Meraviglia in Cozumel
On past visits to Cozumel we’ve gone to the mainland a couple times for Tulum and cave snorkeling, done the snorkel & beach break, and gone to beach bars and Chankanaab on our own. For something different this time we booked a dune buggy tour around the island with snorkel break through Vacations to Go. The same or a similar excursion was also offered through the cruise ship. Pre-covid a lot of places had all sorts of last-minute things available on shore for people who hadn’t booked anything, but post covid at previous ports it had just been island taxi tours. Not at Cozumel though. All the little stands offering pretty much anything Cozumel has to offer are back up and in business. Taxis abound too so getting out to any of the little beach bars or Chankanaab is no problem either.
Punta Langosta sends cruise ship passengers through a mall when they leave the port
Most of our previous port stops in Cozumel have been at Puerta Maya, with one at the International Cruise Terminal. This time MSC Meraviglia docked at the one place we hadn’t been before – Punta Langosta. The other two are quite near each other, but Punta Langosta is about 4 kilometers away. Puerta Maya and the international terminal both have shops within the port, but Punta Langosta exits passengers through a mall. Kind of like nearly every tourist attraction everywhere that exits through a gift shop, except that the cruise terminal sends you to an entire mall – on the second floor where you have to walk past a lot of shops before finding a way down to the street level.
fake shark photo stand at the meeting place for our tour
The meeting point for our tour was behind the Hard Rock guitar at Royal Village across from the international terminal, an easy walk from either of the other two docks, but a long walk or a taxi ride from ours. One advantage of booking through the ship rather than an outside source would be transportation provided from where the ship docks. There was a platform with a giant fake shark set up for photos where everyone sat to wait for the tour. We all had to get up once when somebody wanted to take a picture.
mustangs and dune buggies at the Sky Reef snorkel stop
As usual with these tours, there’s always somebody who books it and doesn’t show up so the departure time comes and goes while they wait and wait until finally the tour leaves late after they give up waiting. It was booked as a buggy tour, but half the cars were mustangs rather than the advertised dune buggies, which resembled Volkswagen Bugs. The mustangs looked pretty new and sleek, but the buggies had definitely seen better days.
we had a purple buggy
It was supposed to be a buggy tour so we hopped into one of those, but in hindsight we should have picked a mustang because the buggy had to be wrestled the whole time to stay on the road, had sticky gears it didn’t want to shift into, no doors, and the rubber trim around the edge of the opening that would have been a window if it had any glass tended to come off and have to be pressed back in place every time anybody climbed in or out. The front seat belts were set for a very large person and had no way to adjust them any smaller, and only one of the buckles worked in the back seat. The buggies also had a hard time keeping up with the mustangs when the drive involved long stretches of road.
Sky Reef beach bar
This is just a guess with no facts to back it up whatsoever, but it seems that if you booked this excursion through the cruise line the cars might be in better condition because the cruise companies wouldn’t want the liability for their passengers driving substandard cars, and if you booked it straight from one of the walk-up booths onshore they might possibly be even worse as they wouldn’t even have third party booking companies like viator, trip advisor, or vacations to go to answer to. Those companies have no actual control over the vendors, just customers who may make complaints or post bad reviews about their tours online.
beach at Sky Reef
We started out with 3 each of mustangs and buggies, but after an unscheduled stop on the roadside they said one of the buggies was leaking gas. There were 2 people in it. One joined us and the other went to a mustang, leaving the buggy abandoned there assumably for someone from their company to pick up. After he took a short turn driving (that he didn’t want) we wondered if their buggy had really been leaking or if that was just an excuse to leave it behind because he couldn’t really drive it. It was a very scary stretch of road with him at the wheel. It felt like we were going to hit every car that went by or spin out and end up in the bushes, but he managed to keep it on the road and in our lane (just barely). He hardly spoke any English so we couldn’t talk to him much since we don’t speak any of whatever eastern European language he spoke.
fish at Sky Reef
The blurb about the excursion when we booked it said the snorkeling was last, even going so far as to say people could stay there after the tour left if they wished, but would have to get their own taxi ride back to the port if they did. So we were all very surprised when our first stop was for snorkeling. We went to Sky Reef, which is one of the little beach bars where we have been before. There’s not a whole lot of coral there, but there are quite a lot of fish. As soon as you put your face in the water at the bottom of the stairway for getting in and out of the sea you see a whole school of sergeant majors that seem to always hang out there.
sergeant major fish and small coral
They have a pretty big snorkeling/swimming area with a boundary of rope and buoys. There’s boat traffic beyond the buoys at the outside edge, so staying within them is required, and also important to insure not getting ran down by a speeding boat. Within the boundaries there are some areas with more fish than others. Out in the deepest part by the buoys is not where the most fish are found. They’re in a bit shallower where there’s a little more structure on the bottom, and a lot of small corals.
puffer fish
There aren’t any large corals or rocky outcroppings, just more of an uneven bottom with some dips in the rocky floor. Not a lot of structure, but it seems to be enough to attract a lot of fish, and quite a variety of types in various colors and sizes. We even saw a puffer fish there, which is something we haven’t seen all that often.
snorkeling in Cozumel
We have our own snorkel gear and went right out snorkeling when we first got there. They were supposed to have the gear handed out to people who didn’t have their own and a guided tour going for those who wanted it within the first 15 minutes of what was supposed to be an hour’s stay, but we were already done before the guided group even got into the water so our stay there went long beyond the hour it was supposed to be. Sky Reef is a nice place and hanging out there is pleasant enough, but when you have a tour with more places to go there needs to be some sort of time management to keep the tour on track. Assuming the snorkeling would be last I hadn’t brought anything to change into afterword, but needn’t have worried about being wet for the rest of the tour as we stayed there so long we were dry before the tour finally moved on.
fish at Sky Reef
We hadn’t been over to the wilder side of Cozumel before. Most of the population and tourist attractions are on the sheltered side across from Playa del Carmen on the mainland. The other side is mostly jungle with open-water beaches that get a lot bigger waves and have rip currents so going out too deep is not advised. At least that’s what our guide said.
paved trail between the road and the ocean
In some places the jungle was creeping over the road in need of maintenance to chop it back. There was a paved path that looked like a small road between the main road and the beach, but since it had signs saying no motor vehicles or scooters it must have been some sort of trail. Cops are apparently either exempt from the no motor vehicle thing on that trail or they just don’t care because we saw some driving on it.
vultures on a roof at the lunch stop
From the road a lot of the jungle looked like palmettos, but when we made it to the lunch stop the tops of the trees there were about as high as the bottom of the second story deck where we had lunch, which I think would be pretty tall for palmettos. The ones I’ve seen before in Florida were more of a shrub than a tree. Could be a different type though, or some sort of palm tree.
restaurant and gift shop in the middle of nowhere
The lunch included with our tour was supposed to be ready when we got there for what was scheduled as a 40-minute stop. It took about half an hour before they even served it so of course we ended up staying there for over an hour. The best part about that stop were the kudamundis running wild there. They mainly were in the jungle all around the outdoor restaurant deck, but they would come up on the deck and run around by the tables looking for handouts.
coatimundi
They would sit up and beg just like dogs and were adorably cute. They seemed to come up from a compost pile they liked to raid behind the building that the deck sat on top of. The restroom (in a different building) at that place left much to be desired as it had no toilet paper in any of the stalls and about half the toilets were missing their seats.
coatimundi
Kudamundis (aka coatimundi, coati, or Mexican raccoon) are in the same family as raccoons, but with a longer snout and slimmer body. There are 4 types that live in different regions down into South America, but the Cozumel coati is unique to Cozumel and not found anywhere else. These adorable critters are omnivores that forage both in the ground and in trees, mostly eating fruit, spiders, and small animals. They seemed pretty happy with human food too that they found digging through a garbage pile and begging from customers at the restaurant. Seeing them was the highlight of this tour.
ocean view from the lunch stop
There was an ocean beach across the street from the restaurant, but we didn’t have time to do much more than look at it. Maybe that was all a lot of people did because it had a frame set up for taking photos from the top without even going down the stairway to the beach.
ocean beach
We were supposed to make a stop for tequila tasting on the way back to the port area after lunch, but since we were running so late that stop got skipped to make sure everyone got back to their ships on time. We had about an hour to spare when we got back to ours (which was the farthest from the starting/ending point), but some of the other ships may have had earlier all-aboard times plus the guides don’t want to cut it too close when running a non-ship sponsored tour as cruise ships only wait for their own tours if they come back late. Also considering that all of the other stops ran overtime an hour probably wouldn’t have been enough time for any stop on this tour. It was a fun tour, but better time management and easier to drive vehicles in better condition would definitely have improved it.
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