Day 0

Uneventful flights except for the fact that the guy at V Australia in Sydney managed to put the honeymoon couple in different rows! We sorted that out and were able to sit together for the 14 hour flight to L.A. Dannii broke her in flight entertainment screen about 2 hours into the flight and it never recovered even after being rebooted.

Dannii's entertainment


We got off the plane at about 5pm L.A. time and made our way to the shuttle bus stop and were at the Sheraton Gateway by about 6pm. We checked in got changed and headed down to the concierge desk at about 6.30. We asked about the shuttle bus from the airport to Dodger Stadium that had been mentioned in an email from the hotel and both employees looked at us like we were crazy people. Rather than wasting more time trying to help them understand English we got in a taxi and headed for the stadium. The game was due to start at 7.10pm so we knew we would miss the start but there wasn't a lot we could do about that.

It was freeway the whole way so what we saw of the city on the way to the stadium was the backs of building and billboards and a quite strange greyish sky. The closer we got the stadium the bluer the sky became which we took as a good omen for our evening ahead. Along the way our driver asked how we were getting back to the hotel and we said by taxi so he gave us his number and got our number and said that when we were ready we should give him about 20 minutes and he would come and get us. I guess that the promise of another $60 fare was a good reason for him to offer this service and it made life a lot easier for us as well.

We got to the stadium and went looking for our tickets. Britt, a friend from flickr, had organised through a family member some seats for us and all we had to do was find the right place to pick them up. We got it right on the second try and headed inside. Prior to taking our seats we decided to line up some some food and drinks and consequently missed the only home run of the night. So we can say that we were there for a home run but we just cant say that we saw it. We headed to our seats with our drinks, hot dogs and red licorice!
We were on the second level in the stand down the 3rd base line. Pretty good seats by our reckoning. We both had no real idea about the game. We knew what strikes, balls, outs were but as far as any further intricacies they were lost on us. We did figure out that Manny Ramirez was the Dodgers fans favourite player.

He looked more like a professional darts player than someone involved in an athletic endeavor but he obviously gets the job done. We lasted until the 7th inning. At that point we had both hit the wall and our travel had caught up with us. Our dutiful taxi driver was waiting outside where we said that we would meet. We headed back to the hotel to get some well earned rest. We both fell asleep pretty quickly at about 11pm. The problem was receiving a message on the phone at 1.30am. That managed to wake us up and we struggled to get back to sleep until about 4.30am.

We made it, there and back!!!

We got home a little under 2 weeks ago and both went straight back to work the following day and have been flat out ever since. Hopefully I will be able to get this up to date over the next couple of weeks and show you all how much fun we had while we were away.

See where we are going.

So one of the ways we have been getting our head around where we are going is by checking these 2 webcams.
This one Puerto Morelos Webcam is positioned above the town centre in Puerto Morelos looking out to the Caribbean Sea.
This one at Akumal Beach is about 45 minutes south of Puerto Morelos and gives you a look at the beach and sea down there.
Both of these are great distractions during a cold wet Melbourne winter.

12 Days To Go! Some more stuff booked

We finally got in touch with Eric from Ecab Tours to book our tour to Chichen Itza and the tour to swim with the Whale Sharks. As far as we can tell he is the only tour operator local to Puerto Morelos and he gets excellent reviews everywhere that you look.
Booked a couple of seats on the bus for our trip to Merida. had a little bit of trouble getting the booking to work online and have somehow managed to pay twice for it but it should be easy enough to fix that up.
We also booked 2 spots on this tour Mayan Biking Experience the biking part of the tour is only 11km's and it sounds like a pretty sedate ride. The cool part is that we are riding through remote villages towards Mayan archeological ruins. We also visit Tixkokob (pronounced like shiskabob but starting with a T) which is purported to be the hammock capital of the world.
I think that is probably everything booked now that we wanted to book before we left. There are a couple of other things we want to do while we are away but we are pretty sure that we will be able to organise them once we get there.

25 Days to go!!!

We are now close enough that we have started booking in some activities for our trip.

As our trip coincides with our first wedding anniversary we decided to find a "fancy" restaurant to celebrate this occasion. Dannii came up with this place Harry's Prime Steakhouse and Raw Bar it's in Cancun so it's about 30 minutes away but it looks like it is definitely going to be worth the trip.

Prior to dinner we thought it would be a good idea to relax and each get a massage here Jungle Spa apparently it isn't just a fancy name but is actually well ensconced  within the jungle.

We have booked in for a day at The Little Mexican Cooking School it's pretty self explanatory from the name.

There are a few other tours we are trying to organise at the moment just trying to work out the finer details.

49 Days To Go!!!!!!!!

Inside 50, only by a few minutes but still!!!!
More to come soon.

Why Mexico?

It seems that a lot of people when you tell them that you are going to Mexico ask why with some sort of incredulity. I don't know if that is just an Australian thing or if it is a worldwide phenomenon.
The fact that the people for the most part are friendly and helpful, the beaches are sensational, the weather is tropical, the cost once you get there is a lot cheaper than Australia in terms of food and accommodation, the historical archeological areas are as impressive as any others in the world and as long as you exercise the same caution that you would in any other major city around the world you should be reasonably safe seem to escape most peoples imaginations.
When we started tossing up ideas in 2008 for places to get married we threw around a few far flung places and at that staged planned to get married in 2010 and honeymoon in Mexico afterwards.
As it turned out we ended up getting married in June 2009 and now we are planning our honeymoon for the original date that it was scheduled to happen.
It will be Dannii's first trip to Mexico and my second. Although we will be spending most of our time in places that I didn't get to visit the first time we will get to see a few of the sights and cities that I saw first time around.
The other main reason I guess is that due to our research in one of the many Mexico travel guides we have we read about Puerto Morelos and it seemed like the perfect place for us to spend a couple of weeks.

96 Days to go!!!!!

Finally out of triple figures.
96 sounds a lot closer than 103, well a lot closer than 1 week is what I mean.

Trips, Tours and other stuff

So as well as looking at all the details of flights, accommodation and everything else we have also been checking out things that we would like to do while we are away. We have about 400 ideas however we only have 3 and a half weeks so we have to somewhat limit our choices.

So far we have a few must do's, some probably do's and some maybes.

On our must do list is;

Swimming with Whale Sharks in Isla Holbox. Pretty much self explanatory. We would either make our way or organise a tour which would get us to Chiquila which is about 90 minutes North of where we will be staying then catch a ferry over to Isla Holbox. From there we jump into another boat that takes 2 hours offshore where hopefully we will get to see as well as swim with the largest living fish species in the world.

Here is a pic to give an idea of the size of these creatures.





Next on our list are the many ruins in the area. The only problem is deciding which ones we will make it to and which ones we will have to leave for our next visit. I am pretty sure that we will make it to Chichen Itza, Tulum and Coba. However we might not have enough time when we are in Mexico City to make it to Teotihuacan. On my first visit Paul and I saw Chichen Itza and Teotihuacan so this time I am hoping to see a couple that I haven't seen before.

Chichen Itza                                                            

Coba

                                                                       Tulum 

There is a long list of water activities that we are looking into besides swimming with the Whale Sharks. Puerto Morelos is renowned for the snorkeling on the Mesoamerican Reef which is a few hundred metres offshore from our hotel room. They say you should head into town and hire a guide to take you out in a boat rather than swim out from the shore. 

Plus there is also an extensive series of Cenotes in the area. Cenotes are sinkholes or wells formed naturally through the limestone found throughout the Yucatan Peninsula. Not far from Puerto Morelos is La Ruta De Los Cenotes, the route of the Cenotes, a series of secondary roads which you can use to travel from cenote to cenote throughout the region. There are many tours that you can do which involve snorkeling in the cenotes amongst stalactites and stalagmites some are even full of fish.  Here are a few pictures to give some idea of what they can look like.

Apart from all the water and ruins we are also hoping to spend a half day at the Little Mexican cooking school. Little Mexican Cooking School As well as the recipes that you learn on the day of the class you also get a comprehensive Mexican cookbook to take away.

When we get to Mexico City we want, and by we I mean me me me, to go to the Friday night Lucha Libre. Mexican masked wrestling  

Paul and i didn't make it last time so it is on my must do list this time.

Also in Mexico City on Sunday mornings they close down the 8 lane Paseo de la Reforma in the heart of the city and let people ride bikes freely up and down the road for 6 hours.

   

We leave Sunday evening so we might have to get up earlyish for this one to make sure that we can still make out flight without having to rush. 

Quick Update

Haven't had a lot to report on recently.

Now that we have most of it organised we are in the stage where we are just waiting, waiting, waiting.

We did recently organise our travel insurance which can be a bit of a hassle for someone with a dodgy ticker, but that is all sorted now which is a relief.

The next things we need to look at are what if any immunisations we need to get, do we need malaria meds, tetanus, etc etc etc.
After that we will have to decide on at least a couple of the tours we want to do and book them in. The main one is the trip to swim with the Whale Sharks most of the others we can organise once we get into town.

Habla Espanol?

No, lo siento.

Soooooooo we start Spanish lessons tomorrow night. An hour and a half every Wednesday night for about the next 16 weeks. Dannii received a voucher for Christmas and we figured out after a few emails back and forth that we would need to start in the first week of February in order for us to be finished 2 levels prior to leaving in June.

The goal or hope is to at least be able to ask rudimentary questions while we are away and be able to understand the answers. I doubt that we will be in any sort of position to carry on a lengthy conversation but hopefully we will be able to go about our day to day activities with relative ease.

The anti-bargain!!!

Well it seems that in all the excitement surrounding getting our awesome airfares from L.A to Mexico and back again someone made a few keystroke errors that proved kind of costly.

Apparently I wasn't paying enough attention when I was finalising our bookings online. Not only did I only include 1 letter from my surname I also managed to invert Dannii's first name and surname.

On any other occasion I guess this would have been an easy fix. Just make a call somebody on the other end makes a few keystrokes and it is all sorted. Well yes maybe if this didn't involve plane tickets! Now I know why when you go to a travel agent they ask you to check the names and how they are spelled several times before they lock it in and print the ticket.

To get both tickets corrected cost roughly $10 for each letter I failed to put in or I put in the wrong place. $300US! That was a fair kick in the pants, although in terms of the relief that I felt after we got it all sorted out it was probably worth it. Trying to explain that I was actually "Mr C" and the plane ticket wasn't for the father from Happy Days to a customs official in Mexico City was not something that I was looking forward to. It was just lucky that the day we booked the tickets we ended up getting them $300US cheaper than we were expecting to pay so that is probably some sort of Karmic intervention evening it all out.

It was an expensive lesson that wont be needed to be taught again.

Our Hotels

We opted for a short stop over in L.A. because it seemed like a good idea at the time. It works well with flights to Cancun as well.
So we have booked 2 nights here LAX Sheraton
It's close to the airport so it means that we should hopefully be able to refresh ourselves after our flight from Melbourne then with any luck go out and see a game of baseball.
We are also reasonably close to Santa Monica and Venice Beach so on the Sunday we might head down there and check it out.

In Po Mo (Puerto Morelos) we are staying at Rancho Sak Ol  for a couple of weeks.
We have been assured that this place is on the beach and that this is a photo of the beach in front of the hotel










Photo courtesy of Chris Gold


From Po Mo we head to Merida for a weekend. While there we will be staying here Luz En Yucatan it is right in the centre of the city and gets excellent write ups.

After the weekend in Merida we head to Cancun for 3 days. We thought that we should stay in the hotel Zone and get a room with a view so we decided on here Hyatt Regency Cancun this is the sort of view we are hoping for











After Cancun we have 4 days in Mexico City and we are staying in an inner suburb of the city. We will be here  Red Tree House

From there we head back home

It's All Booked!!!

Finally booked the flights to, from and in Mexico.We got quite a pleasant surprise too.
I have been watching the airfare prices for our flights pretty regularly and for the majority of the time that I was watching they hovered at about US$1,200.
We got online this morning to book them and they came in at US$900. We couldn't see any particular reason why they were 25% cheaper but we didn't hang around to find out either, we just booked them as quickly as we could.
Because of the saving we made we were also able to book our hotel accommodation in Cancun as well today.
There was no bonus saving on the hotel but I think that we did pretty well for the day as it stands.

So now all the flights are booked and all the hotels are booked.

Inside 150 Days!!!!

Thats the first milestone for us.
The idea of going to Mexico was first floated about 10-12 months ago so while 148 days still seems like a long way away from where we started it is seemingly within reach.
I would have posted this yesterday except our countdown clock was being uncooperative and I had to find another one that was working. Turns out this one has a picture of the main pyramid from Chichen Itza on it so that worked out ok.

Where We Are Going.

The map to the left shows the area where we are going to be spending most of our time in relation to where Mexico City is located and in relation to the whole country. We will be spending 17 days in the Yucatan Peninsula and 4 days 3 nights in Mexico City on the way back home.






The map below shows the highlighted section on the right hand side of the first map. The cities highlighted are those that we will be staying in.
Puerto Morelos is the Caribbean beach town where we have booked 12 nights. It is a town of roughly 3,000-4,000 people.We chose it for a quiet couple of weeks on the beach.
We head from there to Merida for 2 nights. Merida is the capital of the state of Yucatan and is an old colonial town which was founded about 450 years ago and has been inhabited for centuries prior to the arrival of the Conquistadors.
Then back to Cancun for our final 3 nights in the region. I guess it is like Surfers Paradise on steroids for all our Aussie readers. It is the heart of tourism in Mexico with more visitors per year than any other place in the country.

                                                                                                                                                                                              




















Last but not least we will have 3 nights in Mexico City. A city with as many people as all of Australia.

Introduction

I thought that since the blog we put together in 2009 for our wedding in Las Vegas was so successful we would do a similar thing for our "honeymoon" which is due to start June 5 2010.
We put our wedding together on pretty short notice so we could only swing 1 week away in Vegas.
Now almost exactly 12 months to the day since we left for Vegas we are going to leave Melbourne for Mexico. We will be lucky enough to spend our first anniversary in a tropical paradise (hopefully it is a tropical paradise!!!).