Hola,
Yesterday Grace went for her day long scuba dive, I decided to rent out some snorkelling gear and go to the beach, but it then decided to chuck-it-down with rain all morning. At 10:30, after 3 hours of reading my book under cover, I decided to go into a restaurant on the beach for Wi-Fi and ended up seeing a guy I had met the day before who lived on the island.
After getting photos of his ID and sending it to Grace, I agreed to let him give me a tour of the island, mainly out of boredom than anything else. It ended up being a really good day, we went snorkelling in two national park corral reserves, we also swam to the outside of a dolphin enclosure in the sea and the dolphins swam right up the the fence between us – it was amazing how close we were. After that, we went to the original Mayan settlement on the island, it’s full of colourful papaya thatched buildings which still have people living in them today. There were also some old rubble piles that used to be Mayan buildings, a traditional Mayan church and a Tequila museum – where I got to have a Tequila and Mayan alcohol tasting course for free (as Octavia, my guide, was somewhat of a local celebrity; apparently he is big in the bull fighting scene in Mexico). We also saw the other side of the island where there was mostly forest and untouched beaches and everything smelt of honey. We finished the trip off with a quick look at a bull fighting stadium where Octavia trains, before he dropped me back at my hostel. All in all a 10/10 tour.
After my tour and Grace’s dive were done, we went out for dinner with two Irish girls and a Welsh boy Grace met on her dive. After dinner we went for drinks, ‘two English girls, two Irish girls and a Welsh man walk into a bar’ sounds like the start of a joke, but it was actually the start of quite a messy evening. It started with all you can drink Tequila for £2 per person (each shot was like a 1/3 of a pint!) and ended with karaoke at 3 am. It was a really fun night, especially for Liam the guy we were with, who kept having local men ask for his permission to talk to us and buying him drinks to bribe him into saying yes, which worked quite a lot – even though we’d asked him to say no.
This morning was less fun: we woke up after a few hours sleep to get a ferry and a bus in the midday heat to get to our hostel in the centre of Tulum. It’s a lot more lively here and they have free cocktails every night 5-6 pm so I’m not sure how early we’ll be in bed tonight either. Tomorrow we’re off to see the ruins at Coba and to try and swim in some cenotes.
Keep you updated.
Lots of love,
Alice x