Alongside our regular gifts wedding registry, we used HoneyFund.com – so that people could ‘buy’ us pieces of our honeymoon. What you do is break your honeymoon into individual costs, like dinner on the beach, or you know, swimming with dolphins. Then you break it down even further. So if it costs $100 to swim with some dolphins, you break that up into four $25 pieces – and now four people can get you a gift of $25 that goes towards something you really want.
For friends and family that would rather get you an actual gift instead of just handing over cash, this is a pretty good middle choice. As you can see, one of the things on our list was to swim with dolphins.
There are several ‘eco-parks’ between Cancun and Playa Del Carmen where you can swim with dolphins and they’re all in the range of $130-$200 per person for an hour. Yeah. It’s not exactly a low cost activity.
Leah did this at the eco-park Xel-Ha (Shell-ha). We choose Xel-ha rather than Xcaret (owned by the same company) because Xel-Ha seemed like it was the more ‘eco-park’ and less ‘eco-Disneyland’. We were only there for the day and we weren’t bored at all. These are all-inclusive parks so you get to use all of the equipment AND you get to eat and drink all you want (this is Mexico so alcohol is included!)
It was a lot of fun – and I think everyone should go and spend a day there at least once.
Swimming with Dolphins at Xel-Ha from LeahAndMark.com on Vimeo.
Now, it may seem kind of weird but one of the restaurants in Xel-ha had really, really good food. Many of the dishes were prepared as they are in the Yucatan and not as they would be up near the US/Mexico border – so the difference was nice. Even at our all-inclusive resort the mexican food wasn’t as noticeably different/local. (But maybe we should keep it secret that I really liked the food at a theme park.)
The snorkeling is fun – although it’s really just for beginners – since if you’ve ever actually snorkeled anywhere near a reef… you’ll be bored here because there aren’t that many fish in the main inlet area – but for kids, it’s great since they have lifejackets that you wear and you don’t have to worry about actually ’swimming’ – you can just float and kick. And of course they have several cenotes there (underground cave/rivers) – but we didn’t even make it out to those because we were doing other stuff, AND honestly we figured that they couldn’t be any better than the one that our tour guide took us to after we visited the pyramid at Chichen Itza.
At all of the eco-parks they have ‘photographers’ strategically placed at different points to take your picture. At the end of the day you can choose which photos you want to purchase – and they’re all $12 each. Yeah. $12. We ended up buying 3. And that’s just for the two of us – you can imagine how easily buying these photos can rack up. But even with me bringing my waterproofed camera(s) – their photos were really good and you when you realize that you already spent $200 just to get there, what’s another $12 to have a great photo.
Oh yeah, swimming with dolphins? An hour costs $150 – AND THEN if you want to buy the photos it’s another $60 (you haggle to get it down to that much) and if you want the video that’s something like another $100. We opted to just buy the photos (these two are some of the 26 we got) – and then just be satisfied with the video I took while standing on the shore.
In other news… I’ve actually gotten a bit of interests from different people about working on videos with them – some musicians/bands and a nonprofit. This should be cool. We’ll see.