To Tulum

Pedro’s niece, Edith, works in Playa del Carmen, over on the coast. We wanted to meet her before we left Yucatán and headed to Pedro’s hometown of Guanajuato. Edith recommended the beaches at Tulum and we made the decision to leave Valladolid early, to experience some beach time along with our visit. Off we went! I was still driving the rental car, and feeling very sure of myself at this point, especially since the places I drove were so rural.

For being so far away from home, it kept surprising us that in Valladolid we were only two time zones off from our home in Oregon, and only one time zone from Pedro’s family in Guanajuato, who were keeping up with our progress each day. But we also found it funny that a single state of Quintana Roo, on the coast, is in the Eastern time zone; same as New York City or Havana. So we lost an hour when we reached Tulum.

We checked into our Airbnb and were immediately glad we reserved only one night. It was a perfect condominium, in a perfect neighborhood, with perfectly clean and landscaped streets, and perfect orderly convenience stores with not a speck of dust on the top shelves. In other words, we were no longer in Mexico but in some sort of weird vacation haven for foreigners with money. We were not walking distance from anything authentic. It was disappointing, but we got over it easily because the place had arctic AC and gorgeous, perfectly designed living spaces and two giant bathrooms and a spotless kitchen. It was sorta nice to pretend we were rich. :o)

By the time we got there, Edith had been called in to work and we couldn’t meet with her that day after all. We were on our own for dinner. There were several restaurants with very good reviews within walking distance. We chose seafood at Los Morros because we were at the sea. We also had the local Tulum beer. It is advertised as cerveza artesanal (artisanal beer), made from sea water.

We asked our Airbnb hosts for a nice beach close by, and got a great recommendation to go to Punta Piedra which was mere minutes from the condo by car. The tiny beach was tucked inconspicuously between large resorts with members only access all up and down the road we were on. Our beach was free but we had to pay about $10 to park.

It was late in the day, but we had a couple of hours of sunlight left. It was enough time to soak up the warmth of the sand and the water and enjoy the especially beautiful sunset.

My camera was so fogged for the first hour at the beach that photos were impossible. If you can believe it, the weather was even more muggy in Quintana Roo than it had been in Yucatán state. The silver lining is that I had to go play in the water instead. Since we didn’t know the beach or the security of the place, we tried to leave one person on the beach watching our things, while the other two swam in the very warm ocean water.

The waves were fun to play in, and the entire evening, birds dove and splashed around us. There were only a few people on the beach and it was quiet and peaceful and just excellent. We stayed until it was too dark to see anymore.

Our small beach was bound by rock outcroppings on both sides, but there was plenty of sand to play in. There were a few beach shelters set up that seemed to be available to anyone. The properties above the rocks both belonged to resorts and were private property and off limits to us, but we did like the looks of this outlandish wooden structure to the North.

Till finally we had no choice but to make our way back to the condo. We grinned at the prospect of air conditioning turned luxuriously cold, and a modern washer and dryer to get all of our stuff freshened up.