Is it Saturday? It is according to my Fitbit which has found its way back on to my wrist for the first time in a few days, but it feels like I’ve lost a day somewhere over the Atlantic. Were we really sitting on our balcony in Mexico this time yesterday? It’s five hours behind in Mexico which makes it 11am, so yes we were.

Look at that blue sky!

The journey back was largely uneventful. We were on the Dreamliner again, and we had a tailwind most of the way back. At one point it got up to 138mph so despite taking off a few minutes late, we landed fifteen minutes early. The pilot told us the downside of a tailwind is likely turbulence, but luckily we didn’t get any to speak of.

I was poised with my phone to take photos of the ambient lighting on the plane that I told you about here, after I was too busy marvelling at the colours on the way out to remember to take pics.

I don’t really know where to start telling you about Mexico. The hotel, the Riu Tequila, was lovely. It had four pools, one with a swim up bar ….

… and tables and stools in the water. Apologies for the photo – I took this at night because it was always busy during the day.

One small pool which was next to the separate children’s pool which we didn’t frequent, and finally the pool which, happily, was closest to our room and had sunbeds in the water as well as nestled under the palm trees.

The service in the hotel was amazing. The staff, from the cleaners to the bar staff to the grounds men, worked tirelessly. We didn’t want for anything all week and the grounds were always spotless.

There was one main buffet restaurant which was open for breakfast, lunch and dinner …

… and there was also the 24 hour Sports Bar in case you were peckish at four in the morning (we didn’t go in here).

The food in the main restaurant was good with plenty of choice. It was nice to get home and have a balanced meal though because I do find you end up with weird concoctions from buffet restaurants.

There is some fruit and veg in there, but there is also quite a high proportion of churros!

In addition to the main restaurant there are four speciality restaurants. There’s a Mexican which you have to book in advance and is situated over the road in the Riu Yucatan and there’s a steak restaurant. We didn’t try either of these, but we did try the Italian and the Asian. We were underwhelmed with the Italian – the starter and desserts were still buffet style and the choice of mains was very limited.

The Asian was a real disappointment. It was completely self service apart from the drinks and most of the dishes were the same as the Asian options served in the main restaurant, but without the additional choice. I’m glad we checked it out, but I wouldn’t go back.

In the main restaurant there were always fruit sculptures.

The animals in the resort were a massive highlight, and I’d go so far as to say that they went a long way to making our holiday the special break that it was. I’m missing the coatis already. There is now a high proportion of coati imagary on my phone! For the first time in ages I used an actual camera as well to make use of a better zoom. Unfortunately it gave up life towards the end of the holiday, but I still managed to get a few good shots.

I’ve already shown you some coati pics, but I’m going to delight you with some more because they’re just so cute that they deserve multiple mentions.

There’s quite a marked difference in size between the male and female coatis, and there were a few teeny tiny babies. It was quite hard to get good photos because they don’t always stay still for very long. As the sign shows, the hotel encourages guests not to feed the coatis, and on the whole this is adhered to, but we did on one day have crisps by the pool and dropped one. The nearest coati gobbled it down in a milisecond and then realised that my bag contained the open bag of crisps so tried to pinch it! They do it in a very cute way though and aren’t at all threatening or intimidating.

They have a very sweet tooth, as is evidenced by the final photo of a thirsty coati drinking coke that it had pilfered from our sunbed. One also pinched hubby’s packet of Fisherman’s Friends which he’d hidden under his towel whilst he went for a swim. They have highly sensitive and expressive noses which they use to sniff out potential food sources.

After the crisp incident I got back to our room to find this.

Silly hubby!

There are lots of birds around the resort. Some are relatively similar to those you find in the UK, such as these two which I think may be some kind of hawk and a jay.

Some are more brightly coloured like this Yucatan Jay.

Or this woodpecker with its magnificent plumage.

Birds are even harder to capture with the camera so I only managed to get photos of a small proportion of the birds that we saw. As well as these we saw bright yellow parroty type birds and flamingos flying over, high up in the air, in formation like geese do.

The first animal we saw on our arrival at the hotel was what we thought was a capybara.

It turns out that it’s not a capybara, but another, smaller kind of rodent, the Mexican agouti. These were very shy, and we only saw them a couple of times. They wouldn’t approach you, unlike the coatis who weren’t wary at all. This photo was taken from our balcony. The little agouti was seemingly unaware that we were looking down from our balcony so it happily went about its business of breaking into this juicy fruit and enjoying a late afternoon snack.

I thought we’d see large lizards, but I only saw one tiny one. Maybe the coatis have kept their numbers down. If you squint you can just about see it hanging on to this tree, just by the sun bed.

There was a big moth on the wall outside our room for three days, with beautiful camouflage colours.

There are a couple of other animals that I want to tell you about that we saw on the one and only excursion that we went on, but I’m intending to do a separate post on that soon. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe Monday. I’m off to bed now to try and combat the old jetlag.