Inframundo: Tulum, Mexico & Surrounding Areas

Hello Ladies and Germs! I now present to you the long awaited next installment in my life in Mexico. On Saturday morning I got up, realized I’d not packed a few key things (like my swim suit) and shoved them into my overly full backpack. Not long after that, Chelsea’s mom picked me up and we went down to Los Arcos and met up with Diana and the rest of our Inframundo group (but Diana wasn’t actually coming with us).

Fourteen of us piled into the van with all our backpacks secured to the roof with bungee cords. Guillermo was our guide (who apparently is also the subaquatic archeology prof. So we went off down the road and stopped at an archeological site where it was reaaaaaallly hot (I think this was a day where the weather was supposed to be 112 according to google) and we actually rented bicycles and went through the place. After that, we went a little farther down the road and swam in a very cool cenote.

When it was time for the cenote to “close,” we all hopped back into the van and headed for our home base: Tulum. Our home for the next couple days were cabañas on the beach. It was a pretty nice set up, though we only had electricity from 7 PM to 6 AM and never hot water but it was good. In the afternoons it was only a short walk down to the actual ocean. Laurie and Megan slept in their hammocks and Chelsea and I slept in the twin beds.

In the morning, everything was very lax which was very nice and not what I expected. While we had a schedule everything wasn’t super rushed. We were treated to a breakfast of donuts and apple yogurt and then we got into the van and went to another archeological site. On the way there we were stopped by the police who thought Guillermo might have been running some sort of prostitution gig because there were what appeared to be only girls in the van and a male driver. But it was cool we convinced them that we were students and just on a trip.

This particular archeological-ruins site looked like something out of a movie like the secret garden or maybe even some deleted scenes for Pan’s Labyrinth. It was really beautiful. There were trees growing out the rock-work and everything looked untouched. I vaguely was expecting fairies…or at least CGI ones.

This was also the place I think where there was a very tall wooden watch tower. I climbed up it (after the wooden picnic table right next to it collapsed rather noisily), and it took you up above the tree cover. (I thought of you, Dad). It was quite a site.

This day I don’t think we went to a cenote, we just went back to camp early. We brought out our cloth to the beach and hung out there for awhile (with sunscreen). That evening we decided we would all go out to dinner as a group which was nice. We went to an Italian place in Tulum (and got stopped by the police again but I’m not sure what for this time) and my order was actually kind of forgotten…but eventually I got my food and it was all good.

The third day we went to (guess) another archeological site. This one though had the possibility of seeing animals. Well, we didn’t see any big ones, just a gigantic amount of mosquitoes. So that was rather unhappy, but Ariana taught me a song in german about mosquitoes. That was fun.

We were all glad when we finally left and we went to a magnificent cenote. There was a tree that I jumped off of on the ledge. There were quite a few people there and we explored a little cave first but it was really nice and pretty.

The next day we were apparently supposed to get up early but we weren’t informed of it. The schedule was going to involve going to Tulum (the ruins) before heading out back to Merida. Chelsea and I were actually kind of sick of seeing ruins though, so we opted out and decided to start our own part of the vacation right there. =)