Playa del Carmen - Last full day together (02.03.2022)

Wednesday and shared travel day #11 with Kathi and Georg has begun. Our last full day together started at 10:00 after a longer sleep and individual morning activities such as yoga and meditation, with a great and extensive shared breakfast.

Today's day can be quickly summarized: recharging batteries and soaking up the sun. We enjoyed the hotel's facilities, which include several great pools, beach access, and other amenities. We also sorted and processed the impressions of the past few days in pictures and text for the travel blog. Since today is also Kathi's mom, our dear Uschi's birthday, it was nice to video chat and chat and congratulate each other from home.

Reading books, sunbathing, enjoying ice cream, and of course, happy hour were the highlights of today. During dinner, we were able to once again convince ourselves of the quality of Mexican white wine, passing the test (hopefully) without a headache.

Our paths will separate tomorrow morning. Kathi and Georg will stay one more night in Playa and then head towards San Francisco in the US. We will be brought to Cancun Airport by the shuttle at 11:00 and will fly to Mexico City Airport for our first stop, where we will have some layover time. If everything goes according to plan, we will fly to Lima, Peru at 23:55 local time (Friday 05:55 CEST). The flight time, if everything goes according to plan, will be about 6 hours. From Lima, we will take a U-shaped tour through beautiful Peru, more on that in future blogs in the coming days. We are already very excited as it will be a completely different type of travel compared to Costa Rica and Mexico.

The daily two:

Insight: Mexico and tipping are special, especially for service staff in the gastronomy sector. We briefly touched on this topic on the first day of Mexico in the blog back then. In many places, the bill already includes pre-calculated tip rates (e.g. 10% = 100, 15% = 150€, 20% etc.). Unfortunately, the service quality often does not match, even in top establishments like the Kuuk Restaurant in Merida or here at Mahekal in Playa. Examples: plates are cleared while others are still eating, wine is not given for tasting but immediately poured, etc. Often, a 20% tip is expected quickly, which, from our experience, would rarely have been justified.

Moment of happiness: The hotel has a small ice cream shop where we gave in today and were finally able to enjoy a really good ice cream for the first time in a long time.