Soaking Up The Yucatan
Trip Start
Jan 12, 2007
1
11
29
Trip End
Nov 19, 2007
Yucatan Penninsula,
Mexico
Monday, June 11, 2007
On this leg of the trip, we started seeing and socializing with yet another type of visitor to Mexico: for the first 2 months or so, we had hung with the RV crowd, we then got to know fellow language school attendees, and now we definitely find oursleves with the backpacking "travellers" crowd - mainly university students or couples in their 20s.
Highlights of the last 2 weeks or so:
-the Mayan villages on the road from Campeche to the Uxmal ruins. The homes here were adobe walled/thatched grass roof numbers, the women still wore their traditional garb (white dresses called "huilaches") and we saw a different side of Mexico.
-Hotel Trinidad in Merida, which is also an art gallery. The space itself is a converted newspaper office, consisting of 3 or 4 originally distinct buildings fused together, with hallways (indoor and outdoor) going here, stairways going there, and rooms in the strangest places throughout. Then every square inch of the place is covered in great art.
-Cancun: We always get a little giddy anticipating the glitz and glamour of the big resort cities and Cancun, which neither of us had been to before, didn't disappoint.
01. Streets of Campeche
We stayed in the city centre, about a 10 minute drive from the hotel zone and the beaches, at a $35/night place with A/C, a kitchenette, cable TV and toilet paper wrapped around the toilet. The beach fatigue lifted and we spent a perfect day on the beach in front of a hotel that was damaged by the hurricane on 2005. Another night we got in our "resort swim", at one of the nicer hotels on the strip, taking advantage of their private beach at sunset.-Cancun was the most difficult city to drive in yet: heavy traffic, lots of round-abouts, no lines on the road, and cops on every corner waiting to pounce. And sure enough, on our way to Wal-Mart, we made what was deemed to be an illegal u-turn by a passing cop (u-turns are normally legal but we had chosen the wrong gap in the meridian). Adrienne pleaded our case using the "we always drive the speed limit and there were no signs" approach, while I let the cop know that "we live in our van and are on a tight budget". For some reason, after about 15 minutes, our pleas worked and he gave up. We drove away giving each other subtle high-fives.
-Tulum: When Ades and I day-tripped to Tulum last year (we were in the area with my family) we couldn't understand why there was so much hype about the place. It seemed a bit desolete and run-down (in retrospect, it probably hadn't had a chance yet to recover from the hurricane). This time around, however, we could explore the area more thoroughly and we are converts: the spareley populated whitest-of-white beaches coupled with the bluest-of-blue waters make it a dream destination.
02. Cathedral, Campeche
We spent the first 2 nights in one of the dozens and dozens of cabana hotels on the beach, then camped the last night about 50 meters from the beach in a restaurant parking lot. The campsite was about a 15 minute walk from the Tulum ruins and while the ruins thmselves are not that impressive, in this case it is all about location, location, location, as they sit perched above some stunning beaches. Tulum was the first stop on the trip where I wasn't sure I was ready to leave when we did. -the soft-sand, flat beaches of Tulum make ideal conditions for a smashball tournie.
Lowlights:
-the "campsite" at Chichen Iza. We were pretty happy to find an upscale pool to cool off in after a hot day of driving, and we spent a very releaxing afternoon/evening doing just that. However, the campsite itself was really the front lawn of the hotel and was about 10 meters from what is obviously a popular road for overnight truckers. No sleep that night.
- at the Uxmal ruins they put on an evening "light and sound" show set against the pyramids, and this was the main reason we decided to spend the night close to there. However, after we handed over our money we found out that the English translation system wasn't working that night and so we barely understood a lick of it (those Spanish lessons felt like a long time ago. Adrienne was searching high and low for the customer comment cards, but they were nowhere to be found.
Not sure what to make of it:
- the ruins at Chichen Iza are some of the best preserved ruins in Mexico. However, they are also overrun with tourists because of their proximity to Cancun and Merida, and it is probably becasue of this heavy traffic that the public is not allowed to climb on them. However, the alarm was set early that morning and we were the first ones through the gate, having the place pretty much to ourselves for the first hour. By the time we left, there were 8 tour buses and a few dozen cars in parking lot.
- on the narrow 2-lane raod from Tulum to Chetumul we at some point entered into a butterfly "wind tunnel", and were absolutley surrounded by butterflies for several kilometeres (which neither of us remember seeing since we were kids). Many ended up stuck to the windshield as "souvenirs".
