It is no news that I do not like Cancun, and every time I see its lagoon and that amazing long stretch of Caribbean beach ruined by the concrete jungle of the Zona Hotelera I feel sooooooooo irritated.
I landed at Cancun airport a few days ago after quite a long trip and I did not have the energy to escape as far away as possible, as I usually do every time I visit the Yucatan peninsula.

After all, I am not in a hurry; I have decided that this trip to Mexico will be longer than my usual visits…
Furthermore, I have been receiving many requests by gloCal travellers asking me to recommend a convenient place to stay when they have a late arrival or early departure to and from Cancun airport.

Since staying in the Zona hotelera was out of question, I decided to check Cancun town, as I did not know it that well.
I heard there were a couple of places that were not bad, and I have indeed found a decent place to stay a couple of blocks from the Central bus station and just 5 minutes by taxi to Gran Puerto, where you can catch the ferry to Isla Mujeres.
The place is called El Rey del Caribe, and it is recommended by many travel guides, now also by me
The rooms are facing an inner garden with a lot of green, a nice fountain and a small swimming pool. It was nice to see many different garbage bins for collecting and recycling paper, glass, and plastic. The hotel also had a few leaflets about eco-policies and a very interesting one about the many ’swim with the dolphin programs’ which are advertised everywhere along the Mayan Riviera.

Thumbs up for El Rey del Caribe then, although I still would not recommend anyone to stay in Cancun. Once out of the hotel you will have to slalom amongst cars and taxis trying to get to the main road, the Avenida Tulum, which is noisy, polluted and does not offers much more than a few places to eat at quite high prices, some shops, and the inevitable local Burger King… or was it McDonalds?

Unless your flight leaves or lands at a ridiculous time, get out of there and go to Puerto Morelos instead (you can catch any bus to Playa del Carmen, there is one every 10 minutes and the journey to Puerto Morelos is only 35 mins from the airport).

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 15th, 2007 at 5:12 am and is filed under gloCaltravelling, responsible travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.