Isla Mujeres

Hi! 

I had a present this Christmas that was completely different to any present I'd ever had before. You may know that I spent Christmas in Cancun, Mexico, and the present was tickets to go on an excursion to a place called Isla Mujeres. We did lots of amazing stuff, including a dolphin swim, zip wire over the sea,  and much more, so I thought I'd write a run down of what happened here on my blog (I always feel awkward talking about this kind of stuff to my friends, is that just me? Yes? Ok haha).

The first thing we did after our early start (ugh) was catch a taxi to a little dock. This was where our catamaran picked us up and took us to the island. The ride was quite bumpy (understatement of the year, my sister ended up having to wear her goggles!), so it was a good job we'd taken travel sickness pills, haha! The staff on the boat were really helpful, spoke good English and it was obvious that they genuinely wanted you to enjoy your trip.

When we got to the island, we were taken straight to a meeting point where we were quickly split up into groups and taken to the dolphin enclosure. The 'enclosure' was a large area of sea fenced off in a square shape. From what we saw and were told, the dolphins were very well looked after. They were regularly let out of the enclosure into the open so that they would stay happy and healthy. Anyway, we got into the water and we were told to hold onto the fence as the sea was quite rough on that particular day. The dolphins we had were called Merlin and Yokonda, don't ask me to tell them apart though! Our instructor (who was lovely by the way, thankyou Yvonne) explained what we were going to do with the dolphins and told us a bit about them. Then it was time to start!

We did something called the 'foot push', which is basically swimming out into the open, rough sea while the instructor tells you where to swim (you completely lose your sense of direction, haha!). Once you're positioned, the dolphins swim over to you at an insanely fast speed (apparently about 30mph) and push you up and out of the water, while moving forward very quickly, using their noses on the bottom of your feet! It.was.amazing.

However, although we did have life jackets and I do love swimming, I never go deeper than my knees in the sea and I was quite scared as I was the first one to do it and had no idea what to expect!

After everyone had done that (with and without a bodyboard), we did some other tricks like kissing, jumping, dancing and stroking, it was so fun! Dolphins are surprisingly soft and slightly squishy (hate that word), not hard like I expected them to be.

When we had finished with the dolphins, we went to an amazing place called Garrafon Marine Reef Park, which was basically a paradise of turquoise sea, white sand and an amazing zipwire (the tall towers you can see in some photos were the parts where you stopped, it went in a triangle). I won't go into detail here because we did pretty much nothing other than messing around! 

I think that's everything I wanted to say, but in short, it was an amazing day and a once in a lifetime experience that I'll never forget (cheesy much). I'm doing a couple more posts about Mexico then I might actually start to post about normal things, the last few months since I started my blog have been very busy!

Lucy x