One Long Weekend in Playa del Carmen, Mexico

After the long awaited COVID times, we return to international travel with my first trip to Mexico!

This last weekend, I flew into Cancun and spent 3 days at a (work-sponsored) all-inclusive resort in Playa del Carmen. This was both my fist time in Mexico AND my first time at a resort, so it was exciting times!

This will be a shorter post since we just stayed at the resort for the full weekend (with one “adventure” excursion – ATVing, ziplining, and swimming in a cenote) but I’ll share a few tidbits about my trip and tips that I received before traveling.

Travel Tips for Mexico

This is going to be a pretty “lite” version but I found this guide by Travel Lemming helpful!

Some of the top recommendations from the guide and other sources were:

• Don’t Lose the Paper Slip (FMM) You Get at Customs
• Never Drink the Tap Water (and be suspicious of ice cubes)
• Toilet Paper Goes in the Trash Bin

I will add as an additional recommendation, I brought my backpacking water filter to treat the tap water – which DID work well to make it safe to drink but still tasted awful, so we just stuck to bottled water.

Fauna – A Surprising Highlight!

I saw SO many different animals even just on the resort grounds, which I was really surprised by! It felt even more different than animals I usually see on trips to Europe or Asia.

Some of the animals I saw were:

• Mammals
  • Bats
  • Coati
• Birds
  • Swallow
  • Flycatcher
  • Common Grackle
  • Yucatan Jay
• Reptiles
  • Turtle
  • Iguana
  • Spiny lizard

Somewhat thankfully we didn’t see any crocodiles, though some other people did around the resort, as well as a few deer.

The coati was my favorite! It was VERY cute.

We saw a terrifying number of bats looking at an underground cenote; our guide shone his flashlight into the cave and there were thousands of bats in the cave, which will be great nightmare fodder.

Other Highlights / Things I Would Have Changed

It would have been nice to go to Tulum or Chichen Itza but we didn’t have the time or mental capacity to get that planned out.

The cenote (nature swimming pool resulting from a sinkhole) we went to was amazing and it would have been great to go to more! Definitely was a magical part of our trip and we wished we had some pictures (but weren’t allowed to bring our cameras and were being too cheap to buy $70 of pictures).

Also we ate SO much ceviche – but also if I could go back, I would have eaten even more. I LOVE ceviche.