Xcaret is a bit of a tourist trap. It costs $130 for a ticket to the park and almost everything worth doing costs more. But it was still fun overall. On the bus to the park, they showed a video with all of the optional activities, one of which was snorkeling out on the reef. As it happens, the reef off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula is the second largest reef in the world after the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, so it was amazing to be able to snorkel off of it. The snorkeling tour was an additional $45 but it was well worth it.

We boarded our boat for the tour and they drove us about 20 minutes away and then let us in the water. One of the cool parts of this trip is that they allowed me to take off my life jacket so that I could do actual snorkeling (rather than floating). I don’t know if they were supposed to, but since I didn’t drown, it’s all good.

Our guides brought a bunch of bait with them so that we had fish around us all the time. We even made friends with a sea turtle and a very large stingray. The entire tour was 1:30 and the hour we were in the water literally felt like about 10 minutes. I absolutely flew by. This was the high part of the day.