Hey everyone,
Haven’t posted since we arrived in Tulum, so this may be a long one. Tulum has been amazing and so much fun! We’ve literally packed every day full of activities so there’s been no time to write this until everyone fell asleep from exhaustion.
We didn’t get up to much on Wednesday evening when we arrived at the hostel, but we came down for the free cocktail hour and ended up meeting Lin and Victor, two Dutch guys, after chatting we decided to go to the Coba ruins together the next day. We took a Colectivo to the ruins about 8 am and it was almost empty, we got to read a bit about the Mayan culture and to see the stone buildings that were not overrun by the forest. We even got to climb one of the structures. The Mayans believe that the taller the building the closer you are to God, and judging from the amount of steps we had to climb, they were pretty damn tight with their God. The view from the top was amazing we could see miles and miles of surrounding jungle, and we had it almost to ourselves.
After that we tried this local Taco place which was amazing and also very cheap ($16 pesos/60p per taco!). In the evening we again went to the free cocktail hour (who wouldn’t it’s free?!) and met other people from the hostel including Alyssa, a girl from Australia, who convinced us to stay another day and to go to a mojito bar that evening, not that it took a lot of convincing. They had a band playing salsa music and everyone was up and dancing, including us, it was a great atmosphere.
We left after the band finished and got tempted into the block party outside (open front bars with dance-floors that extend into the street) and then onto a club. We didn’t know any of the music, but that didn’t stop it being an amazing night. We didn’t get in until 4 am, but we had promised Grace when she left us after the mojito bar, that we wouldn’t drink much and would still be up at 7 am to visit the Grand Cenote. We only managed to keep half of that promise, which I regretted at 7 am on Friday morning.
So very hung over after 3 hours sleep we decided to rent bicycles and cycle the 6 mile round trip. It worked out really well, we had a nice bike ride in the sunshine and it was much cheaper than a taxi, but much more sweaty. Although in Mexico we always seem to be sweating, it ranges from a moist sheen to dripping wet clothes, but it’s always there. The cenote is beautiful, it was huge, as the name suggests, and had been covered in decking so we could get in. There were several main segments to explore and we had a great time snorkelling and messing about in the water, we were originally only going for the morning and visiting the Tulum ruins in the afternoon, but ended up staying the whole day….so we decided to extend our stay for another day. We tried to go out again in the evening but due to the local elections, nowhere was selling alcohol (it’s against the law here to sell alcohol for the nights and days leading up to an election). We found out about this law just before the ban came in place and quickly bought some beers to take back to the hostel – which the shop owner wrapped in news paper and double bagged telling us to get home before the police checks. So we had a chilled night in, sneakily drinking beers with all the other hostel guests and chatting until the early hours of the morning.
On Saturday we got up again at 7 am and headed to the Tulum ruins on our bikes, these were overlooking the see rather than in the jungle like Coba. The Mayan settlement at Tulum was used as a kind of ancient port, the buildings here were a bit less grand and more practical. After spending the morning here we cycled the few miles back to Tulum, filled up on tacos and headed out on our bikes to another cenote as we enjoyed the last one so much.
This cenote was much smaller, but the distance from the ground level to the pool was much shorter, meaning we could jump in! I got brave and even jumped through a small shoot hole into the cenote, we stayed here jumping in and messing about most of the afternoon and some other people from the hostel joined us later until we got kicked out when it closed.
When we got back to the hostel we were all a bit gutted that we had to separate the next day as we’d gotten on so well and had a lot of fun. So we decided to move our schedules about and adjust routes so we could travel to the next place together. Instead of heading to Merida next we will be going to Bacalar and making our way to Belize from there.
It’s now 1 am and everyone has fallen asleep exhausted after a lot of cycling, swimming and dive-bombing. I should also get to sleep before we rush off tomorrow trying frantically to buy a last minute ticket to Bacalar.
As always, I’ll keep you updated.
Lots of love,
Alice x