SUNDAY (3/28)
We spent most of Sunday traveling. Our flight out of GDL was in the late morning and we had a connection in Puebla, so we didn’t get to the Cancun airport until 4 or so. Mom had rented a car so we all hopped in and drove to our hotel in Tulum. The drive was about an hour and a half long but, never fear, I made mix CDs for the ride!
We got to Zamas (our hotel) at sunset and decided to just take it easy for the rest of the day (not that there was really anything to do anyway).
We got a little cabin only a few steps from the beach. The front porch had colorful chairs and hammocks, and the beds (which came with their own ceiling fans) were beautiful and soft and white and surrounded by mosquito netting. The netting made getting in and out of bed interesting but it also added to the whole experience. There were no outlets and only a few lights in the room, so we were really away from it all.We ate at the restaurant at Zamas that night since part of taking it easy for the rest of the day was not going in search of food. It was actually a really good meal and we were all stuffed by the end. A few highlights of the meal were my Piña Colada (which was not trying to hide the fact that it had rum in it) and my papas bravas (a dish I ate at every meal when I went to Barcelona and they had it at Zamas!).
After dinner we had our first of many low-tech nights, sitting out on our porch in chairs and hammocks, and playing word games to pass the time. Dad started a game of GHOST (which he won after I threw him a few difficult letters) while Mom read and laughed at my smack talking (“You have two ways you can lose this round, which one will you choose?”).
MONDAY (3/29)
We decided on another lazy day so I woke up late and took my time getting ready. Mom and Dad were already up and had read their email in the main office since that’s the only place with outlets. We ate brunch at the hotel and then drove over to Xel-Ha to see the Tulum ruins. Xel-Ha is a very interesting place that mixes ruins with water park and seems to be spread out along a good stretch of the Tulum shoreline.
The Tulum ruins are right on the shore. Two of the main buildings are situated up on the cliffs overlooking the beach (which is open to tourists) and the blue, blue ocean.
I’m still a little fuzzy on the history of the place but I’m pretty sure it was a late Mayan settlement which acted as a hub for the trade route that ran from Honduras up the coast of Mexico. They weren’t the best sailors and didn’t have very sophisticated ships, so the trade route stayed close to shore in the shallow water. The compound is walled in and it is thought that only the rich, important people actually lived inside the walls, while the rest lived outside and commuted in each day. Now, the ruins are the perfect thing to see on a low key day and provide plenty of opportunities for gorgeous pictures. 
There were a bunch of iguanas crawling around the ruins and posing very nicely for pictures, too. When we finished touring the ruins we stopped at a Xel-Ha restaurant and had some absolutely amazing limeade. Seriously, this stuff was sent from above. I might have just been really thirsty, though…We got back to Zamas in the early afternoon and spent the rest of the day napping, laying on the beach, drinking beer, and reading. I got Mom and Dad to try Victoria, my favorite Mexican beer. We sat there until it started getting dark and the wind started picking up and then we went in search of food. This time we ate at a neighboring hotel with an Italian restaurant. The food could have been better but the wine was delicious and the reflection of the full moon on the water just outside made up for a lot of it.
We ended the night with a few rounds of Scrabble, which Dad and I found in the Zamas office/restaurant area. We played one full game and then, in true Carey fashion, decided to sort through the letters and figure out what we needed to make a full Scrabble set. We played our second game with all the right letters. It didn’t help my chances at all (who could hope to win against those two?) and Mom and Dad each won a game.
TUESDAY (3/30)
I woke up pretty early on Tuesday because I was excited. We made plans to go to the Xel-Ha water park that day and I wanted to get started early. We went straight to Xel-Ha before breakfast so we could be sure to get the full day experience. I’m still not sure if the place is real or not, but it was beautiful.
The Xel-Ha water park was situated around a tiny cove where you could go snorkeling or scuba diving and offered a number of other fun water activities like inner tubing down a lazy river, cliff jumping, and swimming with dolphins and manatees. There were also guys walking around taking pictures of people with parrots and giant iguanas (something I wish I’d done, looking back on it). The ticket inside included all meals and most of the water activities.
We started by eating breakfast at a giant buffet in the main restaurant. There were so many delicious things and I was surrounded by such a beautiful atmosphere that I felt like I was on the island of temptation from Pinocchio and any second we would all turn into donkeys.
After breakfast we picked up our snorkel gear and went in search of some tropical fish. Sadly, the water quality was very weird and the range of visibility was poor, but we saw lots of fish, however foggy they looked to me. It probably didn’t help that there were hundreds of other people snorkeling around us. When we got tired of looking at foggy fish we walked around the cove to a spot where we could rent bikes to get to the top of the lazy river. It was a fun change of pace to ride on the path through woods.
The lazy river was anything but, but it was still fun. The current was so slow at times that I took my flippers off my feet and put them on my hands just so I could catch up to Mom and Dad and avoid running into other people. Along the river there were a bunch of places to get off and do things like cliff jumping or this very entertaining rope bridge, but we were content to just float on by and watch other people. The rope bridge was one rope on the bottom, a few feet off the water, and one above to hold on to and people had to try and cross it without falling off. It was harder than it sounds because it kept flopping back and forth, sending a few people down into the water with every violent jerk. It was endlessly entertaining to watch as we floated along in our inner tubes. The real work came at the end of the river when it dumped back out into the cove and the current completely disappeared. We had to paddle through some rocks, against the wind, to a little dock. This made us work up an appetite!
After lunch we moseyed over to the manatee enclosure and watched a group of kids have a manatee experience. There were three manatees but they really only made one of them do tricks. Manatees are very bulky, slow animals (so slow they had algae growing on them) so their tricks weren’t anything like what they have dolphins do. The manatees didn’t seem terribly obedient either, which pleased Mom because she hated to think that the only way manatees could be saved from extinction was for them to do stupid tricks for people. We left while the kids were posing for pictures, getting kisses from the manatees.
Believe it or not, by this time we had been at the park for more than five hours and we were tired. We took our time leaving, stopping to watch a bunch of people having a dolphin experience before leaving the park. We saw the dolphins do the “foot push” maneuver to all the people in one group which proved to be very entertaining. The “foot push” is where two dolphins come up behind the waiting person and push on their feet with their noses while swimming very fast. They get going fast enough that the people get into a standing position, but the speed can also be dangerous for women wearing two piece bathing suits, like the first woman we saw.
We got back to Zamas around sunset again and just lazed around until we got hungry. Mom took a look at my guidebook for restaurant ideas and decided to try and find one suggested restaurant called Copal. This turned out to be easier said than done since my guidebook said it was in the wrong place, but we ended up eating at a really good Thai restaurant called Mezzanine instead. Definitely a fortunate accident.
**Side note: I just gave in and followed the yummy smells to my host family’s courtyard downstairs where they are having an Easter party. I had some really good Mexican barbecue which consisted of thin steak, quesadillas, and lots of salsas.
WEDNESDAY (3/31)
Mom got a taxi to the airport in the morning so Dad and I said good bye to her at Zamas. Afterwards we ate breakfast and planned the rest of our day. It was to be an ambitious venture into the sights of Tulum which were slightly off the beaten path. We decided to start with the ruins at Cobá and then go to Dos Ojos, a cenote that one of the Zamas people recommended to Dad. For those of you who don’t know, the Yucatan peninsula is all limestone which is a very weak stone. There are a bunch of spots all over the Yucatan where surface water has worn away the rock to make giant, water filled caves that open directly up towards the sky. These caves are called cenotes and a bunch of them are open to divers and snorkelers.
Anyway, we started by going to Cobá, a former Mayan city from the classic period about a 45 minute drive from our hotel. When I say city I mean city. They believe that Cobá, which reached its peak around AD 800, had somewhere around 55,000 people living in it.
The cool thing about Cobá is that most of the 6,000 structures have yet to be uncovered and they have left the trees that have grown in over the centuries to provide tourists with shade. Another cool thing is that the area is so big that they rent out bikes or offer tricycle taxis to get from one building cluster to the next.Dad and I started by getting a 45 minutes tour around the first group of buildings. These buildings included a big temple and the main court for the famous ball game of the Mesoamerican cultures. This was not a game played for fun, as our guide said, but was one of the religious ceremonies of most ancient cultures in Mesoamerica. Players used their knees, hips, elbows, and heads to get a rubber ball through either of two hoops mounted at the top of the walls of the court.
Cultures differed in the specifics of the game and the court but they all agreed on one thing: the winner would be sacrificed to the gods. Our guide said that in the Mayan version of the game, players weren’t on teams pitted against each other, but each person got their turn to score and the others helped out. In a different spot in Cobá there was also a practice court where they would sacrifice a jaguar after every practice game.After the tour we rented bikes and cruised around the rest of the city, stopping at different clusters of ruins and looking around. We went down one really long stretch of road that ended in an area full of big stones with engravings on them. Dad decided this was the hall of fame since there were so many engravings (which are usually about people) so densely populating this one area. Our best and final stop, though, was at the big temple to the bee god.
This temple, the largest in the Yucatan peninsula by the way, is something like 120 feet tall and pretty beautifully intact. Surprisingly, tourists are allowed to climb this temple so we had to take the opportunity and go all the way to the top. After much huffing and puffing up the over sized stairs, avoiding looking down the whole way, we made it to the top. WOW! It was so high! I got vertigo just standing at the edge and looking down but I got over it eventually. We stayed up there and took pictures and caught our breath for a few minutes and then headed back down. It was pretty steep and I’m slightly afraid of heights so I scooted down on my butt the whole way.
After taking our time with lunch we headed out for Dos Ojos. I was skeptical about the whole cenote thing and whether we would have time to do both the ruins and the cenote in one day, but we went to check it out anyway. We got there around 4:30 and they had closed which was a shame because it looked really cool. There was a giant poster out front with a map of the caves and all the different chambers (one with bats in it), but sadly it was closed as I’ve already said. Just something to put on the list for next time I go to the Cancun area!
On our drive back from Dos Ojos to Zamas we happened to see the restaurant Mom had been looking for the night before and decided to go there for dinner later. It turned out to only be about a ten minute walk from Zamas, but the sign was kind of hidden behind some plants and we hadn’t been looking for it in that area anyway. Silly guidebook giving us the wrong location!
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