Sian Ka'an, Playa del Carmen

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Si'an Kaan is a national park to the south from Tulum, where you can see lots of wildlife. A boat will take you around a huge bay with mostly fresh water. You'll see lots of birds in mangrove brush. Then the boats will take you out to the open sea, and, if you are lucky, you'll see dolphins or turtles or both.

After lunch you'll go to coral reefs for snorkeling. Snorkeling is quite good here, I even saw a ray, although it was a littel stormy and the visibility was not so good.

This trip is quite expensive - more than USD 100, but I recommend it to people who love nature.

Part of the guided tour of Sian Ka'an is swimming in the canals. you take these Mayan canals from one lagoon to another.
By now you know that we saw a crocodile.
then we stopped at the temple a couple of minutes later. Before we got back in the boat our guide told us we could swim. LOL. Hadn't we just seen a croc? He told us now that it was getting overcast the croc would stay in the reeds and we would be downstream.
I don't know why this all sounded so REASONABLE on vacation. So In we went.
You would not think there was a current, but there was...the guide turned off the motor and guided the boat right behind us with a pole, which i am sure doubles as a croc smacker...just in case.
It really was amazing until my nerves/better judgement got to me after about 10 minutes.

Here is our guide for our trip around the Sian Kaan Biosphere. What do you think, 18? His english was very limited, so is our spanish, but we still got some info. this is our boat pulling away from the temple in the lagoon.

You have to take a boat here. And you can catch one just inside the ruins at Myuil, south of Tulum. 25 dollars a person a guide will take you though the huge lagoons and narrow canals used by the Maya to tranport goods about a zillion years ago.
It's a small boat. We did see a crocodile. Maybe he was guarding a temple..ONLY ACCESSIBLE BY BOAT!

I was so upset that I never got a photo of our close encouter with a Crocodile at Yal Ku, I though I was going to get luck this time. He went under the water. Maybe you can see his shadow.

Here's the temple. You can't see it in the photo, but after our encouter with the crocodile we were amazed to see that that carving on the temple was of a crocodile!