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I had loaded up my HP Ipaq HX4700 with a bunch of my music MP3 files so that kept me entertained. The flight attendants on the Mexicana flight (operated by American Airlines) served us a tasty ham and cheese croissant for breakfast.

Once we landed we took a group van ride ($9.00 per person) to our hotel, The Omni Cancun, and left our luggage at the front desk. We couldn't check in until at least 1pm so we had plenty of time to kill.

After walking down to the beach, we arranged to rent a jet ski at the AquaWorld counter. An hour rental for a Yamaha WaveRunner costs about $75.00.

One of the friendly bell hops at the Omni Cancun Hotel waved up a taxi to the front of the hotel and we hopped in. Almost all of the taxis in Cancun are mid to late 90's Nissan Sentra 4 door cars. They're definitely a lot smaller than the full sized Ford or GM taxis that you'll find in most American cities. As we zipped by the other hotels along the Blvd. Kukulcan, I snapped a few pictures with my Canon Powershot SD110 digital camera. In the pics above you'll see the front of the Oasis Hotel, which is a popular hot spot for college students on Spring Break.

I remembered from last year that most of the taxi rides from the Omni Cancun Hotel to where most of the attractions were would cost under 100 Mexican Pesos. Since we hadn't visited an exchange or "cajero" I would have to pay in American Dollars. The conversion ratio is roughly 10 to 1 so it was easy to figure out what you owed when the locals would ask for payment and they gladly accepted Dollars or Pesos. I highly recommend that you bring enough American Dollars to cover your taxi rides, tips and nightlife costs for your whole trip since withdrawing from the Banamex ATMs will cost you over $5.00 in charges each withdrawl. Everything else you can pay for with a VISA or MasterCard credit card. Don't use your VISA debit card since the chargeback and limited fraud liability of credit cards are generally more to your favor.

If you look at the first picture in this row you'll see AquaWorld's line up of Yamaha WaveRunners and the small two person boats that they use for the Jungle Tour. The waters were fairly calm on the Lagoon side.

After we checked in with the Aqua World staff they gave us the key to our locker and we put our stuff away. Luckily the Jet Ski had a glove box where I could put my digital camera when I wasn't using it. I had my Canon Powershot SD110 inside a big Zip Loc bag to protect it from the salt water.

The Yamaha WaveRunner that they gave us was powerful and seemed to be fairly new. The gauge showed how many hours the engine had been in operation since it came off the showroom floor. We started at 34.0 hours and I knew our hour long rental was almost up when we hit 34.9. Without that gauge I would have had no idea when our time was up. They should attach a small waterproof digital clock on the dash somewhere with 3M double sided tape.