Day six of our Norwegian Getaway Cruise was to Cozumel, Mexico.
The Freestyle Daily...
This
is one of those times I have to say, if I knew then what I know now, we would
have skipped Xcaret Eco Park.
Not because of the park but because of the all the traveling to get there. The park is amazing. Although our ship was docked in Cozumel, we never really got to step foot in Cozumel.
As
soon as we docked, we had to boarded a ferry for a 45 minute ride to the other
side of Mexico. This is not a FUN ferry
ride either. If you get sea sick, this
is not for you. I would say half the
people on the ferry were tossing their cookies the whole ride over. It is pretty rough water and waves are pretty
big. You get tossed around a lot. On a plus note, there is free barf bags!
Once
off the ferry we had to wait in a group for everyone to get organized. Once we were all together there was a walk up
a small hill through town to our awaiting bus.
Then it’s a 20 minute bus ride to the park.
Once
we got to the park we went right into the swim part. They provided bags with locks to store yours
stuff. The bags are locked and taken to
the end of the swim for you to pick up.
This was amazing and lots of fun.
It takes a good hour to do the complete swim and I would recommend water
shoes and a water proof camera. My 11
year old did it so it is doable for kids.
There is a currant which will push you along if you do not want to
swim. They provided life vets if you
just want to float.
Once
out, we were looking for food and our guide took us to a local place inside the
park. Warning….do not do this!!!! We were not impressed. The wait for food was very long and half our order was
missing. Even when the food did make it to the table, it took forever to get
forks to eat with. We gave up waiting and started eating with our fingers. We even had to finally flag down our tour guide
in order to get our check so we could leave. This ate up a lot of time we could
have been exploring the park. I would
say just grab something from one of the walk up venders and spend more time
exploring.
We
only had a good 2 hours to explore the park because we had to be back by 4:30
for the long bus ride and ferry back to the cruise.
The
park is pretty amazing and I could see spending a whole weekend just
exploring. This is not a few hour thing
but an all-day experience. This could be
a vacation all on its own. The paths
were covered by shade to help with the heat and color coded which made for
easy finding your way around. We only
got to see part of the park but would have liked to have stayed for more.
By
the time we got back to the bus there was no time for any shopping. We drove back to the ferry and still no time
for shopping. Boarded the ferry and made
it back to the ship 2 minutes before time to boarding.
The 7 hour advertised
trip sounds good when you book it but they don’t really tell you that 3 ½ hours
of it was spent traveling to get there and back.
