Your Yucatan Vacation

Here is a blog for comments and photos from our guests at Urbano Rentals.

Yucatan Today

Yucatan Today is the award winning website that is most people's first contact with the area.If you have any questions about Merida and the Yucatan you can probably find the answer at Yucatan Today. The address book and the maps are very useful. Hours spent on Yucatan today before you get here will be days saved for relaxation and exploring once you get here. You can pick up a copy of the print version in just about any hotel or cafe. Their recommendations should be taken with a grain of salt as they only recommend their advertisers. Did I say grain? I meant to say a mountain of salt.

Yucatan Living

Yucatan Living is the best source for current news of what's happening in Merida with their weekly posts on current events and their event calender. It's a good idea to check in every week before your trip. The owners call themselves the working gringos because they are a gringo couple who moved here and started working building websites.

Some of the most popular articles are about expat life in the Yucatan from getting a drivers license to building a house. But there's plenty of tips for tourists as well.

Here is an excerpt from one of my favorite articles about the Mexican Fosa Septica...
"We promised to explain why you should not put paper in a Mexican toilet, and we’re not going to let you down. There are actually several answers to this question and the most puzzling of these is: you can put paper in a Mexican toilet! Yes, you can. The toilet will not spit the paper back out like a wrinkled dollar from a vending machine. The toilet police won’t show up at your door. And there will be no immediate ill effect from your indiscretion. But it would be rude."

Yucatan By Bicycle

It seems that every other day I see an accident involving a bike or motorcycle on the streets of Merida. On Sundays the biciruta goes right down my street and ends in Ermita Park. Here is a blog about cycling in the Yucatan with descriptions of routes to take and lots of tips. Sundays are a good day to cycle around Merida as there is only a fraction of the normal traffic in centro. UPDATE: The traffic has gotten so bad in central that I decided to get a bike. On winter weekends we often load the bikes in the back of a friends pickup and 2 or 3 or 4 of go off for the morning and come back in the afternoon. It's the best way to see the villages. I've also started riding in Centro as it's easier to get around and more pleasant. I assume I'd die on the bike & I hope it's instantaneous & in the meantime it makes me happy.

Jim Conrad Naturalist

A blog about the plants, animals & ecology of the northern Yucatan peninsula by Jim Conrad. Full of information with links to his other blogs about gardening and his essays and thoughts on everything from composting to homosexuality in nature.

National Geographic's Best of the Mayan World Blog

Here is blog about the Mayan world including the Yucatan.  There's information about the food and the people but the best part of the site are the photographs submitted by the readers of the blog.

Though we've never met..

Ralf Hollman might have been my twin brother separated at birth.... or maybe we just share a brain. His restaurant reviews are an invaluable contribution to the gastronomic roller coaster that is the Yucatan. His Not The News blog chronicles the quirky everyday travails of everyman who dares to xpat themselves. A couple of centuries ago he and I might have found ourselves in the same pygmy soup pot. In fact if we don't watch our tongues we might still end up in a large vat of sopa de lima.
He is also a tour guide.

The Yucatan Times

The Yucatan Times is a good source for local news if you don't read Spanish in which case you would perhaps prefer Diario de Yucatan my major source for information on bus wrecks and silly social page photos.  The page I use most often at Diario is the movie guide section "cines" but the better site for that is Cines Merida.  There is also Sipse for peninsular wide news en espanol.  I most often consult the Yucatan Times to see Cherie Pittillo's column Backyard Birding in Merida and Beyond though I've never gotten up at 4 a.m. to go birding with Cherie's group I'm often up at 4 a.m. looking at her beautiful photos on the internet.

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