When you hear of the word ‘holiday’, or if you are North American, ‘vacation’, what do you think? Companies that sell holiday packages seem to assume that sun, sea and sand are what most people want, combined perhaps with party evenings and cocktails. I presume they have done some market research and come to this conclusion. Maybe I should be a bit more cynical and think it is the adverts that are forming those ideas of what a holiday should be in people. Whatever, it is safe to assume that a holiday for a lot of people involves going somewhere with guaranteed sunshine, a nice beach and a regular supply of intoxicating liquor. And maybe a buffet breakfast too. We Brits love a buffet breakfast. There are, however, a large number of people who can’t think of anything worse than lying in the hot sun developing melanomas, sitting on a beach where the sand gets right up the crevice or swimming in a mixture of salt water and the outflow from the local sewage treatment works. Elaine and I fall into that category. For us a holiday tends to involve going somewhere that looks interesting, hiring a car and travelling around to see if it is indeed as interesting as we had hoped. It usually is. Lately, and forgetting the pandemic for a moment, we have tended to go to Canada. Not only does it tick the interesting box, it is also spectacularly beautiful and perhaps the most important of all, our daughter lives there. We tend to stay in Airbnb properties, usually for three nights at each destination, before moving on to a new one. I’ve been planning a holiday like this for the summer and we are looking forward to it, despite the lack of a buffet breakfast. That’s not to say we haven’t tried the sun, sea, sand holiday in the past. We had a fortnight in Menorca in 1994. We even had a couple of weeks in St Lucia in 2001. Neither holiday will make the highlight reel of Hughes Holidays.
Having read that initial paragraph, you might be a bit surprised as to the location of our recent holiday. We spent a week in Playa del Carmen in Mexico. This resort is situated 30 miles south of city of Cancun on the Yucatan Peninsular and the whole area exists for one thing – tourism. It might be cruel to call it the Benidorm of the Americas but it’s a mecca for Americans, Canadians and also many folk from Latin American countries. It is also popular with Europeans with daily flights from a number of cities. It has a pleasant climate for most of the year, is lapped by the warm waters of the Sunny Caribbean Sea™(thankand does a good line in tequila sunrise. All in all, it is an ideal holiday destination for the sun, sea and sand lovers and one that provides many tourist dollars to the Mexican economy. What could possibly be there for us? It was Elaine’s idea. We knew that the place where Rebecca worked in Canada closed the first week in January. Why not see if we could arrange a holiday for that time at a destination where we could meet up. Hopefully our son Nicholas could get time off and come too. Great idea but where exactly? Mid way between Troon and Victoria lies Nova Scotia. It’s a lovely place but not somewhere we fancy going in the depths of winter. Mexico, however, fitted the bill. It’s a seven hour flight from Victoria, ten hours from London, and the weather at that time of year looked perfect. Mid-20s, not much in the way of rainfall and, most importantly, a relatively easy place to get to from both the UK and BC. We booked a package through British Airways Holidays for the three of us and invited Caryn, a family friend along too. At the same time we booked a package through Last Minute for Rebecca and her boyfriend Harry for the same hotel. Their flight from Victoria arrived an hour after ours from Gatwick whilst our respective flights back were scheduled to depart at exactly the same time. It was if it was meant to be.
Having booked the holiday last September there was three or four months of worrying about what spanners might get thrown in the works. It turned out that nothing did. None of us got Covid, assorted strikes in various different industries did not affect us and the disarray in Canadian air transport caused by weather in the run up to departure had passed. On December 31st our respective flights ran to schedule, our bags made the connection and apart from a small panic when I realised British Airways and WestJet utilised different terminals at Cancun we all met up and piled into the pre-arranged transport to our resort hotel. It was shortly before 7pm when we set off and so we celebrated GMT New Year on the bus. It was five hours until the local New Year and eight before British Columbia New Year but it had been a long day for those travelling from the UK so we thought it best to get at least one of them done and dusted.
It took about an hour to get to our hotel. This was the Hilton, Playa del Carmen, an all inclusive, adults only resort. All inclusive resorts abound along the coast. I’m not sure why we chose this particular one but we all felt it was a good choice. Not that we have anything to compare it with but it seemed very well appointed. We all had Garden View rooms which were at the cheaper end of the resort’s accommodation spectrum yet were huge in size, each containing a large jacuzzi next to the beds which barely reduced the living space at all. The beds were comfy, the air conditioning efficient, bathrooms were spacious and all in all we were impressed. The resort had several restaurants, numerous bars and two pools – the main pool and a smaller quiet pool. It was right on the beach although that beach was public and got rather busy during the day. We checked in and had bands attached to our wrists. These were to identify us as residents of the Hilton and not chancers coming in from outside to avail themselves of the free stuff on offer. All inclusive meant that – food and drink were part of the package though certain things required a supplement. Once settled in to our rooms we went to the buffet restaurant for some food and then joined the New Year Party that was taking place. Well, sort of. We were all knackered from a long day of travelling and remained on the periphery. For the New Year countdown itself we retired to the balcony of Rebecca and Harry’s room where we watched proceedings. They were twenty seconds late with their countdown which annoyed the OCD in me but fireworks went off and we all retired to our respective rooms. Despite the party going on until 1am I was very tired indeed and fell asleep without difficulty. I’m not sure what I was dreaming about at 3am but I suspect it wasn’t New Year BC time. Two out of three new years would have to do.
The following morning we all met up at the buffet breakfast (a big thumbs up for that) to decide what we were going to do during the following six days. What exactly do you do on a holiday like this? Sit in the sun, swim in the pool, paddle in the sea? For a week? Mainly yes, but not all the time. We booked an excursion for the following day but then spent the time getting ourselves orientated with the resort and the town itself. The main strip of Playa del Carmen was more or less right outside the hotel’s reception, not that you’d know it from inside. It was a long street of shops, restaurants and bars and packed with tourists, this being New Year’s Day and peak holiday time. It was good to know it was there even if we didn’t have to use it. The Hilton itself took a bit of discovery with the assorted restaurants and bars dotted around the place. The routine for getting beach towels and reserving sun loungers needed to be learnt – basically, grab some towels as soon as the towel station is open and plonk them on the lounger in a way that a German would be proud of. Even better, grab the towels the day before and reserve your lounger before the towel station opens. Towels on the sun loungers might be a cliche but it’s a real thing apparently. There were cabanas dotted round the pool. I didn’t really know what they were either. However, they are like four poster beds with an attached cool box which are available to rent for $99 a day. We did not avail ourselves of them as it might have been a squeeze getting all six of us on one. The main pool had various activities throughout the day including, on three of the days we were there, the foam party. To a 61 year old bloke like me this sounded absolutely horrendous. Soapy suds are generated by a couple of foam cannons and sprayed into the pool where some of them stick. Music of sorts is blasted out of speakers, the resort’s resident dancers gyrate in their thongs and you might get some bloke pouring cheap tequila down your throat from the bottle. What possibly is there to like about that, apart from maybe the thong wearing dancers? I can tell you it was brilliant. I don’t know why but it was great fun. Soap suds flying everywhere, a few beach balls thrown in for the hell of it and the hour it lasted flew by.
The tour we had booked was to Chichen Itza. This is an old Mayan city full of pyramids and all that sort of thing. It is first on the list of tours that visitors to the region might embark on. We’d booked the full day experience which involved a stop in the town of Vallodolid, lunch at some Mayan themed restaurant, Chichen Itza itself and a swim in a cenote, a sink hole in the limestone rock that the Yucatan peninsular is made from. All was going well until we pulled out of Vallodolid and were informed that Chichen Itza was closed due to ‘civil unrest’. To cut a long story short, the local population, most of whom were of Mayan descent, were less than happy with the management of the site and were kicking up a stink about it. It took a while for the tour leaders to come up with an alternative plan, concocted whilst we were enjoying lunch. Instead of Chichen Itza, we would go to Ek Balam, a different Mayan city. There was an option to return to the resort but we decided to stick with the tour. The schedule changed and we did the cenote swim first. This was really rather pleasant. The sink hole has sheer vertical sides and the water at the bottom, part of the aquifer that gives Yucatan its supply of fresh water, was fresh, warm and extremely inviting. The cenote done and dusted, we headed on to Ek Balam. You know what, if Ek Balam is number two on the Mayan city list, Cichen Itza must be bloody good. It was a fascinating place and, unlike Chichen Itza, you can walk on it, all the way to the top of the temple. The place was busy of course. Many other Chichen Itza tour buses had diverted there so it was quite crowded, even at the top of the temple, but we all felt we had got a very good dose of Maya at the end of what was a long day, even if it wasn’t quite the city we had expected.
The other tours and off resort activities we did consisted of a snorkelling trip, initially for five people but reduced to four when Elaine got a touch of the Montezuma’s revenge, which the remaining participants seemed to enjoy. I didn’t fancy it so I booked myself on a jungle ATV tour. Once in the jungle, which covers most of the peninsula, I got to zip around some dirt tracks twice, interspersed by another cenote swim. Nice though that cenote was, it wasn’t a patch on the other one. It was the ATV ride I was there for and that was great fun, even if the first one I was one was worryingly smoking by the end of the first ride and I managed to drive the second one into a tree and was stuck for a while until I worked out where reverse gear was. Elaine, Nicholas and Rebecca all went on another outing to walk some rescue dogs in what was a rough part of town. The woman that runs the refuge was most appreciative of their efforts. Of the hundreds of thousands of visitors who visit Playa del Carmen every year, only a handful even know about the place. Apart for a couple of walks along Playa’s main tourist drag and the beach, that was it as far as leaving the resort was concerned.
The rest of the time was spent relaxing, swimming in the Sunny Caribbean Sea™ and the pool, foam parties, eating and drinking. There were several places to do the eating and even more to do the drinking. We tried the Mediterranean style, the genuine Mexican and Asian fusion restaurants. We also tried a breakfast at the Caribbean cafe. All were good but we always tended to default to the buffet which had a great selection for breakfast, lunch and dinner that meant all tastes were catered for. You are supposed to make reservations for dinner at any of the restaurants but the buffet place always seemed to have plenty of room for those who forgot. Drinks were free but as in any other all-inclusive place in the world, this was restricted to local brands. Anything fancy had to be paid for. The coffee shop was well patronised, not just by the coffee lovers but by those who liked an ice cream, milkshake or pastry. The minibar in the room was also well stocked with free drinks so you were never going to go thirsty.
All too soon it was time to leave. Checkout was at noon and the minibus was due at 13:30. Although our wristbands were carefully removed when we checked out we were given a chit that allowed us to continue using the facilities until then so with a final shot of tequila we boarded the bus back to Cancun Airport. It took two and a half hours to get there. The traffic and roadworks were horrendous but it is a known thing which is why we’d set off five hours before the scheduled departure. When we finally got there, Rebecca and Harry were dropped off at Terminal Four, the rest of us at Terminal Three and after a bit of a long check in queue we were through airside and complaining about airport prices for the food. Both our flights departed on time and we were all back in our respective homes when we expected to be. It took a couple of days to get over the jet lag, maybe a day or two longer to reacclimatise to the Scottish winter.
Are all inclusive beach resort holidays really for us? It turns out that at the right time, in the right place and most importantly with the right people that they actually are. They might not make for a particularly gripping blog but you can’t have everything. We are already thinking about doing something similar next winter.
Glad to be Grey 