¡Hola Amigos! ¡bienvenido!
This is just a quick life/travel update from Ellie and me. Ellie and I have long had the travel bug. We always dreamed of traveling to incredible places, seeing beautiful natural landmarks, and experiencing different cultures and lifestyles. It always seemed so difficult to achieve though.
How We Made It Work
Obviously, international travel can be pretty expensive. After getting married in 2020, our main focus was just making enough money to live and eat! After purchasing Regina, our skoolie, in 2022, it became difficult to navigate whether putting money toward travel was really the right thing to do when we needed to save some money to put into the bus. After finding some ways to save money on our bus build, and discovering some great tactics for traveling on the cheap, we decided to finally make the plunge. Also, we met a super nice guy in a Walgreens one day that spoke to us about his annual travels to South America and he encouraged us to “just do it. If you don’t do it now, you never will”. That was enough of a sign for us to really start planning our first international trip as a married couple.
The next thing we had to navigate was our jobs. Getting enough time off of work to make an international trip feel really worth it was difficult. We kinda just got lucky in this department. We’ve been working for a while to transition our careers towards those that cater well to long-term travel. Ellie currently works as a wedding photographer and editor with a local Wisconsin company. This means that she works REALLY hard during the spring, summer, and fall months, and gets winters off for the most part. I am also a wedding videographer for this same company. Along with that, we run our own wedding business that enables us to work from anywhere as long as we are at the wedding location on the day of the wedding. Lastly, I finished my job at the golf course at the end of March in order to work more on our skoolie! This means that during the winter months when we aren’t too busy with weddings and we’re not working on the bus too much, we are able to travel!
Where Are We?
It took us longer than expected to decide where we wanted to go. We’ll dive into this a little bit more when we release our post on how to travel on the cheap! Anyway, Casey (my twin sister), Ellie, and I ended up deciding to go to Bacalar, Mexico. It is known by many to be the Maldives of Mexico! Also known by locals as “Pueblo Magico” or Magic Town, Bacalar is a little off the beaten path and definitely more of a hotspot for locals to vacation. It’s not a super touristy destination but that was part of the draw for us. It also made everything SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper than going somewhere like Cancun or Tulum. Along with that, the Bacalar Lagoon is an incredible natural landmark that is very unique. It’s a freshwater lagoon, essentially a large lake that is fed by underground rivers that flow throughout the Yucatan Peninsula.
By the locals, the lagoon is known as laguna de los siete colores. This is translated to the lagoon of seven colors. They call it this because the depth of the lagoon varies quite a bit depending on where you are and results in very different colors all over. Some of the most shallow areas from zero to ten feet deep are a very bright teal color due to the clear water and white sandy bottom. There are also cenotes scattered around the lagoon which are sinkholes that are fed by underground freshwater rivers that run underneath the entire Yucatan Peninsula! These can range in color from medium blue to nearly black depending on how deep there are. The deepest is cenote negro at nearly one thousand feet deep giving it an almost black color.
One other distinguishing feature of the lagoon is “los rapidos”, a natural lazy river coming off of the lagoon. You can either get a kayak or you are able to effortlessly float down the beautiful canals of los rapidos. This is one of the most picturesque features of the lagoon. Definitely pretty incredible! Lining los rapidos and a few other shoreline areas of the lake are stromatolites. Laguna Bacalar is one of the few places on the planet where you can find these unique things. They look like large circular rock disks near the lake’s shore but do a whole lot to keep the ecosystem as beautiful as it is. That being said, DO NOT TOUCH OR WALK ON THEM! They are very fragile!
Our Experience So Far
Anyway, we will put together a full Bacalar travel guide for noobs like us once our trip is finished. We’ve been here for two days and already learned so many things that we wish we’d known before coming! Honestly, our first day traveling from the US to Bacalar proved to be quite difficult and incredibly taxing. We started to realize just how behind we were in our Spanish learning when we reached our international gate at Ohare Airport. Most things that were said in Spanish here were repeated in English, but not all. We flew from Chicago to the Mexico City airport before taking a final flight to the Chetumal International Airport, Quintana Roo. Being that the Mexico City airport is the largest airport in Mexico, we foolishly assumed that there would be some English spoken and most Spanish signs would have at least some English translation. This was not the case. Very little English was spoken here and there were very few English translations on signs. Along with that, this particular airport is known for being fairly confusing to navigate and slow to update gates for flights. This caused us to rely heavily on our VERY broken and elementary knowledge of Spanish. But there’s no better way to learn a language than to immerse yourself in it, right? Oh goodness…
Seriously we feel like we’ve already learned so much Spanish and have gotten much more comfortable communicating with people. We still feel muy estupido during most of our conversations but can generally piece together enough words and phrases to get the point across. The more difficult thing is understanding what others are saying. We generally plan out what we are going to say ahead of time and listen for words or phrases that we recognize when being spoken to. Here’s a list of all the things we’ve done in the first two days that seem really mundane but with the language barrier can be really difficult and overwhelming:
- Successfully flew out of Ohare Airport
- Navigated the Mexico City airport for our Layover (super difficult for the uninitiated)
- Navigated Chetumal Airport
- Hailed a cab from the airport to Bacalar
- Shopped at a supermarket using USD instead of Pesos (USD isn’t accepted in most places here)
- Exchanged USD to Pesos at a local bank and ATM
- Hailed a cab to and from a supermarket to shop for groceries
- shopped for groceries (The self-checkout was giving us a bunch of errors and communicating with the attendant to help us proved difficult)
The list goes on. It’s been difficult so far but the payoff has been so great! It has been really cool to experience a different culture and be immersed in a lifestyle so different from that of American culture. We already feel like we’ve gotten so much better at communicating in Spanish and cannot wait to continue experiencing more of this magical town and seeing some of the beautiful spots on the lagoon! We will continue to report back with our experience and will eventually release a full Bacalar Travel Guide for inexperienced travelers and los gringos!
