Tulum

Whilst Semana Santa is nominally a week long, the weeks before and after are also busy, as many Mexicans choose to take holiday from work to extend their vacation. I’m not sure if this played a factor, as most of the visitors seemed to be foreign, but Tulum was still extremely busy when we arrived after our stay at Paa Mul.

Tulum town is pretty much just a tourist town, set up to serve visitors to the area, I'm sure the town was there before the ruins were restored and opened to the public but nowadays the town is little more than a collection of hotels, restaurants and internet cafes. Tulum town is a couple of miles back from the waterfront; this seems slightly perverse to me as most visitors are there either for the ruins or the beach.

Not wanting to spend our time an hours walk from the beach, we took a drive down to the beach road to find a place to camp. The road is flanked for a long way either side by various accommodations, but none of the campsites were big enough for Jim, which probably did us a favour as Tulum shares the high prices found everywhere on the Caribbean coast. As the majority of the town is so far away, the road along the beach has no small roads running back from the waterfront, and so as we hunted for a place to free camp, we realised that we’d have to park on the main road. We had no trouble finding a spot, but any chance of peace and quiet was ruined by the constant stream of traffic a meter form our door.

Inexplicably, the hotels and resorts south of Tulum have no electric or water supply, and so on top of the convoys of Jeeps headed to and from the Sian Kaan Biosphere and the taxis ferrying people to and from the hotels, there is a stream of heavy trucks delivering drinking water to the area. The lack of services to the hotels and cabanas along the coast have limited the scale of development, and thankfully the backdrop to the beach is of palapa huts and hammocks rather than concrete hotels. Despite the noisy road, the beach a few hundred meters from our parking spot was a picture of tranquillity, and we spent a couple of days on the beach, enjoying the last time we’d see the sea until we reached the Pacific coast in Oaxaca in more than a thousand miles time.

Most accounts of the archaeological site at Tulum say that it is only worth visiting for its unusual location on the beach, the structures being less impressive and significant than other Mayan sites nearby. With this in mind we decided against going to see ruins, and on leaving the beach we headed straight out of town and got on the road to Chetumal. This was a physical and metaphorical turning point in our trip; this was as far as we’d go in Central America on our trip, from this point we will be heading back towards America.