Now it gets (even more) fun - Tulum!

So up until now, we'd been in highly touristy areas - Cancun(ish), Cozumel, and Playa del Carmen are all pretty large cities.  For the second half of our trip we decided to rent a car so we could get away from the main areas and go adventuring.  We'd planned on and budgeted for this car:

A fine Chevy Aveo...oh la la!!

But due to the vagaries and crooks at Thrifty Car rental, we had to scrap that plan because they tried to pull the ol' bait and switch.  So after wasting a lot of time, we eventually ending up getting this fine ride, for the same price:

That's more like it!

We made the drive down to Tulum, which would end up being one of our favorite places.  For starters:

"Is that a hammock outside your room?" Yes, yes, yes it is!

Our hotel was awesome, it was like a nature preserve that happened to have a few hotel rooms in it, leading to the head scratching realization that I was in a hotel that was surrounded by jungle that was surrounded by a city that was surrounded by a jungle. These are the types of hammock-y things you think about while in hammock.  After that I was tired, so I took a nap.  That's about as high-level thought as is possible while hammocking.

The food speaks for itself, look at this fine seafood stew!

MMMMMmmmm whole crab...tasty exoskeleton...

I suspect they went fishing and just emptied the entire net directly into a huge pot and then boiled it for 12 hours, because there were a lot of different critters in there, all of them delicious!

Tulum is more famous (rightly so!) for it's fantastic and unique seaside ruins.  With our car (yay!) we were able to show up right as it opened, which was an awesome and strange experience to be in a place like that all alone:

It felt like the zombie apocalypse (or rapture if you prefer) - weird

Beautiful!  Coming soon to our travel wall!  Also featured- my "new" $5 mexican "Oakley" sunglasses!

All to ourselves!

I think all archealogical sites should look like this!

And contain a beach!

 We roamed the ruins, reading about archeology and mayan stuff and occasionally spying other zombie apocalypse survivors tourists in the vast complex for about an hour, and then headed to the beach.  Where else can you mix awesome ruins with a soft white beach with perfect blue water?  Nowhere in Mexico, as a matter of fact!  These are the only ruins on the water (well, on a cliff overlooking the water) anywhere!
 

What's not to like?

This one's for you, Joe!

Right after we saw the first iguana hot-footing his way across the beach, we noticed TONS of iguanas sunning themselves on the rocks.  It makes perfect sense, and they've probably lived there since before the Mayans built the temples, but it made the beach even cooler.

We read that during the summer sea turtles will lay their eggs on the beach and you can come help the hatchlings make their way to the ocean, talk about awesome!  That led to a serious (as serious as you can have in swimming suits while tanning) question: is this the best beach we've ever been to?  Could this top Railay beach in Thailand?

Railay, Thailand

VS

Tulum, Mexico

We were never able to reach a consensus, so I decided it was time to really put my engineer brain to the job, carefully weigh and weight all the factors, establish metrics, and apply rigorous mathematic and scientific processes to answer that question.  Unfortunately, that was all done in a hammock.

Beach Bumming our way down the coast

After being on Isla Mujeres for a couple days, we decided we had snorkeled all that could be snorkeled and were going to go down to Cozamel.  Cozamel is world famous for scuba diving, so Brannan was excited to get down there. We took a bus down the coast to Playa del Carmen, about 1 hour trip from Cancun, and then a 45 minute ferry ride out to the island of Cozamel.

On our ferry ride, we were entertained by a local band that played all the stereotypical classics, such as "La Bamba" and La Cucaracha"

Leaving Playa del Carmen behind us

Cozamel is a cruise ship port, so there were always 2 new cities ships docked every day while we were there.  The whole main strip of the ocean front was crazy commercialism: jewelry stores, clubs, cars, clothes... everything you could want to buy if you were coming ashore for a couple hours.  But if you walked down towards the ferry port where we came in, the shops were owned by guys in flip flops and the restaurants were more authentic.
And if you went past THAT, you got to Mexico!  We stayed in a hostel that was just past all the shops, and the surrounding neighborhoods had people going about their regular lives.

Our hostel had hammocks! (sigh...)

The main strip at sunset, with the cruise ships getting ready to head out to sea

After the cruise ships left the streets looked like this by 6pm:

H-- Hello?....*crickets*

We took a diving/snorkeling tour while we were there.  Brannan went diving and I rode along in the boat and jumped out to snorkel around while the divers went down. (I got scuba certified while we were in Thailand, but decided that it made me way too anxious and I just didn't like it!)  While snorkeling, I was going along a reef that dropped off like a cliff. Waaaay down below me next to the reef I saw 4-5 sharks! And later, I was swimming along behind a tour group. One of the guys dove down and picked up an octopus which was squirming in his hand while he brought it up to show his friends. When he was taking it back down to the bottom, it inked a huge black cloud all around him!  I was laughing through my snorkel tube.
But Brannan said he saw some really big crabs while he was diving.  So that's cool too. 

We found that Cozumel had some beaches on the other side of the island, but we didn't have a car at this point. So after getting our scuba fix, we left for the mainland a few days later.

Back to Playa del Carmen for some Beach Nachos, and other stuff. Mostly nachos.

Oh and Nutella churros.

We ended up staying in a hostel that was owned by an American guy about our age from Washington. It was so fun to hang out and talk to him and the other people staying there. Everyone seemed late 20's early 30's and were from all over the world, so we got to talk about cool places they had been, and about their home countries.

We were told to go see the ruins at Coba, so our hostel owner helped us book a tour that took you to some cenotes (underwater caves) and to see Coba.  Best. Day. Ever. First we went to 3 different cenotes and swam around for most of the morning. I'll let the pictures say the rest.

This one was called Tortuga (Turtle) Cenote because the island in the middle looks like a turtle.

Right behind our heads is a cave entrance that our guide took us into with a flashlight. We swam through this dark cave single file and came out around the corner. So cool!

These cenotes were "old" because they were all opened up like a big swimming hole. "New" cenotes have smaller openings in the ground and are huge underground caverns filled with water.We'll get to some of those later in our trip. They all have freshwater in them because it comes up from underground. Super refreshing on a hot, humid day.

Next, we went to Coba to see the Mayan ruins. This was one of the only ruins left that you can CLIMB on!  How awesome is that.

We walked around and looked at some crumbly old buildings first,

Then we rented some bikes and rode them about a mile through the jungle to the grand pyramid

That is one steep sucker

What a view!

It was an awesome and exhausting day. But it was all worth it because on the bus right back to Playa, they played 80's rock music videos for us on the TVs. Rad.

Mexi-Beasleys - a post by Brannan

At long last, our international travels have resumed!  We recently took an awesome trip to Mexico, specifically the Yucatan Peninsula, which is like the Florida of Mexico (as I understand it).

Pictured: fortnight vacation perfection

Two weeks was just about perfect, we were able to see and do just about everything we wanted, (SPOILER ALERT) with the exception of Merida, which we felt like we could just move to.

We flew into Cancun, the spring break capital of the world, which meant that we immediately left Cancun because that's not really our thing.  I think we made the right choice.

This is our thing...

SOOOOOOOO NOT our thing

Right away we knew we'd made the right choice.  Isla Mujeres, like most islands, is way laid back, calm, and small.  The entire downtown is walkable in 10 minutes, and the food was amazing.  This part of Mexico is justifiably world famous, Europeans especially love it!  As a result, on our first night there we ate amazing authentic italian food on outdoor tables on the street, to the sweet dulcet tones of wandering mariachi bands.  Ahhhh just like Rome...mostly.  It was a cool experience though, one of those real "We're in a foreign country!" wake-up moments.

The next day we woke up, had a delicious mexican breakfast (rice, beans, tortillas, salsa), and booked a snorkel tour.  Had to get into the water!  On the way to the snorkel sites, we passed this marvelous vessel:

Yarrrrr - there she blows!

Of course I suggested that we should board and take her as she was probably manned by landlubbers, and asked that Melanie call me "Admiral Brannan", but we had some awesome, unphotographical snorkeling to do.  The water was amazingly clear, and our first site was the underwater museum, which is a 1/2 mile square where the decision was made to sink a bunch of concrete statues of people in like 30 ft of water, like so:

Hmmmmm

It was a really long swim, and kinda strange, but we did see a sea turtle, which is always AWESOME!  and afterwards they took us to a resort beach, where our captain and snorkel leader prepared us some delicious fresh fried fish.  Afterwards we went to the lighthouse drift site, which was much more to our liking.  The water was only approx. 10 ft deep, and the coral was awesome.  It was really interesting because the boat dropped us off and the current just carried us along over top of the coral, no swimming involved!  We saw huge grouper and barracuda (3-4ft long, huge suckers!) and I was more interested in chasing them than they were in us.  The drift ended up around the lighthouse, with all sorts of fish in the corals.  Afterwards we wandered around the island, eventually ending up at the beautiful North Beach around sunset.

Not to bad for a January 21st!