Tulum

On our 3rd day in Mexico, we decided to take a trip with Best Day travel to the town of Tulum. Tulum is a cute little town a little bit over an hour away from where we are currently staying in Puerto Morelos. We had a tour guide named Juan Ramon who gave us a bit of history about the Mayans during our trek to Tulum. Let me tell you guys- he was REALLY excited to teach about the Mayan culture. Honestly, I really wasn’t all that interested in learning about the Mayans. I really just wanted to see the ruins and enjoy one of the top 10 beaches in the world.

The Mayan culture kind of lost my interest after the Mayan calendar end of the world debacle last year. Of course, I wasn’t going to be rude so I listened to his little history lesson. One tidbit I learned about the Mayans is that they celebrate birthdays every 260 days. At first I was like that’s really cool. I wouldn’t mind doing that. Then I realized that means I would be 41 years old according to this concept and I cancelled that thought really quickly. I thought the Mayans were of Spanish descent but it turns out that they are descendants of the Mongolian people.

The Mayans also identified the upper class citizens by their teeth. The upper echelon put jewels in their teeth. They were trendsetter…they rocked the first set of grills. (Don’t hold me to that… there may have been some other crazy people putting jewels in their teeth before them.) I am curious to know if they had some form of anesthesia back in the day. I had a root canal done last year and the anesthesia did not work. It was quite painful. I couldn’t imagine allowing someone to drill a hole in all my teeth to put jewels in it without them being numb! I would just have to be a lower class Mayan forever.

We arrived in Tulum around 10 am. It was pretty hot. Much hotter than I remember it being on the other 2 days. We had to walk about a half mile to get to the entrance gate for the archaeological site.

Once we got to the gate, there was a group of Mexican children waiting. They were sweet. They were curious about where we were from and they kept laughing at me swatting this bug that kept flying around my head. My husband kept trying to remind me that we were in the jungle but I wasn’t trying to hear that.

The lush green tropical landscape of Tulum is absolutely breathtaking. I wish my yard could be as beautiful!

The ruins were pretty nice. I love architecture so they captured my attention. There was a group of workers restoring one of the ruin’s foundation.

Tulum is a smaller Mayan ruin site. The most famous Mayan ruins are Chichen Itza located in Tinum, Yucatan Mexico which was a 3 hr trip from where we were staying.

By the time we walked halfway around the site, it was blazing hot! My hubby started feeling overheated. I knew how to cure that. Head for the beach!!

Let me just tell you, these pictures don’t do this beach any justice. It is gorgeous. The water is warm and it has a very strong current that pushes you out to shore and then pulls you back in! I can’t swim so I tried to make sure I stayed closer to shore. There was a lifeguard present but he didn’t seem to be to observant.

While my hubby was cooling off and enjoying the water, I was taking refuge from the sun in a cave. That was until this creature came lurking…

These bad boys were everywhere! Luckily, we had a little chat and he agreed to go on about his business. He crawled into some little nook in the cave and then I was able to resume taking shelter in the cave. While sitting in the cave, a Colombian man kept asking if he could take a photo with me. I finally gave in and did it. He said he had never met an “Americana”. I could actually understand his Spanish!

After enjoying the water for about an hour, we decided we want to take one last trek around the site before meeting back up with our group and tour guide. A man was nice enough to take our photo.

There were also spider monkeys running around. That was the first time I saw them outside of the zoo.

After walking through the jungle to get back to the van, we were hot and tired. We decided to stop at a cute little general store to get a snack and drink before heading back to Puerto Morelos.

We were the last of our group to get dropped off at our hotel. We had planned to take the last tour to go horseback riding on the beach when we returned to the hotel but of course my vacation story would not be complete without a little rain. I am starting to think that rain clouds follow us when we are on vacation. Luckily it only rained twice during this trip. This afternoon particularly afternoon it decided to storm so we just headed back to our condo, cleaned sand out of unmentionable places, ordered room service, and relaxed until dinner later that evening. It was still a great day and now we have a reason to come back to Mexico!

Have you ever visited Tulum? Have you ever had rain put a wrench into your vacation plans? Let’s chat about it!