Honeymoon Day 3 - Cozumel

After a day at sea, we arrived bright and early in Cozumel.  We were both ready to get off the boat and do some exploring! Just kidding, no exploring, we had an activity booked.  We had decided the night before to do the "Secret River Tour" while in Cozumel.  It was described as an underground cavern with a river in it.  Sounded pretty cool to us.

Cozumel view from the dock

Once in Cozumel, we learned that we had to board a ferry to take us to Playa del Carmen.  

Our fancy ferry

Normally that wouldn't be a big deal, however the waves were extremely choppy that day.  Naturally, being the photo loving scrapbooker I am, I decided we should sit in the back of the ferry to get the best view since it was uncovered.  Bye bye Cozumel and our ship!!!

Two minutes into the ride we regretted that decision as we were sitting in the most splash prone section of the entire boat.

Needless to say, we got soaked.  But it was fun in between the shivers!  We got a great view and got to be the first ones to see Playa del Carmen as we approached it only 30 minutes later.

Once we got off the ferry, we waited for our tour guide to take us to our bus.  While waiting we took a lot of pictures and took in the beautiful scenery.

Our bus ride was probably only 20 minutes, so it wasn't too bad.  We made a couple friends, Sean and Mary.  They were looking forward to going into the caverns as much as I was.  At this point in time, Eric was still a little weary of the whole "going underground in a tight space while also being in water" thing.  Oopsies...guess I forgot to take his claustrophobia into consideration.


When we got into Rio Secreto, we immediately were in awe at the beautiful nature surrounding us. There were so many colors that I am not used to seeing in our vast Texas wildlife.  We didn't have much time to look at everything because we had to get our instructions and then change into our swim suit, wet suit, water shoes, and take the most freezing shower ever to get off all products on us so we wouldn't ruin the caverns.  Us humans be nasty and ruin nature.

After everyone got our fancy outfits on, we got even more instructions and followed our guide into the area where we were blessed by a Mayan medicine man.

FINALLY we were in our fancy outfits, cleaned off, and blessed.  It was time to enter the caverns.  I knew this would be beautiful since I had been to caverns before, but words cannot describe how beautiful the ones in Mexico were.  Being underground and having fresh water run through them made them one of the most majestic things I had ever seen.  I had seen it before on "Planet Earth" but seeing it in person was amazing.  I honestly think that this should be something everyone does once in their life.  Yes, it gets tight down there (sometimes there are rocks half an inch above your head and you have to be under water to not get hit) but it is worth it.  The water is the clearest water I have ever seen.  We got to see fish and bats and even a spider that has evolved to only having six legs and two leg-like antennas.  That was really gross actually.  I don't care if it wasn't technically a spider anymore since it only had six official legs...It looked like a spider so I wanted to kill it.  However we were told not to touch anything, so the spider creature lived to see another day.

I wish I could describe to you the beauty that we got to see in Cozumel in that cavern.  Our tour guide was absolutely amazing.  She took us to parts that not many tourists get to see.  We got to climb, swim, crawl, basically every form of movement.  There were times we had to alligator crawl and other times we had to tread water.  It was amazing.  At one point she had us all sit down in about waist high water and turn off our helmet lights.  We got to sit there for about a minute in the complete darkness and just listen to the cavern.  We got to hear water dripping and echoing.  It was absolutely amazing.  After about an hour, we had to head out.  Somehow, I managed to get out with only one scratch on my knee.  That was VERY impressive.

Once we left the cavern, we got to get back into our real clothes and take off our moldy smelling helmet and wet suit.  They fed us traditional Mexican cuisine for lunch and I actually ate it!!! We knew nobody would believe me so I took a picture.  Here I am eating tortilla soup, mexican rice, a banana (Mexican banana?) and what I referred to as "crunchy things" which I was later told were actually flautas.

After lunch we walked around a little, lounged in hammocks, and waited for our bus ride back to the city so we could catch our ferry.  We had about 40 minutes to walk around Playa del Carmen before returning to Cozumel, so Eric and I did some "exploring".  We saw a Senor Frogs (my first to witness), saw some awesome shops, saw a Mexican man peeing in the corner on the beach

And saw about 5 military men outside of a Chinese fast food shop.

After passing another 10 or so police men (these were in addition to the military men), we headed back to our ferry.

After our eventful day, we sat in the BACK of the ferry again, where we stayed dry this time.  

It was an amazing day.  We made plans with Sean and Mary to have dinner and go to a show that night (sadly I was a bad blogger and did not get pictures with them...oopsies).  We ended up hanging out with them a few more times on our cruise which I will talk about later.


All in all, Cozumel was amazing (even though technically the Rio Secreto wasn't actually in Cozumel).  Up next, MORE ADVENTURES!!!