We’ve just come back from a wonderful holiday in Playa del Carmen, a short drive south of Cancún in Mexico. There were 14 of us — my two brothers and I, our families, plus our parents. Back in summer 2022 we went away on a big family trip to Turkey and had such a lovely time that we wanted to repeat it. After my lovely Nan passed away in January, my mum suggested that we plan another trip. We jumped at the idea.
The best thing about a big family holiday is how much time you all get to spend together. There’s no time pressure of having to fit in all of the conversations you want to have into a few snatched hours, as there usually is when you just get together for an afternoon. Of course, it helps if you like the members of your family. I feel very lucky to be part of such a great crew whose company I really enjoy. Spending quality time with my niece and nephews is a precious thing, and it was great to be able to get to know them better. When we get together, I always think of Tim Urban’s Wait But Why post on The Tail End:
I’ve been thinking about my parents, who are in their mid-60s. During my first 18 years, I spent some time with my parents during at least 90% of my days. But since heading off to college and then later moving out of Boston, I’ve probably seen them an average of only five times a year each, for an average of maybe two days each time. 10 days a year. About 3% of the days I spent with them each year of my childhood.
Being in their mid-60s, let’s continue to be super optimistic and say I’m one of the incredibly lucky people to have both parents alive into my 60s. That would give us about 30 more years of coexistence. If the ten days a year thing holds, that’s 300 days left to hang with mom and dad. Less time than I spent with them in any one of my 18 childhood years.
When you look at that reality, you realize that despite not being at the end of your life, you may very well be nearing the end of your time with some of the most important people in your life.
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It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.
It’s a similar story with my two sisters. After living in a house with them for 10 and 13 years respectively, I now live across the country from both of them and spend maybe 15 days with each of them a year. Hopefully, that leaves us with about 15% of our total hangout time left.
My eldest son may be off to college in August this year. Given that he and his younger brother both have important exams in the summer, the only time we could plan our holiday for was the Christmas break. There were some nerves and reluctance about going away at this time of year as there is something special about being in the wind, rain, cold and snow, and enjoying everything Christmassy with the youngest children in our group. But there wasn’t any real alternative. For the first time that I can remember, I spent Christmas somewhere warm.
We woke up early to drive to Gatwick, dropping our car off and meeting everyone in the departure hall. Our flight was uneventful, but fun. I love a daytime flight going west, as it means that you just end up with a long day.
Arriving at Cancun airport was a different story. As we came to the end of our long walk from the aircraft gate and descended into the immigration hall, we quickly realised that we had entered the gates of hell. The room was jam-packed and completely disorganised. People had little idea of where they needed to be, and no means of getting there even if they did. As we inched our way forward, people started shouting at each other for pushing in or somehow ending up in front of them in the pack. There was no queue, just one big scrum. We tried to make light of the situation, but any smiles were offset by the frayed tempers around us. A little panic set in when we realised that our airport transfer would only wait 45 minutes for us before leaving; I tried calling them but had no luck getting through.
Remarkably, by the time we got through immigration our bags had not yet turned up. After more waiting and a brief moment of panic that our suitcases weren’t with us, we finally left the airport and eventually found our transfer. Our driver didn’t have a clue where we were going, so I sat next to him in the front of the vehicle, holding up Waze on my iPhone to navigate us to the hotel. We were laughing as I relayed hazards reported by Waze to the driver and exclaimed “La Luna!” every time we found a pothole that hadn’t been logged.
Our home for the week was The Fives Beach Hotel and Residences, just north of the town of Playa del Carmen. It’s a strange mix of hotel and condominiums. Our rooms were superb, with separate kitchen and lounge areas, but they had no cutlery or other utensils for self-catering. The hotel is all-inclusive, so I doubt that guests would typically make use of any of the cooking facilities, but it was weird not to have a single implement in any of the drawers.
The rooms are spread out over a sprawling estate with plenty of amenities on site: a big variety of restaurants, a gym, multiple swimming pools, bars, a beach and small pier as well as wooden walkways through a lightly cultivated mangrove swamp. Monkeys, coatis and lizards roam around the complex, turning up unexpectedly as you pass.
You can get around the site by chauffeured golf buggy, which you are introduced to when the staff first take you to your room. But it was much more efficient to get around by foot. The perimeter of the site is about 1.75km and makes for a perfectly usable running route. After a couple of mornings of sweating litres of water on the spin bikes in the humid gym, I couldn’t face doing it for a third time, so I tentatively tried running again. I was so pleased that my calf injury didn’t come back, so I switched to morning runs for the rest of my stay.
The main pool and beach area was lovely. You needed to get down there early to secure any sunbeds, as people got there early and left towels on them all day. I think that hotels like this one would benefit from having some proper rules in place, such as needing to have at least one member of your group present to keep hold of any sunbeds, and for each person to be able to ‘keep’ no more than four.
Early on in our trip we saw an area of the beach turned into a wedding venue. It was beautiful, but strange that there were a bunch of strangers in swimwear milling around the smartly-dressed wedding attendees.
The on-site restaurants were good, but getting a table was a pain. According to other guests that had visited the year before, the hotel had removed the ability for you to pre-book dinner at a certain time. You had to turn up at a restaurant, ask for a table and then wait around with a buzzer until one became available. If there were just two of us I think we would have been fine, but with such a large group we found ourselves eating quite late on a couple of evenings, with the youngest children falling asleep at the table. After some complaining and negotiating, we managed to secure a table for all 14 of us at the Thai restaurant on Christmas Day, which worked out brilliantly. My favourite restaurant was the Italian, which served some incredible butternut squash ravioli.
On the days where it was more difficult to secure a table, some of the group took advantage of the buffet restaurant or the pizzeria in the main plaza. These facilities made things a lot easier when we wanted a more relaxed, less formal evening.
A couple of days into the trip, my wife discovered a little frozen yoghurt shop that was slightly hidden away. It quickly became a daily staple for everyone, with many of us walking out of the shop with overflowing tubs that consisted of at least 50% toppings.
The hotel had a good programme of events for Christmas, which went a long way to keeping it special. Christmas Eve was so much fun. It started with a very good musical duo who were accompanied on stage by a snowy fireplace scene. (Is this as bizarre to people that live in the southern hemisphere as it is to me?) We then had an enactment of The Nutcracker followed by another band and plenty of drinking, dancing and having fun with the other guests around us. It was a blast.
The fun continued down on the beach the next day when The Grinch appeared, followed by Santa Claus who arrived — of course — by catamaran. Children and their parents queued up to go along the little pier to receive a gift from him.
The hotel entertainment was pretty good quality throughout the week, with a programme of events each evening. I loved the enthusiastic mariachi band who played down by the beach, singing songs such as Guantanamera and La Bamba until the rain started.
The weather was pretty good all week, reaching about 28°C most days. We had a little cloud, which stopped it from feeling too hot. There was one day of significant tropical rain, but given it was December, we couldn’t begrudge everything around us getting watered.
A couple of days into the trip we discovered the Lizzard Pool [sic], which made a gesture towards healthy living with regular water aerobics workouts and games of volleyball.
Aside from lounging around by the pool and the beach, we did a few activities. We took a taxi into the nearby town of Playa del Carmen for a look around. The main street in the town is amusingly called 5th Avenue, and is filled with lots of souvenir shops and quite sad-looking restaurants and tequila bars. I imagine that the venues come to life in the evening with the place taking on the persona of a typical resort town, with loud music and people drinking long into the night. It was a handy trip for us to pick up some flip-flops and cheap pairs of water shoes for our adventures later in the week.
One thing it did have was a fantastic ice cream shop called Aldo’s. The coffee ice cream was superb, and the boys both enjoyed a humongous ice cream sandwich.
A few of us had a very busy day out at Xplor, part of the Xcaret group of theme parks. We woke up early to catch the coach from our hotel, stopping to pick up additional passengers on the way. When you get in the park you are given a locker key and a helmet and then let loose on the various attractions. The zip lines were breathtaking — you finish one and then climb up to the start of the next one, covering fourteen different zip lines across two different routes, two of which end up in water at the finish.
As we waited on the steps to our second set of zip wires, we spotted a giant iguana in one of the treetops. We figured that it was a model that had been put there by the park to entertain people in the queue, but an unexpected giant yawn and shake of its head startled us into realising that it was real. We then noticed the iguanas all over the park, basking in the heat in the treetops as we slid overhead.
We then quickly made our way to the giant water slide, which you must tackle as groups of four. I’ve never been on a water slide with so many stages; it was epic. We spent the rest of the day navigating underground caves, swimming through some and using hand paddles to race and bump our way through others. The favourite activity turned out to be using the all-terrain vehicles to bump our way through two bumpy 5km tracks that included cave sections and massive water hazards. At one point my 17 year-old cried out that “It hurts so much but I love it!” Lunch took the form of an excellent buffet, better than the one at our hotel. The day out was expensive, but it didn’t feel that we had been ripped off. We were sad to leave, but satisfied with a brilliantly fun day out.
We were up early again the next day for an organised trip, this time with all 14 of us. Our first stop was the Mayan ruin of Tulum. Once you get past the souvenir and tat shops you find a well-preserved site in a beautiful setting, but surprisingly young at only 575–825 years old. (Berkhamsted Castle, located a short walk from our house, is approaching its 1,000th anniversary.) It was a super hot day and the site offered little shade, so by the time we had walked around we were happy to get back to somewhere where we could buy a drink.
Our next stop was a site where we could descend some steep steps to explore a cenote, a cave filled with groundwater that was formed by the erosion of the limestone bedrock. Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula has thousands of these, scattered all around. Cenote Caracol is located off of a long bumpy road in Tulum. Our trip included a swim in the cave, a walking tour through part of the cave network and a delicious lunch.
The last stop of the day was Bahía de Akumal, a beach that is famous for being able to spot sea turtles as you swim your way around. I chose not to take part as I didn’t think the turtles needed to see me all that much. Everyone donned a life jacket and snorkel and were taken out as a group by a guide. While they were out at sea, a massive brawl broke out on the beach that resulted in soldiers from the National Guard turning up. As I sat chatting with my parents, we had no idea that this was going on a few yards down the beach from us. Our guide spotted it from where everyone was swimming and he first thought that the commotion was due to a shark or stingray being close to the shore. As everyone waded in at the end of their swim, one guy was sitting on the beach with a bag of ice held to his head. I have no idea what the commotion was all about.
One of the biggest highlights of our trip was an evening at La Casa De Rosa on-site at our hotel. This was a paid add-on to our stay where we gathered together in a little purpose-built kitchen and dining area to cook and eat a Mexican meal together. The evening started with introductions with our host, followed by a tasting journey through different tequilas and mezcals. Having had tequila before, and finding it difficult to believe that there could be a less appealing alcoholic drink, I politely declined to take part. But it was so funny to see the various faces that were pulled as people sipped from their shot glasses.
We were then each given a flashcard with a Spanish word on it which would become our names for the evening. Everyone had to learn everyone else’s name. The penalty for getting it wrong, or calling someone by their actual name, was either an additional shot of tequila, or a ‘shot’ of baked crickets. I kept my mouth shut.
The meal itself was delicious, and a real team effort. After we all made tortillas and gorditas that were then cooked on the comal, some people continued to make more while others prepared fish tamales, two of the children got busy making different types of salsa and others prepared a salad. There was mild panic in the eyes of our hosts when I told them I didn’t eat meat, which I tried to diffuse by saying that I would just eat the vegetarian things. But they insisted in rustling up a dish of roasted courgettes filled with corn, cheese and other delights. We ate so much — I haven’t been that full in a very long time. It was a lovely thing to do together.
Our last evening at the hotel was so much fun. They set up a silent disco in the plaza, with three DJs playing different music on different colour-coded stations. Most of our crew had never been to a silent disco before; their skepticism melted away as soon as they put their headsets on. We danced all night and everyone loved it.
Travelling home overnight was always going to be tricky. My brother smooth talked his way into getting all of us access to the BA lounge. Once we had gotten through security we tried to locate it but couldn’t see it anywhere. A quick web search revealed that the BA lounge is located in the airport before you go through security. I find airports quite stressful places, so I found a seat in the terminal and donned my headphones to catch up with my podcast backlog.
Everyone seemed to snatch a small amount of poor-quality sleep on the way back. We then tried to keep ourselves awake all day in order to shorten our jet lag, but it will take a few days to recover.
We had a wonderful holiday. I feel so lucky to have been able to spend time together with my whole family in such a luxurious setting. We’ve made memories that will stick with us for a very long time, and I can’t wait for us to get together again.
Next week: Another week off before work begins again. And turning 48.
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