Flamingos and pelicans and crocodiles, oh my!

Today we took our last excursion, a trip to the gulf coast fishing village of Celestún.  It's located about ninety minutes due west of Mérida on a narrow spit of land.  On one side of the town are the turquoise waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and on the other side the brackish, tannin-stained waters of an inlet called the Ría Celestún.  During the winter, the "ría" is the mating and breeding ground for large flocks of pink flamingos.  Near the bridge that connects Celestún with the mainland, is a visitors' center where you can hire a motorboat to take you on a ninety minute tour of the inlet.  The cost is 1200 pesos per boat. (If I remember correctly the boat holds eight people.)  There were a couple Mexican ladies waiting to take the tour, so we shared a boat with them.  Thus our cost per person was only 240 pesos (less than $20). 

This was my fourth trip to Celestún, and this was the best trip of all.  There were thousands of flamingos... maybe tens of thousands of flamingos... wading in the shallow waters.  Their diet consists of the shrimp larvae which thrive in the inlet.  It is the larvae that give the flamingos their pink color.  A malnourished flamingo would be white. 

 

In addition to the flamingos there are a wide variety of other water birds in the inlet.  I am not a birder, but I obviously recognized the pelicans.  I got a very nice picture of a white wading bird which I believe is a cormorant.  Please correct me if I am wrong.

 

Our boatman took the time to search for crocodiles.  He found some baby crocodiles perched on the roots of the mangrove.  Later he found a big crocodile.  The photo is not the greatest, but what appears to be a log in the water, is actually a six foot long croc.

 

We then traveled through the "mangrove tunnel", and later stopped to walk on a boardwalk in the mangrove by an "ojo de agua", a fresh water spring.

 

After our boat tour we went to the village of Celestún and walked on the beach for a short while.  We finished our day with a very good seafood dinner at a little restaurant called "La Playita".  As the name of the restaurant ("The Little Beach") says... and as the photo shows... we were literally on the beach.

It was my best trip to Celestún yet, and I think that Nancy and Fred thoroughly enjoyed  themselves.  As Fred likes to say...."¡Excelente!"