Club Med Cancun Yucatán

Recently I began scanning all my old slides to digital. There were some good shots from my 1983 trip to CM Cancun. And some surprising ones! Warning: some of these shots could be offensive to some people! Generally this shows the grounds and CM life c.1983. Plus an experience while flying to Chichen Itza...

Here is a link: http://cmcancunreview.com/1983.html

Once you are on the page, the slide show will start automatically. Some of the captions are lengthy, so you will have to pause the show to read them. Controls are at the bottom of each frame.

Enjoy, and please post your comments!

PS: John, I bought the Epson V500 scanner we talked about. Great machine!

Great photos and they do bring back memories of the picnic. Very interesting in how much more beach there was. I had read somewhere that as Cancun was developed many inlets to the lagoon were closed up and the land was built up for pools and building as such. Thus rather than storm surges being absorbed by the lagoon and the land, they just pound into the beach causing erosion. Although the beach is big now that was a man-made effort after the hurricane.

Jim

Very, very cool, Craig!

Offensive photos? The only thing offensive about the photos is that there weren't enough of them!! Wow! That's a lot of white sand! That looks like a very fun time you had. Now that's a pool game that I never played! For some reason, I can't remember the party boat. That means that that I didn't go on it-or I did go on it and had a very nice time.

I took the trip on the plane as well. I remember looking out the window and seeing oil coming out of the engine on the left and going down the wing. However, we were going to Merida and Uxmal. We took the bus to Chichen Itza. That was where the lady with our group got off the bus and said, Wow, the Mayans built the pyramids right next to the highway.

I really enjoyed these. Now that I have processed all of my photos from India and Nepal I can get back to scanning some Martinique photos. BTW, the V500 did a super job on your images.

Thanks again,

John

Jim: If you check the bottom photo on this page http://cmcancunreview.com/property.html you can still see some of the village construction. The waterski island is indeed man made. It looks like a lot of other areas were built up, too.

John: Super funny about the lady's remark! With the V500 I would scan at 48 bit color, 4800 dpi, and use the ICE software, plus color restoration. The color resto looks weak to me - or I didn't use it properly. Then I drop the pix into Fireworks and massage down the file size.

Craig - Loved the 1983 pictures! I'm so glad moustaches aren't still in style.

Your captions were funny too - I liked the one about the kid carrying the bible onto the plane!

The airplane experience was right out of the Twilight Zone (oops, I guess that dates me...) and the bible capped it off. Glad to hear John was familiar with the plane so this was probably not a singular incident!

Craig,

Color restoration is usually hit or miss, even in Photoshop. If you have a really good slide or negative it usually works fairly well. I use Photoshop instead of Epson software, and it still is 50-50.

BTW, the island is land dredged from the swamp. They were doing the dredging when I was there in the late 70's.

I remember being inside the Temple of Kulkulcan (or Castillo if you prefer). I don't get claustrophobic, but boy I felt it in there, and that was combined with 100% humidity. Craig, perhaps this photo will bring back some memories. http://jdlphotos.smugmug.com/Maya/Merida-Coba-Tulum-and-Uxmal/8730967_oL3ch#577372042_ZhSSh

John

Craig - I don't think it was the Twilight Zone that dated you - I think you already accomplished that with the 1983 pics! LOL My first CM was Cancun in 1991, so I have no room to talk!

John - I love your pics of the markets in Merida. I love taking pictures of the markets wherever I go in Mexico - so full of color.

Thanks for these old Cancun photos - brought back a lot of memories. Our first trip there was Spring 1976. Beach, aside from the Club, was completely empty....but really completely empty. We went to Tulum and were the only people there - wondrous experience. Kept going back every year or so until mid-1980's and watched the tourism development march closer and closer to the Club. Once they stopped the on-site Club Med Diving program there (i.e., diving with a GO scuba team), we stopped going. The diving had gotten progressively worse in that area by then, though, due to over development which impacted the reefs badly. Back when Club Med first opened Cancun as a scuba Village, the diving the first few years was as good as, if not better than, Cozumel. Shame that the area got so developed; but that was always the plan of the Mexican government. It's just that Club Med opened first (as it did on Provo, where the subsequent development also followed). I suppose many folks enjoy all the hub-bub of that sort of resort area, and we were lucky enough to have other newer Clubs, on less developed islands, to move on to and dive at.....but Cancun in the early days was really something special.

Adria

I wish I had gone there in the 80's but visited Paradise Island instead for the tennis program. CM seemed to have a knack for getting in first and securing a good location and alot of land. We went to Huatulco in the 90's and liked it so much we endured connecting through Mexico City. With Huatulco, the government tried to have a more eco-friendly development with hotels only four stories high etc. Unfortunately without a lot of hotel rooms, airlines will not do direct flights from the US and the place gets hard to get to. Only if you have a lot of vacation days is it worthwhile to spend a full day traveling.

As to the water ski island in Cancun, I think part of it was natural and then built up by CM. When they created the sand volleyball court you could see where they cut into some coral/rock to make the playing surface or it certainly seemed that way to me. Really a great court.

Jim