Sunday 23 June - Monday 1 July

Cozumel Island

We decided to break up a 24hr bus journey to Cozumel Island with a stop over in Villahermosa for the night. There wasn't much of interest to us in Villahermosa, so we enjoyed a long lunch in town before boarding a night bus to Playa Del Carmen in Quintana Roo. After not much sleep and an air conditioner dripping water on me for 12 hours, we arrived in the pretty beach town of PdC, its a party town with loads of clubs and bars along its beachfront. It was a nice change from the city. We hotfooted it down to the ferry terminal to catch the half hour ferry to Cozumel Island, where Gary would be doing his SCUBA certification. We couldn't have picked a better place for Gary to learn to dive - the warm, azure waters were crystal clear with visibility up to 50m (it was like diving in a giant swimming pool), the reefs were so abundant with life and colour (the best Ive experienced so far) and most of our dives were drift dives floating easily along the current.

We stayed at Cozumel Beach House Hostel, where the hosts, Tina & Adolfo made us feel as we were in our own home. A great environment to relax and interact with other travelers and vacationers. Hola to Adolfo, Tina, Mette, Zeus and Jade if you guys read this! Adolfo - we hope you're in the process of setting up 'Mexi-Leaks' to record all your hilarious stories on 'A 1000 ways to get conned in Mexico'.
Adolfo is a NAUI dive instructor, which was our main draw card for staying there and had Gary suited and diving on his first day. Needless to say, props to Adolfo, he aced his open water and advanced courses with flying colours. I did a little refresher course, practicing my skills, as I was bit rusty after not diving for the past 6 years. We racked up 10 dives in the 5 days we were there, all amazing, from getting stung by fire coral, facing up close and personal to a nurse shark to drifting along reef walls next to Green and Hawksbill turtles......high five for the GoPro, for our great underwater footage. After a week of glorious diving we didn't want to leave, but with Adolfo's tips for the next part of our journey in hand, we headed back to the mainland in search of Mayan ruins and other above water sights.