Tulum

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On arrival in Tulum on Sunday afternoon, we checked into the Weary traveller, which is on the main road (which happens to be the highway). Behind the reception there is a rectangular courtyard with a long wooden table running its length. On one side there are dorm rooms, and the outside walls and doors are painted with a brightly coloured mural. On the other side, is the communal kitchen and BBQ, as well as a small bar. At the back of the courtyard, there are a few trees, with washing lines and hammocks strung between them. It looks nice - but the dorms are crowded and the bathrooms aren't very nice - the toilet in my dorm had a corrugated iron door, for example, and there is no hot water.

We had a walk around Tulum town - lots of souvenir shops selling the usual white cotton clothes, leather bags, wrestler masks and ceramic skulls, and then returned to the hostel to cook ourselves some dinner. It was a 'burn your own' BBQ - not quite what we expected from the sign outside the hostel: 'BBQ every night!' - so when you ordered your burger all you got was a frozen burger, a bun and a slice of cheese. The rest was up to you. We didn't do much that evening.

On Monday morning we hired some bikes - German-style ones where you brake with the pedals and the handles are wiiiiiide. We cycled a few kilometers to the Hotel Zone of Tulum. We snuck into the first Cabana resort we saw. Cabanas are simple thatched beach huts - some have bathrooms but most don't, and some even have sand floors. We spent a few hours relaxing on the private beach there, under the shade of a thatched parasol, and then went off to get ourselves some food.

The road that runs paralell to the beach is full of hotels, restaurants and eco lodges (offering cabanas, yoga etc). It was quite hip - lots of places advertising food good for the soul, lots of interesting lighting and a hippy sort of vibe. It reminded me of the green fields at Glastonbury. Everywhere to eat was quite expensive though. We settled for a restaurant which was open-air, only the bar was covered by a thatched palm tree roof. Lamps shaped like mangoes hung from the trees. My roasted vegetable sandwich was gorgeous.

In the afternoon we cycled further down the hotel road towards the nature reserve that Tulum is famous for (alongside its Mayan ruins). We were looking for a public beach but there weren't any. After a while we gave up and parked our bikes at a Spa resort. We snagged ourselves some sun loungers and bought a drink, making this one of the few visits to a hotel that was actually legitimate! A few hours later, after sunbathing and watching kite surfers on the beach, we cycled back to the hostel, via the supermarket. Tea was fish, done on the Barbeque with salad. It had been tough getting the man in the shop to understand that we wanted the head and tail cut off and the bones to be taken out. Our Spanish just wasn't up to it.

We spent our evening sampling some 2-for-1 cocktails from the bar (2 drinks for 40 pesos! Thats a pound a drink!) and chatting to the Australians who had been in my dorm and we catching the night bus to Belize city.

On Tuesday we caught the public bus to the beach - free as part of our accommodation. It was very humid when we arrived. We walked 10 mins down the road to the Tulum ruins, but we were both too hot and sweaty to enjoy them properly. We spent our afternoon on the public beach (which we'd completely by-passed at the fork in the road the previous day!). By mid afternoon we were getting hungry so went to a little beach hut with plastic tables and chairs outside it. We got some guac and nachos. Whilst waiting for our food, a man emerged from the palm trees and plonked himself at our table. He was canadian and had no front teeth. After a few minutes of small talk he disappeared off into the ocean, leaving us with his hat, some cash and a credit card, mysteriously valid until 2022 and with no name on it. We chatted to him when he returned from his dip - not out of choice - he was a bit strange and had a bit of a mad look in his eyes. Anyone camping on the beach in Mexico raises suspicion from me, but his friend Tammy and her 9 year old daughter seemed a little more normal.

Our evening was spent eating Burritos at a cheap restaurant just accross from the hostel. The Aussies had recommended it to us the previous night. Whilst there, we got chatting to a retired policeman, Marcus who was making his way from Belize to Cancun to fly home following a dive trip. He was really nice and we shared a few drinks with him the following night.

Wednesday was another beach day. After a few hours swimming, reading and sunbathing we went off for some lunch at a beach bar, where we sat on some swing seats. We had just finished a rather morbid conversation about the last time either of us had cried when a guy around our age, with excellent English, said he'd seen us from where he was sitting and that we needed to smile more if we were on vacation. He collected his drink from the bar, where we were sat and went back to his seat again. He returned a few minutes later, feathers a little ruffled, saying his Italian (=diva) date had stormed off down the beach because he'd come to chat to us. Now we were stuck with him. He moaned about his how he loved his job at the Biosphere reserve but how it was SO hard working in Paradise. Blah blah blah. And then he offered us a lift home, and asked Hannah if she wanted to go to his apartment and 'see his baby howler monkey' who was recuperating from falling out of a tree. A monkey that can't stay in a tree? I think that's natural selection!

Anyway we politely declined and returned to our hostel where we spent the evening getting tipsy on cocktails and chatting to the rah boys (Jonny, Toby and Solly) who had turned up in our hostel after the continuous drinking in Playa had begun to get them down. One of them was on the bunk above Hannah and had been very surprised to see her name ("the only person whose surname I know in Mexico!").

We packed up our stuff, setted our bill at the hostel and hung around. Our initial plan was to get a minibus package which takes you to Chetumal, puts you up in a hostel and gets you your ticket for the ferry to Caye Caulker. We asked around at the hostel and called the numbers on the poster, but frustratingly no-one seemed to know what was going on. We eventually found out that we could have needed to make a reservation the night before, so said the semi-naked man who makes all the tour bookings. "You should have asked", he told us, and we snappily replied that we had asked several members of staff over the last few days.

After a morning spent lazing in the hostel hammocks listening to Springsteen and The Beatles, we left Tulum catching a four hour second class bus to the border town of Chetumal.

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