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:
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| A fine Chevy Aveo...oh la la!! |
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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:
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| That's more like it! |
We made the drive down to Tulum, which would end up being one of our favorite places. For starters:
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| "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!
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| 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:
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| It felt like the zombie apocalypse (or rapture if you prefer) - weird |
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| Beautiful! Coming soon to our travel wall! Also featured- my "new" $5 mexican "Oakley" sunglasses! |
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| All to ourselves! |
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| I think all archealogical sites should look like this! |
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| 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!
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| What's not to like? |
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| 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?
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| Railay, Thailand |
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| 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.
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