January 25, 2026
Day 27: Valladolid to Coba
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This was a day not designed for too much excitement, and it mostly lived up to its billing. We got up with the sun and breakfasted on instant oatmeal. But we also had fresh orange juice we had bought in the food fair last night. We rolled out of the hotel San Clemente, and with the singing from the cathedral across the street, realized that we were missing church this Sunday morning. Ha! Good thing we are not church goers.
The streets were quiet, meaning that others were either sleeping in or in church themselves.
The road to Coba is very boring, lacking any towns beyond Tikuch, or much of anything.
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Our big event for the day was the appearance of another touring cyclist, coming the other way. This turned out to be Denis Blais. Denis is from our hometown of Montreal, where he says he lives in an old folks home. He is 76, but they seem to have let him out to pedal the highways of Yucatan. This is his thirteenth trip here! Like us, he will go to Merida before circling back around. As with anyone of enough years, Denis has had lots of experiences. We have peeked at his Facebook page, and we see him pictured there with the Pont de Gard (in Provence) in the background.
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Our only other thing was having spotted a White Winged Dove. OK, these are super common, but ours was very cute.
The boring road turned out to be long and hot, with the temperature hitting 40 degrees. This took quite a toll on poor Dodie, who had to keep boosting her assist level, until her bike began to cry "uncle". A quirk of our bikes and of lithium batteries is that you can not discharge them overly without causing damage. Our bikes start off showing 100%, but at 20% they shut off. That makes the 100% look like a bit of a sham, since it's really 80%. It would be better to show us 100% to 0%, even if the true meaning of that is hidden in the background. In our case, when Dodie saw 22% as her remaining battery, she knew the end was near. Fortunately the end of the road was also near, and we pulled into Coba hot and exhausted, but still moving.
Our hotel, the Itza Coba, has a small but very deep and cool pool. This revived me quickly, but Dodie was too beat to go in. Instead we put her down for a nap.
The economy of Coba is really focused on the ruins. People come out on tour busses from Tulum, and mostly return at the end of the day. Restaurants therefore typically run from 9-5, which are inconvenient hours for us. We are tending to eat low quality grocery food, like instant oatmeal or instant noodle soup. It's not just the hours - restaurant meal costs have increased significantly since we were last in Yucatan. 180 pesos now seems normal. That's exactly the cost of a Big Mac meal back home. But McDonald's does not aggressively demand a tip! (Dodie points out that the local restaurant meals are actually healthful, unlike Mcdonald's).
We did sneak in to one place just before 5, and scored some chicken fajitas, empanadas, and a banana smoothie (liquado).
The food gave us the power to walk along the lakeside boardwalk:
And so we can show some fairly standard but still nice birds:
Tomorrow our plan is to wake up at dawn (again!) and to circumnavigate the lake on the bikes, seeing what birds are awake. The afternoon is reserved for visiting my "baby dentist", to see if the root canal and crown are ok. They have been feeling fine for the past week!
Today's ride: 62 km (39 miles)
Total: 1,027 km (638 miles)
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