TammyDurkee

We went on a Royal Caribbean Dolphin VIP Experience and found the meeting place in the Cozumel Port area very close to the COZUMEL sign where everyone gets the "touristy" photo. There is an RC guy walking around with a royal blue polo on who will be glad to point out any shore excursion meeting point, if you can't find it. Even though it is booked thru RC, I believe the excursion company was ToursRUs, and they put us in taxi shuttles fee included in RC booking price but do tip your driver and tour guide they work hard (10 people per shuttle), and in 10 min, they had us to Chankanaab Parque Natural where the dolphins are. When you get the VIP experience, you get to touch the dolphins, 2 dolphins will give you a Superman ride by 1 dolphin pushing each of your feet so that you rise out of the water, they have the dolphins dance in front of each person while you pet the inside of their fins, then you get a 2nd ride holding onto their dorsal fins with your hands and they pull you 50 feet or so, don't be surprised if you have to wait for 5 minutes a couple times for the dolphins to do some hanky-panky, apparently they are very amorous and try to make babies all day every day. Then you go to another enclosure where you touch a Manatee (Manatee = 800-1200 lbs, compared to dolphins 400-800 lbs, I was surprised by the large sizes of both, because I had only seen pictures before), and be sure to listen for when the tour guide says the last Sea Lion show is, because that is included too, but we missed it by 11 minutes, because our tour had so many people (50+) that we couldn't hear the guide very well. This excursion has the ocean to swim in or a fresh water pool, and the fresh water pool had a swim-up bar, which I believe you said you might be interested. The VIP experience has an included buffet, but honestly we would have preferred to buy a hamburger in the area where the people who didn't pay the higher VIP price went. We were the 2nd RC excursion group, and I believe our buffet had been out under heat lamps since the earlier excursion. I put it in the RC survey Oct 2023, so maybe they will have fixed the buffet by then, or go to the early excursion where the food will be fresher. We highly recommend while in port, see if you can find the store in port that has a deal where if you buy 2 Vanilla bottles (1 ltr each) then you get 1 free!! It is the MOST FRAGRANT Mexican Vanilla and SO MUCH BETTER than vanilla in the USA!! This port store also had buy 2 chocolate bars and get 1 free, but the supply was almost sold out that day, and we didn't want white chocolate which is NOT real chocolate, also didn't want chocolate with hot pepper inside, so we bought the LAST 1 bar of Milk Chocolate for a friend and have not had the chance to give it to him yet, but by Christmas, we should have feedback as to whether the chocolate bar was good or not!!

We're looking for good Mexican Restaurants in Cozumel. Recommendations? We wouldn't mind it being more Tex-Mex, but would be open to Authentic Mexican as well. Thank you in advance! Mark & Tammy K