Tulum (Mexico) – In Another Minute (Week 261)
Tulum, a coastal town in Quintana Roo on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico… where do I begin? It’s so wonderful!
I just spent a week there for my birthday with my husband Scott Solary, and it was the best vacation we’ve had in a long time, if not ever.
To
me, it’s the perfect vacation place: the beautiful turquoise water and
white beaches (even during this time of unusual amounts of kelp), the
warm weather, the history and exploration of Mayan ruins, the amazing
food and cocktails, the fascinating wildlife (iguanas, coatis, iguanas,
frigatebirds, iguanas, pelicans, iguanas, toucans, iguanas…), the
friendly people, snorkeling with turtles in nearby cenotes (cave
sinkholes) and the access to the Sian Ka’an Biosphere. I even found
street art!
Actually, we only spent half our vacation in Tulum and
the other in Sian Ka’an. I’ll be releasing separate videos about Gran
Cenote, Sian Ka’an and a few other experiences in the coming weeks.
Everything
else, you’ll see in the video – including shots from Tulum Pueblo (the
town a few kilometers away from the waterfront) and the charming
canopied street of Zona Hotelera where you will find great restaurants,
bars, shops and cabana hotels (small houses, instead of big resort
buildings) both on the jungle and on the beach side. This is a place
for foodies not just because of the Mexican food, especially the street
tacos, but also because of chefs from around the world opening up
farm-to-table and other high quality outdoor restaurants.
While in Tulum, we stayed at the Los Lirios Hotel Cabanas
and enjoyed our big balcony with hammock overlooking the Caribbean Sea.
Conveniently, that place comes with 24-hour electricity, your own
bathroom and excellent breakfast and dinner included. We still kept
venturing out for food, and I can now highly recommend Arca and Casa Banana (Argentinian food) and El Pez, Mezcal Monk and Zamas
for cocktails on the beach. By the way, we couldn’t be bothered to wait
for an hour in the afternoon to get a table in the evening at Hartwood.
Vacation time was too valuable for that.
I’ve already mentioned the never-ending array of iguanas. But it’s the frigatebird (fregata) that was most captivating – looking like a pterodactyl as it soars above the sea.
Another
special image that will remain with me is the street sign “Stay
Present” along the Tulum Zona Hotelera road. A wonderful reminder that
may not be necessary while you’re on vacation (when it’s all about being
in the present), but a good image to take with us when we are back in
our normal everyday life.
Of course, you can’t talk about Tulum without talking about the ruins of the Pre-Columbian Mayan wall city
perched above the sea. While we had heard that it’s best to go early or
late in the day, we had great luck with finding the place not too
crowded right in the middle of my birthday.
Other tips I’d like to share:
If you do rent a car (to drive the 1 1/2 hours from the Cancun airport to Tulum and beyond) do not rent from EZ or any of their affiliates
(like America Car Rental). They seem to be in the business of rip-off,
if not actual fraud (not actually being at the airport, giving you a
lesser car than you reserved and charging 3 times the amount you had
originally booked). I’m very proud of us keeping a cool head, going
through their BS process and then returning an hour later with the jeep
we had rented at Alamo (which is in the airport) and dropping off the
silly car EZ had pushed on us.
Bring your own koozies to keep your
caned beverages cold! They apparently haven’t made it to that area of
the world yet. Instead of adding fun new local koozies to our
collection, we had to settle for Ed Hardy koozies, the only ones we
found at a souvenir shop after searching for a few days. Oh, and ice is
called hielo. Last but not least, go have some street tacos.
Over the next few weeks/months, I plan to release videos about the following other places I visited on this Yucatán trip:
Chichén Itzá – World Wonder (Mexico) – In Another Minute (262)
Sian Ka’an
Gran Cenote
Cobá
… and possibly a few other collections.
Also,
I plan to put together a longer slower version of this video and
publish it here. That 1-minute rule can be quite constraining.
The song in this video is called “One Fine Day” and was written and performed by Jason Shaw, who made this song available via the CC BY 3.0 license. Thank you for all your great (and free) music, Jason!
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| Mayan ruin in Tulum, Mexico |