Liu's Motorcycle Diaries: San Francisco to Puerto Aventuras

The 4 am wake up wasn't as bad as it would seem, but I’m sure the 2 Starbucks double shots I bought the night before significantly helped my mood at that hour. Even so I still took the opportunity to nap on the 30-40 minute Bart ride back to the airport.

Dual purpose helmet

The weather in SF was a nice 52-59 the whole time were there, a great difference from the temperature in Chico the day earlier, so hauling around our luggage didn't seem so bad. I was very much enjoying the nice cool weather before venturing off to humid Mexico in just a few hours. We arrived to the airport and ate our leftovers from the night before while we sat and watched people who had slept at the airport the night before rise and shine from their bed benches in the cafeteria. Was it worth the hotel expense on our short layover? Definitely!!

The flight was an easy 6 hours and we were able to watch a few episodes of the last season of Lost in the meantime. We arrived in Cancun around 4 pm and caught the ADO bus to Playa del Carmen where we then took a taxi to get to Puerto Aventuras where our B&B was for the night. The ADO bus from Cancun was about 100 pesos (10 USD) higher per person than it had been 2 months before, but I suppose this was due to tourist season. We saw on Tripadvisor that the B&B we reserved had 5 stars and 0 bad reviews, so I was really looking forward to our stay that night. As it turns out, the B&B is run by an Italian couple who don’t keep the central AC running leaving the entire place smelling like BO and since we reserved the cheapest room we had to share a bathroom with the staff. I was expecting our own bathroom so I was a bit bummed, but it was a good introduction back into Mexico; never expect too much!!

Nice, modern rooms!

Garden view

Shared bathroom could be a bit more clean but doable. Hard to do anything in here without AC though!!!

It was almost 7 by the time we arrived and unpacked and were given a tour of the house, so we headed out to dinner shortly after. Puerto Aventuras is a small, Americanized community mainly meant for tourists and long timer expats. It’s built on a small marina and filled with nice hotels, restaurants, small shops, coffee shops and even has their own dolphin discovery and manatee display. We walked around the Marina for a bit before stumbling upon our friend Dan’s restaurant that he co-owns/works at for dinner. We didn't see Dan’s bike outside, but we decided to eat there anyway. As it turns out Dan walked to work that day and we spent the rest of our meal catching up with Dan and Pam who walked down a bit later. We ended up closing the restaurant so Pam and Dan invited us over to their place afterwards for a few more drinks. We chatted about bikes and traveling and life until about 2:30 am when we then decided to call it a night. Great catching up with them and a fun first night back into Mexico!

There's a lot of money in Puerto Aventuras. You can tell just by looking at the size of these boats!!