Mexico | Tips & Hacks | Trains & Frogs.

Booking a Resort 🏨

This itinerary is from our travel to the Riviera Maya on the Yucatan Peninsula. We have been here once before and used that experience to plan this trip as well.
If you are traveling with family including kids, we suggest a family-friendly all-inclusive resort south of Cancun. Puerto Morelos or further south close to Tulum.
Playa del Carmen is a pretty large and busy town. We preferred smaller towns a bit more.
Different resorts have different fine dining options. We picked the resort based on location and food options. As we tend to eat there most of the days of the trip, the food options were important.

Try to book your tickets ahead of time online. Booking in advance gets you a 10% discount. You still need to pick up the tickets at the window but the line for pick-up can be shorter.
We have visited this park twice. The first time we did not purchase the buffet lunch and the second time we did. If you plan on spending a long time at the park, it probably makes more sense to purchase the buffet lunch. There are plenty of coffee, snack and some fast food type snacks available for purchase. Hence, it is possible to get by without purchasing the buffet lunch as well. We found enough vegetarian options at this buffet to have our fill including salad, chips and salsa, soup, pasta, pizza and desert.
Xcaret park has many paid animal interactions like swimming with sharks 🦈, dolphins 🐬, stingrays etc. We chose to skip these and still had many activities to fill our day. We especially enjoyed the underground river and the walk through the Mayan shopping village.
The underground river is pretty busy first thing in the morning. We chose to go in the afternoon and experienced much less crowds. There are several routes to choose from based on whether you enjoy the tunneled sections more or less. Length of the routes varies as well.

When visiting this area of Mexico, we recommend pre-booking a private taxi for getting around by calling some companies in the area and deciding on the price and locations to visit.
The taxis available directly from the hotel might cost quite a bit more.
We booked airport transportation through a company as well but did not have the best experience. We had to wait over 30 minutes at the airport for them to load us into a van with another family going close to where we were going when we booked a private transport. Additionally, on the way back to the airport the driver arrived more than 30 minutes late.
The highway back to the airport is notorious for bumper to bumper traffic. Allow at least double the expected time to get to the airport.

The Tulum ruins are easy enough to visit on your own unless you are looking for a guide to explain the monuments. The tickets can be purchased at the window.
It can be really hot even in the end of December.
We had a tour we booked online for Chichen Itza, Ek Balaam and a cenotes visit. However, on the day prior to our visit, the Chichen Itza ruins were closed due to some protests. Since we had not paid for the tour yet, we got our private taxi company to take us to Coba and Ek Balaam.
The Coba ruins accepted dollars but the Ek Balaam did not. Ek Balaam tickets are about $30 in pesos. We ended up not having any pesos and had to rush around finding some locals willing to exchange dollars to pesos outside the entrance. There is an ATM in the town about 30 minutes away.