January 19, 2024
What It Cost
We don't really have hard data comparing to last year or to before COVID, but we have the strong impression this year that many prices in Yucatan have just skyrocketed. At the very least, we can point to things that we saw this time that are just as expensive, or more expensive than in Europe right now. Starting with a trivial thing, but one that is for sale everywhere, we have the souvenir keychain. The price for anything other than just a little piece of flexible plastic is 110 to 200 pesos. 100 pesos is over 5 euros, and of course 200 pesos is 10 euros. For a keychain?
Another benchmark thing would be one of our favourite main dishes, the poc chuc. Just for fun, let's look to a photo I took in Valladolid in 2018:
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I did think that 55 pesos for a poc chuc plate was quite cheap, at the time. But now in 2023/24 on the road to Coba we stopped into a normal looking restaurant and found poc chuc for 249 pesos. I thought this was a really bad sign, but was relieved to find the more usual price, at about 190. But that is still a rate of about 25-30% annual inflation since pre COVID.
To some extent one can side step rising prices by avoiding the worst examples, and adjusting what we decide to buy. For example, no keychains came home this time - something that made Dodie actually glad. And while I remember a straw hat in Mexico as kind of a $2 item in the old, old days, being asked for $Can 50 to start, this time around, was hard to take. However, by scouring literally the whole Yucatan, I did come up finally with a good one for $Can 8.
Finally let's look at a couple of hotels. The Maya Turquesa, where we stayed in Playa, was about 7% higher than last year. But the Hacienda Uxmal had moved from 1140 pesos last year to 2024 pesos this year- almost double. There is not a lot of choice at Uxmal, so we stayed at the also upscale Uxmal Resort, for 1458 pesos . That meant for Uxmal anyway, despite some shifting around, we still had to pay 28% more, over last year.
The bottom line of the price changes and our efforts to adjust for them was that the cost of the trip was about the same as last year, and amounted to $Can 7000 for a 35 day outing. About 1/3 of this cost is in airfare, and the cost of getting to Yucatan from west coast Canada is about the same as getting to Europe. That makes a 90 day European tour a more economical bet, in terms of the airfare cost on a per day basis.
Hotels are another big cost item, making up another 1/3 of the total. No use crying about that, because our camping days are clearly over. We try to choose decent hotels, in the middle of the price range. Cheap Mexican hotels will bring a small hot room with beds made of old lumber. And expensive Mexican hotels can be way off our scale, like at 8000 pesos (400 euros) per night. The average cost of the hotels we chose was about 900 pesos, with a low of 500 and a high of 1500. 900 pesos is 50 euros -so that is cheaper than we would commonly find in Europe. On our "Iberian Inquisition", this figure was more like 80 euros, and in "England and France", 100 euros.
Once of the "advantages" of Yucatan is that our expense item for postcards and postage is zero. That's because we have come to accept that the post office basically does not exist there. We thought about getting postcards and mailing them from home, but that is rather lame.
One expense item that does mount up to about 5% of the total is the cost of admissions to things like Mayan ruins, or national parks, or cenotes. We think it's fair enough for the Mexicans to levy these charges, but we do wish they would spend more of the proceeds on maintenance and less on just paying people to collect the fees.
A final 5% category is taxis or shuttles. Around the Mexican Riviera, taxis are among the costliest we know of anywhere. As we see from my story of negotiating a ride to pick up our bike cases, bargaining can reduce the cost. But even after bargaining, that 5 km ride did cost over $30 Can! We did gladly pay for the ferry to and from Cozumel island (1140 pesos). That's where we photo'd the Cozumel Emerald, a hummingbird that occurs only on that island. How much is an Emerald like that worth?!
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Really looking forward to hearing what your route will be in Spain. We fly to Alicante on the 6th May. Our daughter and her husband have just moved to Murcia ( which is close by) where their son plays football and will be there for a year. We are staying about 3 weeks and if we find suitable easy rides will hire bikes and have a bit of a poke round. From there to Porto for a cruise on the Duro River. Then will pick up our bikes from Louise and ride for six weeks or so around the Burgandy area. We are confined to really easy routes not because of the cycling but because my walking is so terrible and now can’t really walk along pushing a bike for any distance at all
3 months ago
We had initially planned on Europe for 2024. Airfares were dismal. Then Jacinto decided he would have surgery on his other shoulder. Forward a little, he changed his mind on the surgery. He also decided to push Europe back for his 60th birthday trip in 2025. Which leaves us with a domestic trip for 2024 - starting in Twin Falls, Idaho, and heading up into Canada, then back down. I'm about halfway through reserving lodging. In the good old days, I used to think $100. was an expensive room. Now that is a suspicious price. I would say $175-200. is going to be average cost for this trip. We aren't talking extravagant rooms! Like you, camping is off the table, we are captive customers!
3 months ago
3 months ago