Loltun Cave – Near Merida

Monday morning we broke camp at Uxmal and headed along the Puuc Route to Loltun Cave. It is the largest cave in the Yucatan. The road signs were good as well as the road until we got near the cave. I think there is another route without all the big chuckholes by going a little further on a better road.
They do their tours once an hour and you are required to have a guide that they say to tip at the end of the tour. The entrance fee was very reasonable and AFTER you pay a English speaking guide wandered up and said his fee is 600 pesos which is almost $50 for a 1-1/2 hour tour. There was another couple who didn’t think the fee was unreasonable so I did not have the opportunity to negotiate a better price. The guide said, if more people were here the price would stay the same, but whether you have 1 or 20 the group MUST still tip him 600 pesos.

Actually the tour was quite good. It is a very large multi-passage cave and the lighting was OK except that most of the time it shined in our eyes making walking the rough terrain a little hard. Along the way this dog started to follow us and kept jumping at my heels. At one point, for no apparent reason, the dog runs up behind Peggy and jumps up on her almost knocking her over. I pushed the dog down, he yelped and ran away. A woman on the tour with us then came and scolded me for abusing the dog. She could care less that Peggy was scratched and almost knocked down.  A real animal lover,

just doesn’t care much for people. I kept hoping the dog would come back and bite her to see if she might change her animal activist ways. We saw Ancient paintings that they probably redo every few years.

After the tour we decided to drive up toward Valladolid to see some cenotes (caves full of water) and tour the city. The short road back to the MX-180 was OK, but slow through all the small towns. So when we got to Piste (Location of Chichen Itza) we decide to stop at the Stardust Inn RV park. What a joke. It used to have power, water, sewers and bathrooms with hot showers. Now, nothing works but it is a nice level grassy field and cost 80 pesos to dry camp.

We were getting tired of the bad roads and saw all the churches, ruins, caves and busy little towns that we cared to, so when we awoke in the morning we drove over to the 4-lane Cuota (turnpike) and happily paid the  $20  toll and head all the way to Cancun and MecoLoco RV park. We stopped to fill our water tanks with bottled water and get fuel. We made it there in 3 hours and it was a very easy drive.
We intend to pay for a month. However we will leave our RV for 18 days when we fly back home for the holidays. We did this last year and our friends John & Elsie, camped right next to us, again agreed to keep an eye on our camper. MecoLoco now has free Wi-Fi so I’m catching up on all my website updates.