Tulum…Chapter Two
Tulum was actually larger than I thought it was going to be. Not a large city by any means, it was still an active town with many restaurants to choose from. One thing that was disappointing was that the prices were much higher than I thought they were going to be. While I expected the beach resort restaurants to be pricey, I didn’t think the in-town restaurants were much better. On my first night, I stopped at an Argentinian place along the main highway downtown. They brought a complimentary appetizer of bread and chimichurri sauce and sauteed onions. Isn’t it nice how everything is colored-coordinated, to include the beer and my sunglasses? Rich shades of browns and golds…would make a nice advertisement.
I didn’t know what to expect because I had never had this before, but it was wonderful. I could have been satisfied with having just this for dinner.
More tightly napkin-bound utensils…
For lunch I had the vegetarian crepes. I should have just stuck with the appetizer because this was WAY more than I was hungry for. This was one of the least expensive items on the menu and it was about 120 pesos. It was good…
Very rich and filling…
I could only eat about half of it. For dinner that night, the owner of my hotel recommended Charlies.
For a restaurant with such an American name, I would have thought it was owned by Americans, but the woman who seated me didn’t speak a lick of English. She seemed like the owner or manager, and was very nice, but it was very difficult to understand her. After some conversation, I was able to figure out that she wanted me to come back the next night because they were having entertainment. I’m always kind of amazed that even with my severely limited knowledge of the Spanish language I am able to understand some conversations just from various words I can decipher.
I ordered the shish-kabob, but was very disappointed. The meat was very tough and I couldn’t eat all of it. Again, it was pretty pricey at about 150 pesos…definitely not worth it.
After dinner, I learned that there were salsa dance lessons in the back room, so I decided to go back and check it out. The main participants consisted of an American couple with two small children. I will have to say that many Americans could learn a few things about dancing from our friends south of the border. Most of us are WAY too stiff and awkward and could use some serious loosening up before we try to come close to imitating our very talented southern neighbors. This couple looked like it was more work than fun and definitely needed a few shots of tequila in my humble opinion. Sorry I didn’t get photos.
It was hard not to notice that most restaurants that had televisions were showing the Olympics. Here’s the trampoline competition…
I just had a beer in this place and noticed that it had its own little Dia de los Muertos celebration on a Ferris Wheel. How fun…little skeletons with their arms up…wheeeeee!!!!!
Subway in Tulum. Yep… I went there after my day in Coba. I was tired and just wanted to get back to the claustrophobic hotel, believe it or not. The 6-inch sub I ordered was only about $1.70 US dollars…wow. And it was good!
Okay, so these are just some miscellaneous shots of Tulum…I took these the morning I was leaving for Akumal.
Fruit and veggie stand…
Happy Mojito Bar owner…
Ssshhhhhhhhh!!!!!! (Whispering…) I think someone had a hard night…
I wish they had had the prices on this sign…I would like to have known how much they were. They were cute.
I’d also like to know how much this place is, too. It was a half block off the main highway and actually looked very nice.
The ever-popular masks…
And another fruit and veggie stand…
Here’s where I had breakfast my last morning in Tulum…
A veggie omelet…
It was good…very cheesy…
I’m saying…it must be a law!
No matter where you go in Mexico, you get a feel that despite the problems, these people love their country.
And they love each other.
One more post to come of the “other” Tulum.
Tulum…Chapter One
I thought I would do several posts on Tulum rather than one long one. The strange thing about Tulum is that there are actually two areas…the main town which sits right on the highway…and the hotels and beach areas that run along the coastline. They are not within walking distance of one another which is kind of a shame. It is at least a five minute taxi ride to get from the town to the beach, depending how far you are going down the coast and costs about 50 pesos for the ride.
First, I started out the day in Playa del Carmen. When I’m in Mexico, I always like staying in hotels that have cable TV. I don’t watch a whole lot of TV when I’m there, but when you travel alone, it’s always kind of nice to have some chatter in the background. It’s kind of interesting to flip channels…did you know Barney speaks Spanish? And it looks like he’s in Venice, so he must speak Italian, too!
Personally, I only like to watch de pelicula which shows old Mexican movies. They’re silly, but for some reason, they make me feel at home…I have no idea why.
Well, it’s time for breakfast, so I go to a nearby restaurant on the main strip. Here I am…
The waiter just grabbed my camera and took a picture. All the waiters are always so nice in Mexico. I don’t think I’ve ever had a single instance when a waiter hasn’t been. However, I didn’t take a picture of breakfast this morning because it was one of the worst breakfasts I think I have ever had in Mexico. I just had eggs with potatoes and sausage. You wouldn’t think that would be too hard to screw up, but it was really bad. The potatoes were just like a McDonald’s hash brown patty and the sausage was a mediocre hot dog cut in half length-wise. Yikes. I don’t think I’ll be visiting this establishment for breakfast again.
Time to head to the bus for Tulum. I don’t follow Disney cartoon movies, so I don’t know what was showing, but it’s kind of funny to see these dubbed in Spanish.
Here we are backing out of the bus station. I will have to say the bus drivers of these big buses are very skilled in maneuvering around tight places. For one thing, the parking spaces in these stations don’t leave a whole lot of room in between buses, so that alone always impresses me. But seeing these huge vehicles turn sharp corners in very tight, crowded Mexican towns just amazes me. This was particularly evident when I was to Vallodolid. Some of those streets were extremely narrow and cars were parked along the sides. It’s amazing that these guys don’t run into something once in awhile. I give them lots of kudos.
Here’s a typical street scene in crowded Playa del Carmen…
There’s nothing really to take pictures of along Highway 307 when you’re going down the coast line. The road is too far away from the shoreline to see, and all the hotels and attractions are tucked back from the highway, so you can’t really see anything along the way.
Here’s the ADO bus station in Tulum…
And here’s my hotel in Tulum…the Secret Garden….which I was pretty disappointed in and would never stay at again.
Here’s my room which was right next door to the check-in area, so I never felt like I had a whole lot of privacy. Besides that, I normally don’t mind when a room is small, but this one had a very claustrophic feel to it.
Maybe that was because of the dark brown wall and barn-looking door…
The bathroom was very dark…
But the shower was a good size…
Here’s the center courtyard between the two rows of rooms. One evening, I decided to take my laptop out there to do some blogging while another couple was relaxing. As I stepped over to one of the benches, I said, “Do you mind if I join you?” Neither one said a word. I thought maybe they were foreigners and couldn’t understand me, but you would have thought they might have said some kind of greeting. Anyway, it was REALLY dark out there and I had to rely on the light from my laptop in order to see where to sit. It seems like they could have had some dim lights out there or something so you didn’t trip on anything. So I sit down on the bench and start working on the blog when I suddenly feel/hear something “land” on the bench next to me. I couldn’t see anything in the dark, so I kind of felt around on the bench next to me to see if there was something there. As I write this now, though, I can’t even believe I did that! What if it had been a scorpion…or a snake!! And here I’m trying to feel what it was?? Really, Deb? Feeling rather uncomforable because of the mute fellow hotel guests and my unknown bench occupant, I left pretty quickly to return to the safety of my claustrophic room.
So, on to the town of Tulum. It sits right on Highway 307 which runs from Cancun to Chetumal.
Because it is the main highway between those two locations, the traffic can be pretty noisy and hectic at times. Huge tractor trailers come through all the time…and many of these are semis pulling another full semi behind.
Because of all this traffic, they have guards that stand on the main intersections who stop traffic so that people can cross the street. That’s definitely a good idea and makes things much safer.
They also have the typical cars making the rounds with the loud speakers making announcements about who knows what…
Here’s the place where I rented my car. If you would have told me 10 years ago that I would be renting a car on my own in a town in Mexico from a little hole-in-the-wall place, I would have told you you were crazy. Now maybe I’M the one who’s crazy…haha!
You see police trucks circling the town quite often with officers in the back.
After awhile, you don’t even think about it…although they do look a little formidable in their black outfits…
Here’s the zocalo where all the locals come to gather in the evening…
They had a model of the Tulum ruins enclosed in a big display case. I didn’t go to the ruins this time, but have been there before. You can check out that visit here.
Here’s just a typical street scene around the corner from where I was staying.
This tree is called a Pride of Barbados. They have these in Texas, but they are only bushes…they aren’t huge trees like this one. They are all over Mexico and are just beautiful. They clipped this one to accommodate those big semis going through town.
Had to share this sign I saw on a store window. A “holyday home”…hahaha!
I’ll end this post on some beautiful flowers growing at my hotel. More on Tulum to come.
Grand Cenote
I got home at about 10:15 p.m. on Thursday night and had to go into work on Friday because it was the first day of registration for the fall semester at the university. Even though I was so tired after a day’s worth of traveling, I ended up tossing and turning on Thursday night and didn’t get much sleep. So I was pretty much worthless on Friday. It took the weekend to recover, so now I need to go back through my photos and post some things I never got to while I was in Mexico.
I will have to admit that this was a strange trip for me. There was too much jumping around from one place to the next and it didn’t end up to be a real relaxing vacation. Plus, having to deal with Hurricane Ernesto wasn’t in my plans, so that took away some of the fun, too, although it was somewhat interesting, nonetheless. Since it had been a year and a half since I had been to Mexico, I think I tried to fit too much in and it just ended up being kind of disjointed. I never really felt a connection with anywhere that I stayed and that was a disappointment for me because I’ve always felt that before.
Anyway, I still want to make some posts of things I experienced along the way. This post will be about the Grand Cenote which is just outside of Tulum on the way to Coba. I hadn’t planned on making any stops before Coba, but since I had the car, it was convenient. It cost 100 pesos to get in…and here’s the first thing you see when you enter. I don’t think the restaurant was open…maybe it is during a busier time.
They had a pen full of peacocks before you got to the cenote…
So the cenote isn’t far from the road and this is what you see when you get there…
It isn’t that far below the surface of the ground level which kind of surprised me…especially being named “Grand” Cenote. My first cenote was Ik Kil, near Chichen Itza, which you can view here: Ik Kil Ik Kil is much deeper underground and more impressive in that respect.
There were lots of lily pads. See the turtle in the center?
The thing that was impressive about this cenote was the incredible reflection of the sun on the water. It created beautiful shimmering effects with the camera.
I particularly like this shot…and I did not manipulate this photo at all…
And it looked like there were caverns and crawlspaces underneath the rocks where you could swim…
See another turtle?
Okay, so I climb back out of the cenote and see a sign where there are some more down a pathway. No one else is going down this way, but I decide to see if there’s something worth seeing. After about a five minute walk, I come to what looks like a cenote in progress. It’s very shallow and dirty and there are about five Mexican workers moving rocks and talking…until they see me and everyone stops talking. Okay…time to turn around and go back since I’m out here all by myself.
On the way back, I see this. I’m adventurous, but not THAT adventurous. This is what horror movies are made from. Nice home-made ladder, though.
Now we come to a “feeder” cenote off the main one. It’s amazing how clear and blue the water is…
This is the view going back to the main opening under the rocks…
Then this is back at the main cenote again…
But this time, a bunch of scuba divers had come and were just getting in the water. If that’s the case, then there must be caves and caverns back there that are worth exploring. I’m not a scuba diver (yet), but I’m thinking that would be pretty fun to explore what’s under there.
On the way out, I saw the customary chickens and roosters…
This is probably his son (awwwww)…
And a final picture of the beautiful flowers that were blooming on the grounds. I don’t know what they are but they were as delicate as tissue paper…and such a pretty color.
Coming up next…my stay in Tulum.
Random Travel Musings 
