September 14 - Royal Haciendas promotion, third largest pool in the world and the Playa beach

Royal Haciendas promotion

Today is the D-Day in terms of the marketeer’s promotion attendance at 10 AM. The trip was turning into a hotel promotion event, felt almost as if it was a work trip. It is no fun to live into some one else’s schedules even though they may offer you benefits. 

       We were lost for direction and finally landed at the ‘Royal Haciendas’ resort at 11 AM.  As we had not brought my wife’s passport, the hostess offered just the breakfast and no promotion packages as the ‘rules’ insist that the guests have Ids. I was like ‘Really?’ , the way Niya’s friend Pallak asks Niya when she makes her feeble attempts at throwing frisbee. I said it is either our time in response for the promotional tours or money back for nothing. As I counted in the 1100 pesos back , the chains disappeared from our hands and a vacation started. 

Lunch from the Havana moon restaurant

While on the way back from the ‘Royal Haciendas’ , we realized that ‘Playa De Carmen’ is a resort
town where you have ten times more resorts than you have restaurants. In the 45 minutes drive back from the ‘Royal Haciendas’ resort to our ‘Mayan palace’ resort, there was hardly a restaurant we could stop at. 

  So, we went to the Havana moon restaurant within the resort, the restaurant by the main pool, also overlooking the beach. which is supposedly the third largest indoor pool in the world and the largest pool in latin america.  I ordered fish(grouper) sandwich which was blackened and nice. Divya had shrimp tacos. Part of the plan in terms of culinary tourism was to have mexican food and sea food as it is hard to get good seafood in inland Atlanta. 

Pool

Today we hit the famed pool. Four non-swimmers will hit the pool , three in the water, one in the stroller. 

Amey timed his sleep perfectly as we had fun in the pool watching the stroller right next to us on the side. 

Niya found a friend kid and they played for some time in the shallow kids pool. 

Beach

Right next to the pool was the Playa beach with white sands and various simple game facilities like the ‘Duster game’( my name) where you try to putt a duster bag heavy with mud into a ‘goal’ on a wedge shaped platform. Challenging and fun, I did bag in one. 

Then there was the life sized chess board with pieces of Niya’s height. I played with her hoping to teach her the names of the pieces. 

Then we relaxed on comfortable beach chairs for some time and later on a swinging king size bed on the beach.

Resorts are into selling dreams. The beautiful light greenish blue of the ocean, the nice breeze, the sway while you sleep. 









Dinner from Playa De Carmen downtown restaurant - HC De Monterrey
      This was our first trip to the downtown of Playa De Carmen and we had chosen the steak house named 'HC De Monterrey' for our dinner. However, when we reached there, we saw that the restaurant to the left of this restaurant and to the right of this restaurant were very crowded where as this particular restaurant had no customers at all. I
still decided to stick to the plan and went and asked a waiter there if the restaurant is still functioning and why the crowd is much more in the other restaurants. He simply answered that the one on the right is a seafood restaurant and the restaurant on the left is a Taco restaurant where as this one is a steak house.
     We had flank meat and the rib eye steaks. I had a bad throat and I asked for a coffee. They did not really serve coffee but later they came back and said they could give me black coffee. The sweetener saches were not sugar. When requested for sugar saches, the waiter instead brought a test tube of sugar solution. The coffee was good as was the food.
      This is the first time we had seen a town in Mexico and it looked very much like Indian small towns almost making us nostalgic.

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