Tulum by bike
Welcome to the Caribbean!
Although we are already back in Germany, we don’t want to deprive you from our impressions of the last stops of our tour. We were very much looking forward to arrive in Tulum as it was the first place for us to see the Caribbean coast! Some years ago Tulum was still a fishing village but over the last few years more and more visitors have been drawn to its beautiful Caribbean beaches. When we arrived in Tulum we recognized we would need a bicycle as the city is divided in three parts. There is the city center (where our AirBnb was located), a beach zone and a hotel zone.
Unfortunately we realized that Tulum is not really suitable as a destination for low-budget backpackers. The coast at the hotel zone consists of private beaches that only belong to specific hotels or beachclubs so we were not able to visit those beaches. There is one public beach, the Playa Paraíso, which is fantastically beautiful. Although the water is not very clear there, it is even warmer than at the Gulf of Mexico. Unlike the other Mexican beaches we visited there is an entrance fee to get there. Tulum seems to be something like the Instagram capital of Central America. Even though it was a bit funny watching all the people trying to get the best photos of theirselfs, this is not surprising as the view from the coast is incredibly beautiful.
On our first day after arrival in Tulum we went to see the historic Maya ruins which are located directly at the coast. After directing our bikes to the entrance of the park we recognized there are a lot more people visiting the ruins than we were used to from the other places we went to. We really liked the park with all the different plants and lots of iguanas crawling along the paths. As the Mayan culture is omnipresent in Yucatán, it was great to see their pyramids and temples and to try to imagine how these people lived before the Spanish invasion.
As it never gets boring with our frequent changing of accommodations in the different cities, we also made some new experiences with our AirBnb in Tulum. Although we knew that our accommodation was an old shipping container we did not know that it was a quarter of a shipping container. We thought we should maybe store our backpacks outside the room as it was not possible to move otherwise but as we spent the whole day outside it would not really matter. Later, we came back to the room and recognized some cockroaches running over the bed. On our trip we already experienced different kinds of accommodations including mould rooms, not-working toilets (by the way it’s not recommendable to get gastrointestinal problems there) and so on. But we recognized that this reached the point we cannot cope with. So we wrote our AirBnb host about the situation and he said we should send a photo of the cockroaches to him. Of course, in that moment all cockroaches were hiding from us. So Raphael spent some time crawling through the room looking for the cockroaches. We didn’t expect to ever be so happy about finding a cockroach and taking a photo of it (as a reward, we could change the room after that).
We also explored the city center of Tulum (as always, on our way searching for street food). In contrast to all other Mexican cities we saw Tulum does not really have a historical center, probably because it developed from a fisher’s village to a tourist highlight within only within a few years. The city center is full of restaurants, cafés and souvenir shops which all look really beautiful but less authentic than other places. But, after crossing a few streets we reached a part of the center where locals were meeting and selling street food. Overall happy, we enjoyed our last authentic Tacos of our trip.