My Cancun Honeymoon

We stayed at the Gran Bahia Principe Coba.
The resort is about an hour south of the airport, but ended up being right in the middle of all the attractions we wanted to visit.

The resort was all inclusive, which was absolutely wonderful.
There were several different buffets every meal of the day as well as various huts that made greasy "drunk food" twenty-four-seven. since we stayed for a week, we got three scheduled meals at their gourmet restaurants. The restaurants all had very stunning decor. It was the first time I had fois gras! (it turned out being kinda icky)
The Asian food at the Mikado restaurant was scrumptious!
(not to mention the alcohol is all inclusive too)

The resort is actually three resorts in one. It is almost like Disneyland, very well manicured. There are shuttles constantly going between the resorts and to the beach. The beaches were beautiful, perfect for strolling, and the nighttime entertainment was lively.

The room service was thorough and had a sense of humor. Every day we came back to a different towel animal! Tip your room service and you will come home to pleasant surprises. After a fairly nice tip our guy brought us some fruity dessert and a little bottle of very nice tequila (which we took home for a souvenir for a friend)

The only bad aspect we noticed was that we would occasionally get a whiff of sewer smell as we walked around.

Travel Company Representatives
Make sure you find your representative if you have airport pickup! For example, we traveled with Apple Vacations, so our representative had an apple on his shirt.
The airport in Cancun is always crowded with fake "information" guys. Do not make eye contact or ask them any questions! Go straight through to the exit and find your representative!
Resort Representatives
Usually these people will take you to places if you buy one of their daily excursions. There is a good side and bad side to this. With them, they handle your transportation, food, tour guides, translators, park entrance fees, and pretty much everything else. You don't really have to think. The down side to these is you are stuck with them. Some excursions allow free time to wander, but there isn't much of a chance to change plans if the fancy strikes. Another down side is the price. usually these excursions cost hundreds of dollars per person. For excursions with equipment like ATVs or jetskis, I can understand. But for a day looking around a mayan ruin, you can do the same thing for about $20/person. It also didn't seem like fun to pay for meals on these excursions when we already had all inclusive meals at the resort.
Rental Cars
We didn't even touch these. If you have all your documents together, it doesn't seem so hard to navigate cancun. North to South is pretty much one road with HUGE signs to all the attractions, including ruins. Rental cars would also give you the freedom to do whatever you want.
keep in mind that Mexican driving is different than American driving! Be current on all licenses and know the laws in Mexico.
Another thing to consider, especially if you go inland, is gas stations and having a map with marked gas stations. they are not as common in Mexico as in the states!
Taxis
If money matters at all to you, DON'T EVER do the taxis! If you must use a taxi, try to split it. Also, don't get in the car until you have established a price to where you need to go. You can haggle with taxi drivers sometimes, but don't expect to get a deal.
Buses
This is what the locals use. The buses go to the places inland that the collectivos don't go to. We took a bus from Coba, the end of the collectivo line, to our other resort at Chichen Itza. These buses go through all kinds of ittle towns. If you want to get to know the real Mexico, the bus is a great way to do it!
if you want efficiency on the bus line, try to make sure you know a little Spanish! On the way from Chichen Itza to Cancun for our flight out, we accidentally took the local bus instead of the express bus to Cancun. This bus picked up school children in addition to people walking on the road. We were TWO HOURS late for our flight! It was okay in the end, because we made it onto a more direct flight a little later, but it was a little scary waiting for people to not show up for their flight!
Collectivos
These are the absolute best and cheapest way to get around everywhere along the coast. These are vans run by the local government. For only $2-$4 USD, you can go anywhere along the main drag, including to many ruins and attractions. They are comfortable, air conditioned, and they are almost always driving up and down the highway, past all the resorts, so you can flag them down. They even go to a few of the Mayan ruins, like Coba and Tulum. They also drive by Xel-Ha and other water parks. As with other methods of transportation, ask how much to your location before you get in.

We went to three sets of ruins on our trip. These were Tulum, Coba, and Chichen Itza.

The first ruin, Tulum, was right on a craggy cliff on the southern part of the coast. This ruin is just about completely excavated, with the rainforest cut back, the paths lined with stones, informative plaques, and ropes around everything.

When we opened our camera, we had a hard time taking pictures, because the camera had last been opened in the cool air conditioned hotel room, when we opened it, the hot humid sea breeze got into it and made all the pictures fuzzy for a while. Keep your camera on/open for a minute before taking pictures here.

The ruins are very nice and you can see some carvings. The whole site is really small and could be done in just a few hours.

Now we are naughty and wanted to hop on the ruins for a photo-op. It took a while to find a building without ropes around it.

Our favorite ruin by far was Coba. A little further inland, and a much more spread out ruin, we felt like explorers in this partially-excavated jungle grown ruin. If you dont have a tour taking you there, it is a mile or two from the collectivo stop to the entrance. (Tours park right at the entrance) Then it would be maybe seven miles to explore all the parts of the ruin. You can rent a bike or pay a guy to pull you on a bike if you are lazy :) The biggest attraction of Coba is their large pyramid. Smaller than the wonder at chicen itza, older, and crumbling in places, this ruin actually has a guide rope so visitors can climb to the top of it. I think a few people have gotten injured (or even died) on this part. The steps are very tall and steep. Though most people just go to the big pyramid, they miss much of the partially excavated ruins, with giant eight foot steles dipicting pictures of god and mayan writing. I definitely recommend planning a LONG day for this ruin, and go by your self, not with a tour so you can drink it all in. You might want to hire a guide to tell you about things, because there aren't any plaques here.

Chichen Itza is also great, though we were sunburnt and didn't spend forever there, there is a lot of interesting stuff other than the big pyramid. The big pyramid is GREAT though! It is much bigger than I imagined. The scale is really incredible. After all those crumbling shambles in coba, this one looked pristine. It was a definite jaw dropper. The whole ruin was really amazing though. Again, this ruin was well kempt. There were lots of plaques, so I don't recommend paying a guide for this one if you can read. Most of the ruins here are roped off (definitely the big pyramid :'( but you can walk through the hall of a thousand collumns. This almost greco-roman hall has endless columns. It really is a thing of splendor.

The beaches were exactly what they should have been. Nice fine white sand, clear shallows with lots of tropical fish, nearby snorkeling areas and those little straw hut umbrellas. On this resort there was even a beach bar every several hundred feet, with rope swings to sit on while you wait for your beverage.

The beaches were great, but we only spent one day on the beach because the pools were so darn good! The pools are spread out so that almost every room is close to a pool. Some of the pools had various waterworks and jets. Some even had bars, with stools underwater. They were also near to poolside food huts, so you could hang out all day. The pools were always nice and clean and we never had trouble finding a pool chair. We didn't hit the activity pool, but they would set up things like water volleyball at certain times of the day.

This resort is literally IN the ruins of Chichen Itza! Out side of our bungalow there were old ruined walls. Out of the lobby window was one of the towers. it was literally a five minute walk to the great pyramid of Chichen Itza! The resort wasn't nearly as nice as the Bahia though. Part of our opinions might have been colored by our sunburns, since we spent the last day at the bahia on the beach building sandcastles.

The resort wasn't all inclusive, and that was painful at the end of our trip. We were pretty much out of money so paying $12 per person for a buffet smaller than the one at the other resort made us grimace. There was some interesting ethnic flavor, with mexican dancers who could balance bottles on their head while dancing.

There were also lots of exotic animals and plants, some of which had informative plaques for those interested in botany. I fed some peacocks macaroni. The rooms theoretically had airconditioning, but were much less than air-tight. The AC did not acheive its purpose. The beds had mosquito nets. The tv only had 2 channels.

I wouldn't recommend staying here more than one night, like we did. We had all the time in the world to peruse the extensive chichen itza ruins, without having to worry about the 2 hour drive back to the coast.