Disney Cruise Line: Costa Maya - Salsa and Salsa

While we loved Grand Cayman, we were super excited to go to Costa Maya to do Salsa and Salsa! This port adventure promised to teach us how to both make salsa and dance the salsa! 

When we first docked in Costa Maya it looked really beautiful. You get off the boat and instantly you’re in this lovely courtyard-like area with of course lots of tourist-trap things like “take your picture with this jaguar cub!” Which you shouldn’t do even if it looks super adorable.

Once we got outside we were put into a little bus that took us further inland where things got…weird. Outside of this little port area you go through the neighborhoods where the locals live. And “neighborhood” is a really loose term since it’s a number of small huts made out of discarded signs along the edges of all the mangrove swamps. Then you get to the beach area where there are hotels in various stages of being built, none of which look finished, including the one where we were dropped off. At this point most of our excitement had disappeared and we were pretty depressed to learn that Costa Maya pretty much only exists for cruise ships and the local population appears to live in poverty so that they can service cruise ships guests.

The hotel where we ended up was lovely and seemed to be mostly open air so that you could see the beautiful beach wherever you were. We were seated in a small area with tables by the bar and “Nacho” then taught us to make two different kinds of salsa. 

We actually had a lot of fun with this and we got to eat the salsa at the end which was delicious! Just be aware you are doing this outside so there are lots and lots of flies hanging around. You get used to them.

The making salsa is the better part of the salsa and salsa port adventure because the bit where they teach you to dance is a little…lame. It lasts about seven minutes, you don’t do any partner dancing, it’s basically teaching you in a line-dancing style and then they say “Okay bye!” and you’re left on your own. We then went down to the beach, which made us wish we had done some sort of beach port adventure because the water was clear and like walking into a bath. It was AMAZING! We were able to hang out in the water for about a half an hour, then we had to call a certain taxi to bring us back to port. Except the taxi we got decided he didn’t want to drive all the way in and dropped us off halfway back in the middle of an abandoned street, so we walked the rest of the way. We laugh about it because it was so insane, but really I think if we had to do it over again we would either do a beach port adventure or just stay on the boat and not get depressed.

Next Up: Tuluum! Which we liked less than this port adventure, unfortunately.