Cancun, Part 2, The Hotel

Cancun, Mexico, January 2015

The Hotel

After a very long search online, we decided to skip all the hotels in the Hotel Zone, Zona Hoteleria, in Cancun. For a couple of very good reasons. Firstly, it's a pure tourist bubble within the town with very little authenticity. And secondly, and more importantly, the hotels were very very expensive. We're not saying the Hotel Zone is a bad choice, it just wasn't the right one for us for this trip. We opted for a downtown hotel, called Dogtown Suites, by the Lopez Portillo Avenue quite far to the north. However, the hotel is actually known by the name Santa Maria, and the "Dogtown Suites" seems to only exist online to attract, well, dog owners. That said, 0% of all the taxi drivers we had knew either of the names, so it was a very low key hotel. But the price was right: we paid in total $206 for five nights in a double room.

The location was rather good in the end, since we could take a bus to the Hotel Zone quite close by, we could get to the cheaper harbour (as opposed to the one in the Hotel Zone) to travel to Isla Mujeres, we could find cheap restaurants, hole-in-the-walls and taco stands and the neighbourhood seemed to be rather Mexican, but never felt unsafe, even after dark. We also had a small supermarket on the other side of the road and a bank with working ATM right next to us. The centre of downtown (basically close to the bus station) was 10-15 mins walk away, if we used our shortcut through the rugged neighbourhood (again, nothing to fear there).

The inner yard of the hotel

Our room was definitely good enough, despite Marta's initial shock. We had clean towels and sheets, beds were alright, there was TV and a large, fully functioning fridge with a freezer. Our shower had warm water 24/7. We had air conditioning, which however made the room quite cold. Luckily the receptionist, a very nice man that spoke good English, resolved with giving us extra blankets. All in all, we can definitely recommend the hotel, if you're not after only the luxurious of accommodations and want to have a touch of Mexican authenticity for your holiday. If not, there is always the Hotel Zone.

Fridge and air condition unit

The bathroom

The bed with an additional fan

 To be continued...