January 15, 2026
Day 17: Rio Lagartos to Tizimin
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The great waterfront location of our room at Diego's Ria Maya operation (rooms, restaurant, guiding) turned into a slight drawback over night. First, the tide came in, to a level that partially flooded the street. Diego said he has seen it lots higher than that. This is where the three steps that I have been lugging the bikes up into the room came in handy. Next a wind came in from the north, causing the boats to slosh and roll around. They were fine, but subconsciously through the night my brain worried that it was listening to a water leak.
For reasons that I am still not certain of, Dodie had us wake up and leave in the dark. Our 68 km run was a normal distance, so that was not it, and the weather has been cooler rather than hotter than normal. If I ask her now, she will have some sort of reason, but I think it's a slightly premature concern not over today, but tomorrow. Tomorrow we have a genuinely more than 100 km run to attempt, and yes, we will start it in the dark.
Yucatan is not very densely populated, and while there are, to be sure, towns and places to stay (at least in the northern section) the bookings have to be set up carefully. A big problem in our thinking surrounds the town of Buctzotz. Buctzotz sits squarely between the extensive services of Tizimin and the joys of Progreso, on the coast. Buctzotz nominally has a hotel, one hotel, the Tapia. But the Tapia seems to be mostly a gym, and while it sports the name of a sort of hotel chain, OYO, it does not appear on the OYO website. AI says OYO stands for "On Your Own", and that's how we expect to be when we roll into Buctzotz.
All that is to explain why today we headed back to Tizimin. We are trying to position for a run to Buctzotz, but potentially through it, to Dzidzantun. Tomorrow will tell, but for today we also chose a slightly longer but different route to return to Tizimin than the one we used to get up from there to Rio Lagartos.
The route, which runs past San Felipe has a claim to fame other than being different. The claim stems from its inclusion in that birdingplaces.eu website, the one that sent us off into the jungle yesterday. This time, the Europeans claim that the San Felipe road has all sorts of birds, and they name it the "Camino San Felipe". They list species like the Vermilion Flycatcher, Crested Caracara, Mexican Sheartail, and about ten others to be seen along the road. They made it sound like really the way to go.
One of the species mentioned by the Europeans sounded off base to us. We always look at the Black Vultures and the red necked Turkey Vultures, both of which are very numerous. But now we had a claim about something called the Lesser Yellow-headed Vulture. We had never heard of it and never seen a vulture that sported any yellow. But Dodie started chirping about this. It was just that the website mentioned it. We had no idea what it might actually look like.
The problem was that to find a yellow headed vulture in a sea of black headed ones, you have to stop and photograph every one, or least zoom the camera enough to check. That's a lot of stopping and zooming, and the camera is not that keen on coming out of its bag(s), doffing its lenscap, turning on, and zooming. But, we did it.
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Amazingly other claims for the Camino San Felipe came true as well. How about these:!
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In all we saw 20 species, 9 of which were new for 2026, and 4 were "lifers". Our 2026 total has now reached 125.
With all the jumping on and off the bikes, it took some time to reach Panaba, and we were really ready for a rest.
Panaba is just a little town, but it has a pleasant enough central square. I whined about the people not cooking up anything (for us) in the square, but Dodie pointed out that it still was just 11 a.m. (see the clock on city hall..). Starting out early has its drawbacks!
The road continued good, though never with a shoulder. Although the photo below shows a straight stretch, corners were a problem given the narrowness. Big trucks had to watch out for us, and vice versa.
We were now firmly back in cattle country. The cattle auction was in operation, but we were now too beat to drop in.
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We did see some trucks carrying hay, and below you see us passing what could be a hay field. The grasses are quite ragged, though. The photo also shows the continued no shoulder road, but unlike in some places in Europe, this caused us little concern.
We rolled back into Tizimin, and stopped off at the Soriana grocery. With restaurant meals running up to 500 ($40) pesos for the two of us, we are relying more on the grocery. Our staples there are bananas (surprisingly not totally cheap), yogurt ("Disfruta" - our favourite!), instant oatmeal and instant noodles. Unbalanced as this may sound, the Mexican groceries are actually filled with worse stuff, including scads of packaged cookies.
The Mexican government tries to warn people about excess calories, sugar, fats, and sodium in these things. We tell ourselves that we need the excesses for cycling power. For the general public, they either are stuck with it because fresh bakery is not available, or more likely they are used to and actually prefer this junk food.
Today's ride: 68 km (42 miles)
Total: 529 km (329 miles)
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