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Meraviglia and other ships in Costa Maya
Having been to Costa Maya on previous cruises, we knew there was nothing much at the port but a pool and shops and a couple paid things to do. We’d already done the random taxi out to Chacchoben Mayan ruins and a kayak adventure at Bacalar 7-colors lagoon. This time we booked a snorkel excursion. You can book excursions through the cruise or random online sources, or just get somewhere and see what there is to do. We often book our cruises through Vacations to Go and they provide another excursion option with a list they send out of excursions to book through them. That was where we booked our snorkel excursion as well as the previous kayak excursion.
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entrance from to Costa Maya cruise port from the dock
Ship’s excursions have an advantage in that they provide transportation from the port and if you return late the ship will wait for you. Things not booked through the ship generally leave you on your own to get to their designated starting point. Some provide transportation from somewhere near the port if the place they are going is quite far, while with others you get there completely on your own. Excursions booked through Vacations to Go do include directions to the starting point and a recommended mode of travel, which for this excursion was a taxi.
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Mar Adentro Dive Center
Once you find your way out of the maze that is Costa Maya cruise port, there are taxis available both inside the port area and just beyond it. With 4 ships at the dock the walkways between the port’s many shops were a writhing sea of people. We tried going to where the exit had been the last time we were at that port, but there was some construction going on and the exit had moved to a different location. We had to backtrack back toward the dock to find the new exit through a long narrow corridor of small shops instead of the short hallway where it once had been, which now led to more shops rather than the way out of the port.
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view of the beach at Blue Kay Ecocabanas from the water
Instructions to get to the starting point for our excursion at Mar Adentro Dive Center inside of Blue Kay Ecocabanas said to take a taxi, which is an 8-minute ride. Google maps said walking there would take just over half an hour. The taxi stand at the port sent us to a taxi-bus with a bunch of other people. We made sure it was just taking people where they wanted to go and not one that was doing a scenic tour before getting on. Most of the people got off at a beach. Just us and one other guy stayed on to go to the dive shop. He had a dive excursion there, which he was a bit late for. We were slightly early for ours, having allowed ourselves plenty of time to find the way out of the port and get a taxi.
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snorkel boat
There were 6 people booked for our snorkel excursion, but other than the one girl who was already there and waiting when we arrived nobody else showed up. She was a bit worried about the time, but apparently had been mistaken on when her ship departed as it was still at the dock a couple hours after she thought it had been scheduled to leave. One advantage of booking excursions through outside sources is that they usually don’t have nearly as many people as an excursion booked through the ship.
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life on a rock
Once they determined that the rest of the people weren’t going to show up we took a small boat out to a reef not far from shore so it didn’t take long to get there. We got a bit wet getting into the boat as we had to wade out to it, but we were going to get wet snorkeling anyway. They would have provided snorkel gear, but we all had our own.
Before we got going the boat captain and guide showed us a chart of all the different sorts of fish we might see out on the reef. They also mentioned there were often rays there and occasionally turtles, but we did not see any turtles that day.
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snorkel guide
At the site we ditched the life jackets that were required for the boat ride and donned our snorkel gear before jumping off the side of the boat into the water. On some snorkel excursions you just swim around on your own near the boat, but this was the sort where you follow a guide to places a bit more distant.
The area had a lot of little reefs on rocky outcroppings with sand or seagrass in between, which we would not have seen if we had just stayed next to the boat. Sealife loves structure. Wherever there were rocks they were covered in small corals of many different varieties, with fan coral being the most prominent. Fish of various sizes and colors swam about the reefs.
Between the little reefs there were not so many fish, but in some places small rays sat on the sandy bottom. There were a lot of little clear jellyfish, but they were not the stinging sort. Besides a variety of fish from the chart I also saw some cuttlefish, which are related to squids.
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found the right boat
A crowd of people from another boat got between me and the others of our group while we were heading back to the boat and I lost track of them. Our little boat had moved from where we originally got out and was hiding behind their bigger boat. Meanwhile another little boat identical to ours had arrived, stopping in the same direction away from us as ours had originally been, though a bit farther away. Having spent the time looking at sea life rather than boats I did not see either of those things happen. Not realizing we hadn’t just swam that much farther from it, I went the wrong way toward the other little boat on the opposite side of the bigger boat from where we currently were. I hadn’t gone too far in the wrong direction before the guide got my attention to find him and get turned around and head back toward the right boat.
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little reef with lots of sea life
Reminiscent of our last visit to Costa Maya, the weather was nice during our excursion, but poured down rain on the way back. By the time we got to the port it had slowed down some, but was still raining. You don’t really get that wet from rain when you’re already soaked from snorkeling though.