monkeys on this guy's shoulders. I think you could pay for a picture with a monkey.
That evening we ate at the Japanese restaurant, our first "theme restaurant" experience. On the way Matt took pictures of some of the murals we passed. There are lots and they all seemed to be different.
The Japanese restaurant was great! Here the chef is holding a rabbit's head made of the rice and vegetables he would soon cook for us.
The chef put on a great show and even tossed some bits of food at some of the guests - good catch Colby! By the way - if you ever sit by Colby at a Japanese restaurant, you're going to get to eat all of the sushi appetizers yourself, a little bonus along with the pleasure of his company.
After dinner we stopped by the evening's entertainment. We suffered through all of the pre-show show.
The show itself was also hard to listen to, so we didn't stay long.
Not our style, but we had plenty of other things we did love about the resort.
Next day - a trip to the Eco-park Xel-Ha. There are three eco parks in the Cozumel area. We decided on Xel-ha because we knew Grandma really wanted to snorkel, and that is what Xel-Ha is all about! We took a camera but never took it out of the bag, so these are all pictures I found online. Here is the park map. It is big and amazing!
The first thing we did was take the "jungle discovery train" (they should say TRAM, not train) to the beginning of the river to inner tube and snorkel down the river to the lagoon. We looked a lot like these people do, only most of us snorkeled - just Zoe and Grandma shared an inner tube
The river started off realllllly cold, but as you got closer to the lagoon it warmed up. You could feel the different temperatures of water as it started to mix.
There were some pull-outs where you could have some fun. Here is what we didn't look like when Matt, Pierce, and Zoe jumped off the "courage cliff". Yes, even Zoe jumped off - it took her a very long time to decide to jump, but even though she was scared, she was determined to do it. Good for you, Zoe!
Then there were some fun adventure ropes and zip lines. We went on the zip lines a bunch of times, just like these people presumably did.
Here is a different guy looking at the fish which are like the fish that we saw.
After a long snorkel, we ate a delicious buffet lunch and dried off a little bit. We looked at some fish in a stationary glass bottomed boat, then crossed the very wavy bridge at the far left to the other side of the park. There are a few walks around some beautiful ceynotes and through the jungle. It poured rain on us for a little while (but we were already wet anyway). Matt and Pierce went in a cool cave, then we got our masks and fins back on and went back in the lagoon for more snorkeling.
The best snorkeling was in a lagoon by this cove where the glass bottomed boat was. We went under the boat, ha! Even Zoe snorkeled like a pro, and even though Pierce got cold he hung in there too for quite awhile.
It was really so lovely. When we were all officially freezing we got out, dried off, and could think of no better idea than a little more buffet lunch and treats, so we did that. They had kind of a closing ceremony with candles and floats in the lagoon, which was very pretty, though the music was ridiculous.
A little view of us on the zip lines - maybe we should have bought some of their pictures since we took none of our own.
Pierce and Spencer played with the camera a little on the bus on the way back to the resort.
And that was the end of two more marvelous days in Playa del Carmen!
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