Fifty Plus (50+) - Anyone ever bike in Akumal, Mexico?

My wife and I are headed for Akumal, Mexico next week for a brief stay. We are diving for two days, but plan on renting bikes and exploring a little. Anyone with experience in that area of the Yucatan? Any reason to worry about exploring the area by bike?

Akumal is a self-contained resort community, but it's pretty small and isolated and there's not much exploring to do there by bike; it's pretty much strung along one street. It would be nice to have a cruiser to take around from your lodgings to the restaurants and beach. But you could walk most places too. Beyond Akumal there's the main highway (not recommended for biking!) and the small Mexican town across the highway where most of the locals live. Beyond that there's nada.

However, I did take a guided trip to a cenote via a 20 minute mountain bike ride. That was cool, but more for the cenote than the bike ride.

Given the way Mexicans drive, you'd want to be pretty careful on a bike there.

Make sure you have plenty of cash or travelers checks handy even if, like me, you rely on ATMs when traveling. When we were there a couple of years ago there was only one ATM in the local general store and it was not reliable. Nearest banks are in Tulum or Playa del Carmen.

Thanks for the info . . . any recommendations on good places to eat?

I can't remember names but: the big palapa covered restaurant by the beach near the main gate is good, and there was a more "upscale" place in the market/shop area that was excellent for dinner.

I did keep a brochure for a hotel/restaurant there that was good: Que Onda, near the Yal Kul lagoon. BTW, the lagoon is a great snorkel spot for casual snorkelers and families.

Actually it's hard to go wrong there. There are a lot of nice private homes in Akumal belonging to affluent gringos (you'll see American plates on the BMWs and Lexuses in the driveways) so the clientele ensures a fairly high standard.

Of course in resort areas places change a lot, so who knows.

Hey, I also dug up the flyer for the bike/cenote/cave trip: it's thru TSA (there's an office in Akumal) and the cenote is called Santa Cruz. email for info: tours@akumaltravel.com Price for the trip was US$35 three years ago. Worth it IMO. Guide was personable and knowledgeable.

Be aware also that Akumal, because it is both a resort community and isolated, is more expensive than the norm for the area. Not rip-off expensive, just a bit pricier.

Take a day to go to Tulum for the Mayan site and to check out the funky, rapidly growing town. To the north Playa del Carmen (the mainland port for the Cozumel ferry) is a hopping tourist/beach town that has exploded in the past 10 years, but unlike Cancun is not hi-rise and is very walkable.

That whole area was hit very hard in the hurricanes a couple of years ago (Playa and Cozumel in particular sustained heavy damage as did Cancun) so a lot might have changed since we were there last.

thanks for the info -- Tulum is on our list of must see sites. Haven't made up our minds on the cenote, one dive shop is pushing their dive excursions . . . we'll see.

That whole area was hit very hard in the hurricanes a couple of years ago (Playa and Cozumel in particular sustained heavy damage as did Cancun) so a lot might have changed since we were there last.

I went to Cancun last year. It wasn't bad. Most of the bay area has been cleared of the mangrove trees due to the hurricanes. It was hard to tell what was storm damage and what is new development. That city is really booming. I even have a second "home" location for my timeshare, now, as Royal Solaris had added a brand new hotel to it's chain.

As far as cycling goes, you'd need a SAG vehicle behind you to make sure that you don't get run over if you're planning to ride alone through the hotel zone, but I did see what looked like a bike club riding in toward the city--probably about 12-15 people.

Other must sees:

- Chichen Itza (bring water)
- Xel Ha (prononced shell-ha) (swim w/dolphins, unguided snorkeling & swimming, inner tubing, biking, hiking, cenote/under ground caves, dining)
- Isla Mujeres (swim w/dolphin, swim w/sharks (fence partitioned), swimming pools, snorkling & swimming, bicycling, hiking, dining)
- Xecaret (pronounced sh-ca-ret) (zoo, snorkling, swimming, underground river float, Mayan show, Los Caballos show, mariposa (butterfly) breeding and viewing area, dining)

Here's a web site with a short description of many of the Mayan Ruins that can be visited. Look for the ones in Quintana Roo or Yucatan:

http://www.locogringo.com/research/ruins.html

I last was in that area 26 years ago, and in a way it is good to hear that once you get outside of Cancun, things haven't grown all that much. Cancun of course is much larger than it was in 1980. It was already full of big hotels, but the hotel area has since expanded much farther down the coast.

Back then my wife and I rented a car for two side-trips. (It was a VW bug - which were still being made in Mexico at that time, after production had stopped elsewhere in the world.)

1. Drove down to the large Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza, which is definitely a must-see. Two-lane road, with hardly any traffic on it, at least back then. The road goes through one decently sized town, which I forget the name of now (began with a V, I think).

2. Drove south along the coast, stopping at Akumal, Xel-Ha, and Tulum.
- Akumal was a pretty sleepy area back then - it sounds fairly quiet and peaceful still.
- As noted above, great snorkeling at Xel-Ha, which is sort of a state park (the state or province of Mexico that this is all in is Quintana Roo). The neat thing about Xel-Ha is that it is a natural lagoon that is fed by both fresh-water springs, and also at high tide there is spill-in from the ocean. So there is a very interesting mix of fish. I still remember coming face-to-face (literally) with a huge sea bass, which gave us both a bit of a start. I just saw an article somewhere about Xel-Ha (maybe in the AAA magazine, Via??) where they said that it has expanded a fair amount, but is still a great place to go. (Of course if you are a scuba diver, then Xel-Ha is probably not as interesting, compared to diving off of Cozumel.)
- Tulum is also very scenic - the ruins are small, but are in a beautiful setting on the coast.

At least back then, the places along the road (not in town, but on the open road) where paths led to people's houses (mostly simple huts) were marked by painted animal skulls propped up on sticks or poles. Things like cattle skulls, sea-turtle skulls, and even the occasional jaguar skull. It added a certain atmosphere to driving along the deserted road through the jungle/forest. At one point (I forget which of the two roads this was on) a guy carrying a rifle and a machete popped out of the forest on the side of the road, wearing two crossed bullet belts. I assume he was just hunting, but I didn't stop to ask him... Driving back at night, the interesting thing was that in many small villages there was only one thing lit up by electricity in the whole village. It would be a lone Coca-Cola machine, with a single cord run up to the power line running next to the highway. You'd see if off in the distance, glowing red and white.

rschleischer: You would be appalled at Xel-Ha and Xcaret now. Both are more like theme parks. Expensive too. Both are a 'must miss' IMHO. I think it was Xcaret where the gov't "improved" a famous grotto by dynamiting it.

That little lagoon at Akumal is better for snorkeling. More fish. Once I met up with a sea turtle. Costs all of 5 pesos to swim. We took the grandkids there a few years back and they still talk about it.

That whole stretch of the Yucatan coast is now promoted heavily as the "Riviera Maya". Huge self-contained resorts are springing up along the whole coast from Cancun to Tulum. Only good thing is that the coast highway has been greatly improved...but the net environmental cost is probably huge. I never saw those skull signs...probably a thing of the past.

The road to Chichen Itza (and Merida) from Cancun has been bypassed by a modern toll highway. The "V" town is Valladolid.

Akumal has been developed more than you probably remember, but it is still basically a neighborhood (albeit an affluent one) with a few small hotels mixed in instead of a "resort". I know it started as a collection of dive bums' places following a Cousteau film about the bay but that time is long gone. But it is still quiet and laid back. Diving is still said to be superb but I'm not a diver.

Oh, and on that bike/cenote trip we did meet a guy with a rifle and machete as you described! Guide said that illegal hunting by locals is common. So some things haven't changed.

However, a couple of times we have driven all the way into Belize and once below Tulum it gets pretty remote again.

Now, Belize is a whole 'nother thing! But I wouldn't want to bike there either, unless I was a hardcore MTBer.