After breakfast in the restaurant of the Hotel El Meson del Marques in Valladolid, we drove to Puerto Morales. Puerto Morales is the town we stayed in our first night in Mexico, so we knew it was just 20 km from the airport, which was a good thing because we had a very early flight to catch the next morning.

While driving to Puerto Morales, we got caught in a torrential downpour. A very heavy rain pounded down, but it last less than half an hour. By the time we reached Puerto Morales, the skies had clear again and it was a beautiful day. That was the worst weather we had the entire trip, so we were fortunate. Every day in Mexico was ideal for us - sunny, but not blistering hot. I couldn't have asked for better sightseeing weather.

We stayed in a nice place called Posada el Moro. Breakfast is included with the room, but we left too early the next morning to enjoy it.

Puerto Morales is only a couple hundred kilometers up the coast from Belize, which is famous for the second largest coral reef in the world (after the Great Barrier Reef). This reef extends along the coast all the way up to Mexico. We decided to book a snorkeling trip out to see the reef. Since I do not have an underwater camera, I have no photographs to show.

The part of the reef we saw was just a couple hundred yards off shore, you could swim out there on your own if really wanted to. Because no one else signed up for a tour at the same time, we got a private snorkeling trip. I talked to the ticket guy while we waited for the trip to start, and he told me that tourism had never recovered from the peaks it had prior to the swine flu scare. After fears of the swine flu passed, the global economy crashed, and even in 2013 it had not recovered. The ticket guy told me that it was perhaps 50 or 60% of the number of tourists that used to visit. That is too bad, I found the Yucatan to be a wonderfully nice place, with fascinating ruins and great weather. Everyone was really nice to us, even the gas station attendants who tried to rip us off outside of Chichen Itza.

After our snorkeling trip, we walked around the tiny town, bought a couple T-shirts and then had dinner and went to bed early. It was the end of a fantastic trip.

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