Xcaret Park in Playa Del Carmen

I wanted to do something different for my Birthday this year, and after going on a cruise for the first time last April, and really enjoying it, I decided to to take a cruise again this April, but I planned it so my Birthday would actually take place while on the cruise. I learned last year that cruises depart out of Galveston, TX. This is only about 1 hour south of Houston, TX, which is where I live, so it couldn’t be any more convenient. After a good experience with Carnival Cruise Lines last year, I decided to book it with Carnival again, but this time I decided to try out the Carnival Breeze since I had already tried the Carnival Freedom last year.

Our first of three destinations was Cozumel, Mexico! Since I visited Cozumel on last years cruise as well, I wanted to make sure I tried a different Excursion this time around. So after chatting back and forth with my friend Nikki that was going with me, we settled on Xcaret Park in Playa Del Carmen. I wanted to try this place out because there were so many activities available to do! As it turns out, you need much more than a single day to accomplish all the available activities at Xcaret Park. The map of the park has over 60 different activities and as you can see in this video, we only had enough time to do about 5 of them over a span of about 6-7 hours. I definitely would love to go back sometime, and now that I know how the park operates, I’d like to take more cameras so I can shoot an even better video than I did this time around.

A post shared by Melvin Maya (@melvinmaya) on Apr 3, 2018 at 4:36pm PDT

If you want to know more about this park, you can visit their website http://www.xcaret.com/. However, if you’re planning to visit Xcaret Park while on a cruise, I would suggest booking it through the cruise line to make sure the timeframes coincide with the timing of the ship arriving and departing from the port.

A post shared by Melvin Maya (@melvinmaya) on Apr 3, 2018 at 4:42pm PDT

If you’d like to know what cameras I used to shoot this with, for the intro and outro, the time-lapse was shot with my Sony X3000. The first half of the video was all shot on my cell phone, the Google Pixel XL 2. (Google, I’m planning to shoot a lot more videos with this phone, so if you’re looking to sponsor anyone, I’m interested 🙂 For the second half of the video, where we were swimming the river, Nikki was shooting with my GoPro Hero 4 Black and I was shooting with the GoPro Hero 5 Black. Shoutout to Nikki for being willing to tote a camera around for much of this trip, I actually used more of her river footage than my own.