My Cancún Travel and Retrospects
Tags: Travel, Cancun, Mexico

Before 2021 Christmas, we spent 12 days in Cancún. Never traveling abroad since COVID-19 and having undergone significant personal transformations in the past two years allowed me to experience this trip quite differently than my previous vocations. Those perspectives shed light on what’s missing in my lifestyle.

This post is a memory of my experience in Cancún. I hope it helps others who plan to visit the beautiful Caribbean island during the COVID. I end this post with my retrospect from this journey.

Experiences

All-inclusive hotels

It’s a shame that I didn’t discover this way of vocation earlier. I feel I owe myself many such stays.

In those hotels, we pay once and enjoy all the food, drink, beach amenities, and performances; there is no need to think about payment during the whole stay.

There are countless all-inclusive hotels with a big price range. All goods’ marginal quality decrease with a higher price — A 50K car is noticeably better than a 20K car, but not two times better. Yet this is not true for services: I found the marginal increment in quality is constant and sometimes increases with higher price tags. This is the case for those all-inclusive hotels. Google Map, with integrated price information and reviews, is a good way to research them.

We stayed at Hyatt Ziva’s adults-only area. I attest that every penny is well spent. All the restaurants are wonderful; they easily beat the top-tier ones in Bay Area. They have a beautiful beach, heated and huge pools, attending and friendly staff, and everything you can hope for in a tropical area hotel. All are close to perfect.

Having never experienced such stays before, I found it extremely relaxing and enjoyable for a few days; longer than that, I will become bored.

Scuba Diving

The Caribbean Sea has 14% of the world’s coral reefs, making it a fantastic scuba diving location. I had four boat dives. The pro-tip is to prefer top-rated diving shops from Google map than the diving tours organized in hotels — this might be the only downside I can find from the all-inclusive hotels.

The dives are as good as those in other tropical islands. The unique part is MUSA — Underwater Museum of Art. To make an attraction, the Mexican government sank many statues and several other stuff years ago under the sea, then coral grew on them. This became MUSA. It’s artificial but magnificent and feels natural.

Xcaret Theme Parks

We visited the two most popular of those parks: Xcaret and Xplor. Both are beautifully designed with attentive service staff. Xcaret is mostly a zoo, but with a decent beach, underground water swim, many water activities, and a nice show at night. The buffet in Xcaret is excellent. Xplor features long zip-line routes and several other activities. The wait time for zip-lines is one to two hours during our visit. You will need to come up with some strategies to queue efficiently.

Driving to the park is better than buying Xcaret’s transportation. Like all such tourists buses, they wait for the slowest and latest folk, making the waiting time easily more than one hour.

I think those parks are better for the summer in Cancun when it’s less crowded with hotter weather — more comfortable going wet.

Food

Authentic Mexican food is both delicious and healthy. We eat them every day and I lost two pounds there. We’ve yet found such Mexican food in California.

Maya ruins

Chichen Itza is 200 KM away from Cancun. We had a day trip tour to the grand pyramid — El Castillo.

Logistics

Covid-19. There are many antigen tests near the hotel zone. It took 30 minutes to get the result that’s required to board a flight. Some hotels also have onsite testing. I found one antigen test lab at the airport too. Covid added many fractions in Cancun’s airport checking in. It took one hour between our arrival at the airport terminal and reaching the boarding gate.

Language. English is perfectly fine in Cancún.

Transportation. I prefer the buses if you stay in the 22-KM long hotel zone. The bus covers the whole area. Due to their massive volume, the average wait time is less than one minute. The bus will stop if you wave on the curbside; it’s like a taxi, but faster and easier. The price is negligible.

Weather. The best season is December to April when it’s not too hot. During our stay in late December, Cancún was warm but sometimes too humid.

Retrospect

Missing out the world

Since 2014, I’ve given too much fuck about work and making money. When we give too much fuck about one single thing, everything else in life will inevitably be overlooked — attention is a scarce resource. Seeing the beautiful Caribbean sea and tasting the delicious tacos, I realized that I missed out some much about this amazing planet!

The action item, therefore can’t be more clear, is to give less fuck about making money and invest time in exploring the world.

Some form stressors are essential

Nassim Nicholas Tale made a point in Antifragile: Organisms use acute stress as information to adapt to the environment and grow stronger. While most of us suffer from too much chronic stress that weakens our vitality, the lack of stressors is equally harmful. Laying on the beach for an extended time, with drinking and eating in between, created numbness in my brain. It felt physical. I can imagine being whacked by such lifestyles.