Selvatica Adventure Park: Ziplines and Cenote Tour from Cancun and Riviera Maya

We spent a fantastic day here as part of a bumper birthday celebration with family. Our ages ranged from 13 to 80. We started the day getting fitted with our harnesses and safety equipment by the excellent staff, followed by a safety briefing explaining how to use the ziplines safely. Our guide Paco and his team were clear, funny and put everyone at ease. We then climbed up the many steps into the canopy for our zipline adventure, which was brilliant! We all had a fantastic time and some of us got to do the Spiderman manoeuvre (hanging upside down whilst ziplining) which got woops of sheer exhilaration. We always felt completely safe and the staff at each zipline were friendly and entertaining at all times. From here, we were loaded into the army trucks and taken to the cenote, a stunning limestone oasis surrounded by forest, where we frolicked in the water, throwing ourselves in from the platform and the short zipline and generally mucking about in the water. Our group were great fun and we supported each other if anyone was suddenly stricken by nerves before the plunge. There were some excellent somersaults! We saw a glorious Morpho butterfly and plenty of fish. From here, we headed back to the centre for a tasty lunch and a beer. Because of the nature of the activity, you can't take cameras or anything along with you on the ziplines. For this reason, the Selvatica paparazzi are ever-present, taking photos of you and your group to capture the day. While we were eating, a tablet was brought to our table so we could peruse the photographs before potential purchase. This is a bit of a sucker punch. There were 9 in our group and the price asked for the photos was $315USD (£35pp). There were around 400 photographs in total, really clear images taken with excellent quality cameras but, of course, a lot of the images are very similar (with digital cameras, we always take far too many...) Obviously, having not been able to take any photographs of the day ourselves, we really wanted the photographs, even though we know we will probably only use some of them, but there were other people in our group who were really shocked by the price and gave it a flat "no". We also wanted to buy a few souvenirs in the gift shop for friends at home. We did buy the photos, as we were splitting them between three families, but felt so rinsed after that that we had no money left to leave a decent tip for the brilliant staff, which we would have liked to do. Obviously you are a captive audience and the insurance requirements for a centre like Selvatica are probably huge - maybe the photographs form a large part of the income of the centre as a whole. We were just a bit shocked it was quite such a large figure for a file of digital images and perhaps a heads-up about that at the start of the day would be helpful, as it made for an unexpectedly expensive end to a brilliant day out!