Tulum: Our Trip

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We just spent a week in Mexico. Our five-year-old son was excited since he loves Mexican food (especially quesadillas, but we found the local equivalent, "gringas". Not a joke - that's what they call it when you put cheese and meat in a tortilla.) We chose to go down to Tulum, to avoid the Spring Break crowds, and I'm glad for it. Tulum is a nice chill town, with interesting people-watching. It's quiet, the kind of place where moms walk their kids home from school, alongside dogs running in the streets, many people (tourists and locals) on bicycles, and the cars go slow enough to avoid accidents. It's the kind of place where a rooster awakens you in the morning.

We stayed at the Posada Yum Kin, with its gracious hostess, Graciela. This inn is very homey, with two lovely courtyards and many private rooms all around it. We were on the second floor, with a private balcony including a hammock, and a little suite (kitchen/dining, bedroom, bath). It isn't close to town (about a mile's walk), but aside from the dogs, it's pretty quiet, not a party area. Tulum has three main areas - the ruins, the pueblo and the beach. We were closest to the pueblo, where there are many restaurants, cafes, and handicraft/souvenir stores in the main area. If you really want a deal though, you get your stuff at the Chedraui grocery store on the road to the beach. Kai says "I liked our hotel. I could have stayed there all day if I was in charge."

The Tulum ruins aren't that impressive compared to, say, Teotihuacan or an even more apt comparison, Tikal. Tulum is post-classic Mayan architecture, and probably wasn't a very important city anyway. However, the setting is amazing, overlooking the Caribbean. From the ruins, you can walk down to the beach, which of course, we did. The tide was in, so there weren't many places to stash our dry clothes, but we did splash around a bit before finishing the rest of the ruins tour. I'm not sure if I'd recommend visiting Tulum ruins. It is all roped off and not very interesting to look at, and you can get to a public beach from anywhere around here. We did do the smart thing and got there early, before the tour buses from Cancun. So we waltzed in with no lines. By the time we left, people were in lines down the road. Tulum is pretty built up too, with lots of handicraft places, buskers (street performers) and even a Starbucks! Yup, I went to the Starbucks. Air-conditioned loveliness. Still, it was even more built-up than when we had visited Teotihuacan! I usually like the more rustic ruins more.

The beach part of Tulum is basically one long road with guesthouses, hotels, restaurants, and yoga studios. In this part of Tulum, you will not see many locals, but you will see a lot of very attractive people. Here's where you find the sugar sand beaches, the turquoise water, the green-brown of the seaweed. Yes, there is a LOT of seaweed. The first day, there was none, but later on in the week, it was 10 feet wide at the shore and filling the water from top to bottom. As sea-turtles nest near here, they don't machine-clean the beaches. Also a sad amount of trash washes up in this part of Mexico due to the way that the ocean washes up here, trash from all over the world. But the hotels clean most of this up. It just makes me sad though, how much trash we've thrown into the ocean. Anyway, the beaches are beautiful despite this, and it's warm and the water is warm. The waves are too gentle for surfing, but perfect for boogie-boards as we saw many kids out there doing. To visit a beach, you either find an opening to the public beach (actually all beaches are public in Mexico), which is if you turn left on the beach road. Or you can go to a beach club. Most of these are hotels or restaurants or both. You go in, have lunch (and spend at least 25$), and then you can spend all day lounging on their part of the beach, with lounge chairs, drink service, and so forth. Kai's comments on the beach: "FUN, but I do not like the seaweed time. When there was seaweed, I didn't like it."

One day we drove to Coba, which is a much more impressive ruin in the Peten style (same as Tikal), classic Mayan pyramid architecture, and a huge site. It was about an hour drive, and an interesting one through villages. Coba was not as popular as Tulum, although it did have a zipline, it was quieter and you felt like you were in the wilderness. You can still climb the big pyramid there, and I climbed it, overcoming my fear of heights (though my legs still shook a lot on the way down and I had to sit down for some of it, and hyperventilated, and remind myself that no one had died there that day.) Meanwhile, people carrying babies in their ARMS were walking up & down like it was no problem. Still, I was better than I was at Temple II in Tikal. Kai climbed halfway up twice, with Alli, but not to the top. Pretty brave. We also rode in a bicycle cart around the ruins, but overall, Kai was NOT impressed and rushed us through the ruins. We did have a nice lunch on the water at a tourist restaurant. There were no tour buses there when we arrived, but there were people eating there, so it seemed like a safe place to eat. Unfortunately about five tour buses pulled up and blocked our lake view and pumped their foul emissions into our nostrils. Fun times. Tour buses - the bane of my existence.

Kai's comments on COBA: "It was a little bit fun."

Tulum is also well-located for visiting all the natural beauty of Mexico, and especially cenotes. Now, it turned out that my son is still afraid to swim, and really panics especially in unknown water. So we didn't go into more than one cenote. We chose Gran Cenote as our first and only one. It's large, with two entrances. The second entrance was less crowded and had a shallower area, where he would have been fine had he been brave enough to step off. Loads of people were there - both foreign tourists and Mexicans (after all, many Mexicans are also tourists here in Quintana Roo). They had lockers, but all were full, so we had to stay near the benches where we had stashed our stuff. Actually I saw a woman messing with Alli's purse, where she had our money, passports, camera, etc - and I leapt into action. Unfortunately I knocked my son down in my rush to get there, but I did get there - and I moved the bag away from her and said "I'm so sorry that was in your way." and she said "no problem at all", and we both pretended that she was only touching our bags in order to move them to make way for her big bag (the size of a carry-on suitcase). But I'm pretty sure it's all a ruse - she "moves" your bag and if you're not there, she takes your stuff and puts in her bag and no one's the wiser. Who knows? Maybe I'm just too suspicious but theft is not uncommon on the beaches and in the cenotes if you leave your stuff unattended. Most people are good but the tiny percentage of bad people do know where to go.

Kai's comments on cenotes: "I HATED them. I hate them hate them hate them. I really badly hated them. Because I don't like being in water!"

I wish we had had more time to swim in the cenotes! I would have loved to have snorkeled in one, or swum through an underground river, but no dice.

Speaking of which, we chose to go to XCaret instead of Xel-Ha (or another cenote, or etc) because it was supposed to have fewer water activities. My son agreed he'd wear the lifevest and let us carry him through THEIR underground river, but again, it didn't happen. Unfortunately I had swum up ahead (to see if he'd want to follow me) and the current was too strong to go back. Although I was plagued with guilt, I was also enjoying floating/swimming through this amazing environment. I got out at the first "emergency exit" and ran back barefoot (a long long way). Then I found K. and Alli, where both were nearly at the point of tears/anger, and we had to walk, all of us, barefoot to the other end of the park. Because they send all your stuff (clothes, shoes, towels) to the end in a dry bag, and you pick it up there. It wasn't a great way to start the day.

XCaret would have been charming, and if we had all been in the right mood, I think it would have gone better. The sea turtles were amazing. I liked the beach with the inner tubes. I didn't like how everyone was smoking. If you don't smoke and aren't used to it, it's hard to find a spot of fresh air with people lighting up everywhere. But if you want a clean beach with no seaweed, you can't go wrong with XCaret. It also has snorkeling, but we obviously didn't partake. (We also had to give up on snorkeling in Akumal, same reason. Argh.) The pre-hispanic dance show was superb and if we weren't so tired out, we probably would have liked their big evening "Mexico Espectacular" show. THe traditional mexican buffet restaurant included with our tickets was incredibly tasty. Overall, it's a safe, clean, sanitized experience. Kai's comments on this day: "I liked it, but not that underwater cave either. I liked the non-water stuff."

On another day, we decided to check out Aktun Chen. It is another adventure park, but you pay for each activity individually, so you don't have to pay for things you won't do (like swim in a cenote, sadly, or zipline.) We did the long dry cave tour, and it was awesome. So beautiful! Years ago, I swam into and explored Actun Tunichil Muknal in Belize. This cave was much more built-up for tourists with subtle lighting (run by generator), pathways (mostly to keep people in certain areas to protect the stalactites), and a beautiful underground water reserve. The guide told us a story that years ago a "research team" had come, dived there, and took tons of things away in suitcases. So they think there were things in this cenote, maybe pots or other relics, but it's all gone now. Unfortunate. Other than that, there was no evidence of any rituals or sacrifices here as there were in ATM in Belize. Still, it was a cool cave, and the guide we had was great. The adventure park also had a small zoo, some rescued snakes, a margay, and lots of monkeys. We even got to feed and hold turtles! It was a much more organic experience than XCaret, much more my speed. And no tour buses!

Kai's comments on Aktun Chen: "I liked it better than the underwater cave. I liked seeing the monkeys and the turtles."

At the end of the day, if your child turns out to be aqua-phobic, a trip to Quintana Roo should not be in your future, because almost everything fun is in the water.

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