How's the adventure travel and activities in and around Yucatan: Riviera Maya, Playa del Carmen, Cancun, Merida, etc.?

Here in Yucatan, adventure travel is one of the main businesses for a lot of people. We have lots of opportunities to experience cenotes. A “cenote” is an underground river. In the entirety of the Yucatan area, we don’t have the regular rivers that you would see back home. All of our rivers are underground, so the whole area is like Swiss cheese. Every now and then these rivers will open up, and that’s what’s called a cenote. It looks like a quarry and it...

Here in Yucatan, adventure travel is one of the main businesses for a lot of people. We have lots of opportunities to experience cenotes. A “cenote” is an underground river. In the entirety of the Yucatan area, we don’t have the regular rivers that you would see back home. All of our rivers are underground, so the whole area is like Swiss cheese. Every now and then these rivers will open up, and that’s what’s called a cenote. It looks like a quarry and it has constantly moving water but you don’t notice it because it’s moving very slowly.  People go swimming and diving in these cenotes.  They create lots of caves. Divers go into these caves with ropes telling them where they’re going.  They’ll go for hours underground. People often go and swim in cenotes because it’s all limestone rock. The mineral content in the water is extremely high so when you go in there you feel revived, and your hair and your skin are soft when you get out. Going swimming in a cenote is a very healthy thing to do. 

 

There are lots of tourist parks for doing ziplining.  We have dry cenotes which are essentially just caves so you can go in the dry cenotes and drive four wheelers through them. You can do hiking through the cenotes into the caves where there are bats everywhere. These cenotes will open to large caverns of stalactites and stalagmites, which is very interesting.

 

There are a lot of places to go nearby. We’ve got highlands that are nearby where one of them is a spot to see the whale sharks. So you can go swim with the whale sharks, which look more like whales than anything, but they’re about the size of a garage. So you can swim with these giant creatures that only eat is plankton.  They open their mouths wide as they’re swimming and they just inhale the plankton so they’re not dangerous.  They’re extremely friendly and you can go right beside them. You can also look at the wild flamingos. This is all through the Riviera Maya and as well as the Merida area.

 

Another thing I didn’t mention is the ruins. We’ve got many different areas for Mayan ruins. We’ve got Chichen Itza, which is one of the wonders of the world now and it’s one of the most impressive ruins structure you can go see. You can spend the whole day visiting.  It’s very interesting.  

 

(Cenote on land available to buy near Tulum Beach, Yucatan, Mexico, pictured.)