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Merida

Pierre and Barbara
February 18th, 2020 · 2 min read
Home > Yucatan > Merida

Tips 👏

  • There’s Uber Eats if you fancy lazy food
  • It’s a big city and the capital of Yucatan, a lot of traffic
  • Plenty of hotels, making it a good basecamp to explore the surroundings

🏠 Accommodation

We stayed at the Holiday Inn in the center, booked with our rewards points. We don’t recommend since pretty expensive and not that great.

🚲 Getting there

We drove 3h from Valladolid on the highway without issues. Entering in the city took time because of traffic congestion.

⏱ Duration

We stayed 2 days and 3 nights and felt that was good.

❌ Miss

We didn’t make it in time to the Cenote Canunchen and Cenote Bal Mil because they closed at 5PM. Check opening times before planning your day. We also didn’t got time to visit the city.

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Homun cenotes 🏊

On our first day, we decided to go to Homun by car to explore the multiple hidden cenotes of the area. We could also have taken public transports since once there, there was plenty of agencies to visit the area but the car was just more comfy. We left the city after lunch, and arrived around 2:30PM at our first cenote. In total we stayed around for four hours and visited three different cenotes since the two remaining ones were closed. Here’s what we saw:

To get to the two last ones, we went in Homun up to Calle 8 where we found signs. We followed the directions and drove on an un-pave road for 500m. At this point, we turned left for Cenote Tres Ojos and after carried on straight for Cenote Yaxbacaltun. The roads looked dodgy but were fine with the car.

cenote santa rosa stairs
cenote santa rosa
cenote tres ojos
cenote yaxbacaltun

Celestun boat trip 🚤

For our second day, we took the car and drove 2 hours up to Celestun to do a boat tour and look-out for flamingoes. We arrived in the city around 1PM and went to grab an ok lunch on the sea side at Los Pampanos . They had a private parking which was ideal for us, and helped us to find a boat tour from the beach for 400MXN/person (normally is 200MXN/person, but since there was only 5 people with us the price jumped to leave faster).

We left the car on the parking, boarded the tiny boat and started a one hour quite bumpy ride onto the lagoon. We then finally arrived close to tons of flamingoes gathered together on the water looking for food. We stayed for while watching them from few meters, before heading into the mangroves where we spot a baby crocodile and took a bath in a cenote.

boat celestun
flamingoes
boat mangroves

Post bath, we rode back to the bridge connecting the city to the land and jumped off the boat. We were delighted to find a family of racoons with babies hoping for some nibbles. Few pictures later, we took a cab back to the center, did a little bath in the sea, grabbed a quick shower at the restaurant, tipped 50MXN the parking dude and headed back to Merida for the night.

cenote mangrove
cenote mangrove jump
racoon 1
racoon 2

Overall, it was quite a nice day. Celestun is a nice small town but we both felt beside doing a boat tour there’s not much to do, so an afternoon was enough for us.

Restaurants 🍲

  • La Taque: Good burrito for cheap price.
  • La 21: Pretty good mexican food available on delivery.

Our 2 days stay in Uxmal, check again Valladolid, or go back to the main Yucatan post.

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