On the flight to Cancun we thought and talked about our apparent lack of desire to travel. How could we travel for two more months if neither of us found any joy in it? I have always wanted to go to Mexico and it was sad to feel so uninspired once we were getting there. Would we enjoy our stay, or just suffer through it? Should we resort to our backup plan of choosing a nice place where to spend all our time until the day of the flight back home? But unexpectedly everything went back to normal after just a few hours! Cancun is not an attractive city, and we weren't interested in spending much time there. Nevertheless a few tacos and a stroll around downtown immediately awakened our traveller's instinct and the desire to discover this vast country.
We didn't really see anything in the city. The town of Cancun was created (literally, there was nothing here) in the '70s to lure in international tourism. It's composed by two main parts: the 'zona hotelera', where the all-inclusive resorts and the beaches are located, and the 'pueblo'. Both areas are strongly tourist-oriented and pretty much devoid of any charm. We had planned to stay for as short as possible, just enough time to decide where to go next. For this reason we chose a hostel in the pueblo, right next to the bus station. We spent most of our time in the hostel, studying the newly bought travel guide and trying to figure out where we'd like to go next. The air conditioning in the room and the breezy roof terrace helped a lot our phase of acclimatization to the heat and humidity of the region.
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| Margaritas! Bienvenidos a México! |
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| New country, new guidebook |
We enjoyed the food at 'Mercado 28', talking with people in Spanish, and joining a political party street festival at 'Parque de las Palapas', but after one day we had enough and moved on south. Our first real destination in Mexico would be Tulum, still a beach town of Riviera Maya, but hopefully less massively developed than Cancun or Playa del Carmen.
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| Fiesta at Las Palapas square |
We're not exactly beach types and we don't care for fancy hotels, but Tulum has much more to offer. There are Mayan ruins on the beach, fresh water 'Cenotes' caves to explore, sea turtles and the Mayan complex of Cobá is not far away. That should keep us busy for a few days. We arrived by bus around noon and immediately regretted not having booked a hostel. It's never nice to drag a full backpack around from one hotel to the next, even less when it's miserably hot and humid on the streets. The first places that we checked out where filthy, decrepit and relatively expensive. Just when we were ready to settle for the least decrepit choice we stumbled upon the Hotel Mundo Maya, and the search was over.
While the beach of Tulum is a beautiful and attractive strip of land, the downtown is nothing more than a stretch of highway surrounded by shops, hotels and restaurants. I wasn't convinced at the beginning, but we would end up liking this place a lot. We've found delicious food here, like the melted cheese with mushrooms plate at the taquería 'El Carboncito' and the incredible 'paletas' popsicles at 'Flor de Michoacan'. These two places alone would be enough to make me want to come back in the future.
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| Taco 'pastor' |
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| Melted cheese with mushrooms and tortillas. Pure pleasure |
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| Best fruit popsicles ever |
The same can't be said for the ruins at Cobá. We went there early in the morning to avoid the crowds and to have sufficient time to see the place. It turned out that the location is slightly hyped: the ruins didn't impress us much and the area was smaller than expected, so the visit lasted less than two hours on foot. It would have been even shorter if we hadn't stopped to observe some interesting animals. Unfortunately there is only one bus that could take us back to Tulum, and it would arrive four hours later. We crawled under the only little shadow we could find, ate our lunch and waited. It was a horribly long and hot wait. We saw other fellow travellers doing the same, wandering from one shadowy spot to the next in a desperate attempt to escape the heat.
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| The tallest pyramid at Cobá |
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| A steep climb up |
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| ...and a steep walk down |
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| Time for a siesta |
In the end we sat down at a restaurant's table to drink an icy cold soda and ass some time. Since the other tables were empty the waiter, Manuel, spent a long time with us, talking about Yucatan and Quintana Roo states. He gave us a few tips about travelling around here and even taught us a few words in Maya, the everyday language for many people in this part of Mexico. The hour at the restaurant is the best memory that I have of an otherwise disappointing day.
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| Manuel, our friend in Cobá |
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