Puerto Aventuras

Our next stop was Puerto Aventuras, Mexico. We left in the evening and travelled all night, arriving the next morning. It is about a 12 hour trip south of Isla Mujeres. This place reminds me of Lake Buena Vista— before it was replaced by Downtown Disney. There are rows of restaurants and little tourist shops with surrounding condos and vacation rentals. And there is also a Dolphin Encounter, with regular groups of 8 or 10 people getting to swim with the dolphins, sea lions, and manatees. The marina mostly serves charter boats for diving, snorkeling, and sunset “sails” (most are not rigged for sailing since all those lines would get in the way of the people on the bow). In fact I think we are the only liveaboards here.

The place has an OXXO convenient store on premises with basic groceries, and next door to that are French and Italian bakeries with fresh bread and croissants.

One evening Kim excitedly called me out to look at some small animal. It was dark, hard to see, but there was a four legged animal walking to the bushes and then it disappeared. We had no idea what it was. Benjamin overheard us talking about it the next morning and said, “I saw one too, I thought maybe I was just still blurry-eyed, I have no idea what that was!” A few days later I decided to ask someone and went to an employee of the dolphin encounter who I assumed incorrectly would speak English. I ended up with four employees of the dolphin encounter who spoke limited English and my limited Spanish while I did charades to have them guess the animal. Basically it has four legs, short hair, no tail, thinner than a raccoon, not a cat, not a rat, unsure of the color since it was dark but probably brown. I had to do lots and lots of gestures. They would bring up pictures of various animals on their phone… a raccoon? No lots thinner and not as long haired as a raccoon. A squirrel? No, larger than a squirrel and it doesn’t have a tail. Finally one guy figured it out, a tepezcuintle! A what? I had to write that one down and then google it. Also known as a paca. After that I started seeing them in the early morning and evenings and was able to get a better look at them. They look like a small thin groundhog.

Our boost pump for the water maker isn’t working. We have another on order that Kim will pick up when she flies to Texas for Aunt Chris’s 98th birthday. She was worried about us not having enough water while she was gone, and the marina hose water isn’t potable enough for our water tanks. So we bought 16 x 5 gallon containers of water. Benjamin used a dolly and made the trips back and forth to the OXXO, bringing 4 at a time. Aislin added them to the tanks. The project took a couple of hours and almost wiped out the OXXO of water, but should last us a while.

We plan to stay here for the next couple of weeks.