Snorkel with Turtles

This is my last day in Xpu Ha until after the holidays.   I am going home for Christmas!   I am very excited.  I can't wait to see my family and friends.    Sadly, I am leaving Gerry here, but he is with a lot of great folks, and has a working satellite dish. 

Living in Crystal Beach, we are quite used to spiders.   We grow them fairly large there.   Even so, the spiders we run across here give us the heeby geebies.

 

 

This adorable little fellow hops when he runs around.  

 

Gerry stuck his big toe beside it for perspective.   Ugh...you wouldn't catch me putting my barefoot anywhere near this critter.    I dont know what kind of spider it is, but you can bet your bippy it has some nasty venom.

 

 

A few of us decided to go down to Akumal to see if we could find some turtles to snorkel with.  

 

There we are, the motely crew! That is me, Helen & Paul, and Shirley and Rob. Gerry, sat on shore and took pictures.    I wish I had a housing for our camera.    Perhaps I will visit ebay and look for a good deal.    

 

The five of us stuck together for a little while, but once we started seeing turtles we were too distracted to keep track of exactly where each other were.       

 

 

I admit it...I stole this pictures from the internet.   This is from a website about snorkeling with turtles in Akumal, and I saw a couple that looked exactly like this.   I saw 15 turtles, 1 ray, 1 blowfish, 1 needlefish and several other various fish during my half hour snorkel.    Until today, I had never heard of turtle grass.       

 

The turtles eat the grass on the bottom, and will sit there while you watch from above.   They don't stay put when you dive down, they swim off presumably to find another spot to eat in peace.

   

 

What's a good snorkel without a drink afterward?    We got menus, but one look told us that we were going back to Xpu Ha for lunch!   It was quite expensive.    My Pina Colada was 65 pesos, and Gerry's Pacifico was 40 pesos.    

   Don't you just love mask face?  

 



 

This is the little restaurant at the end of the road leading to our campgrounds.    I have been saying I wanted to stop in here for some authentic Mayan cuisine since we got here.    Gerry finally indulged me today.

 

Holy expensive!!!   We ended up getting appetizers, a shrimp cocktail and a conch cocktail.   They were tasty, but not awesome.    120 pesos each and 20 pesos each for a luke warm coffee.  

 

 By Canadian standards, it really isn't very expensive; however, we are more accustomed to the prices on the west coast and in central Mexico where there is less tourism.  

 

They sported a lovely zombie coconut head on the wall.

 

This dude is standing on an aluminum ladder, working on the hydro.    Yikes!

 

For the last 2 days we have had crazy hydro at the campground.    One outlet would spike 175 volts, while the other outlet would drop to 60 volts.    One second our fan would be running normally, then the next second it would slow down until it was barely moving.    Everyone was worried about their electronics.    Some people unplugged completely and turned on their generators, others relied soley on their solar panels.    However,  Nicole and Stephan burnt out their inverter, and perhaps some other electronics.   They didn't even get a chance to try to fix them because they were flying out today.    I sure hope the damage was minimal.   They will be returning in March. 

 

It turned out to be a ground wire was shorted out from a fallen palm leaf.      All is well again.