Colleagues Bob and Nancy Dunn of cruisingdoneright.com are pinch-hitting for me this week after being in the Caribbean on the Carnival Ecstasy. Today’s report is about a little-known, interesting Mexican port.
The port of Progreso, Mexico is a relatively recent addition to the map of cruise-ship destinations. Some consider it a map dot, a jumping-off place for Mayan ruins or Merida, the big city down the road.
To get in and out of Progreso, ships — in this case the Carnival Ecstasy — have to negotiate a seven-mile-long, man-made channel. For the captain, it’s not just a matter of pointing the nose of the ship in the right direction and letting her go, and we happened to be on the bridge watching the
Ecstasy’s departure through the buoys. In a channel this narrow, winds can make it trickier, although that was not an issue during our bridge tour.
Once the ship is tied to the bollards of a pier that’s four miles long, cruisers seem to fit into one of three categories. They either (1) head for Mayan ruins on a shore excursion, or (2) take a bus into Merida to shop, or (3) stay in the port and sample the local cerveza. We opted for door No. 2, minus the shopping. Bus tickets were available from tour operators at the end of the pier, and the trip to Merida cost $5 per person, each way.
What a deal!
The modern, air-conditioned bus offered a view of the wetlands that separate Progreso and Merida. It’s the local bus, so the stops were 
frequent, and the trip was close to an hour by the time the bus pulled into “Centro” — the heart of Mexican cities big and small.
This city is home to 900,000 Mayans, Mexicans and Mestitos (mixture). The population has doubled in recent years, an influx due to students who come for a university education and never leave, the migration of locals from outlying villages driven by the search for work, and outsiders impressed with Merida’s reputation as the “safest city in Mexico.”
It’s modern enough to have Walmart, Costco, Starbucks, a large convention centre and even a modern Hotel Dubrovnik juxtaposed against the colonial mansions, ancient churches and other remnants of 
the Mayan civilization once rooted in this northern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula.
Upon our return to the Ecstasy, Captain Andrea Viacama asked if we had been to the ruins called Chichen Itza, once home of the great Mayan Empire. We said no.
“Next time you must,” he said, “I took my family — the kids loved it.”
To get there means going through Progreso, which is much more than a map dot. It has been compared to Costa Maya but, while it’s hardly a thriving modern metropolis, that’s an injustice to Progreso. Besides, some people we saw on the beach looked like they really enjoyed Progreso’s cerveza!
