Playa del Carmen

The city started as a small fishing town with ferries across to Cozumel, the world famous diving spot. It is in the Riviera Maya along the Caribbean Sea. Unfortunately, at the moment the nice beaches are covered in seaweed as it is drifting in on the currents from the Sargasso Sea. 

We caught up again with Yvonne and Tony and I got to spend some quality time with my mate. Mark went diving most days as he'd not done it for a while and this area is renowned for it.

We decided to stay on in the apartment for an extra week so we could go to a Spanish language school and build on what we had learned listening to the CDs. It wasn't the traditional classroom style either, which helped. We'd meet in coffee shops or a beach club, play games similar to a kids version of trivial pursuit - in Spanish where we'd need to understand the question first then formulate the answer in Spanish, in addition to learning new words and trying to understand past and present tenses. I have enough problems with the present tense!  Four hours a day was quite exhausting as there was just the pair of us with one teacher, so it was fairly full on. The saying about teaching old dogs new tricks definitely related to us but I think we, especially me, are more confident in constructing sentences now.

Tomorrow we head to Tulum for a few days, then further south before crossing the border next week into Belize, where they speak English and drive on the left :-)