Tulum Too-rar-ay

Here we are in Belize City, 3 days after landing in Cancun, Mexico. It's been an eventful few days. Flying was a breeze, really easy and with no Delta raw sewage. Infact the much-maligned US airline was better than Qantas.

After an evening in the square at Ciudad de Cancun eating quesidillas while a clown entertained the crowd we crashed out before getting the bus to Tulum beach for the weekend.


Tulum Beach

It was great to return to Tulum, to start where I ended my last trip to Mexico 8 years ago. I thought we'd look for the place I stayed before but couldn't remember the name and the pouring rain meant we took the nearest affordable beach cabana to where the taxi dropped us. We had thought about a place called El Mirador but the taxi driver assured us it had closed 2 years ago.


View from our cabana

We were in a typical Mexican sand-floored, wood and concrete palm leaf thatched cabana right on the beach for 250 pesos. All it took as a left turn and a short walk and we were in the Caribbean. A quick look around suggested some things were a bit different and then the owner of the cabanas supplied the answer - Hurrican Wilma had hit this part of the Yucatan coast 2 years ago randomly decimating some cabanas while leaving others standing. Half of his were out of order while the others were fine and he hadn't the money to yet rebuild the ones he had lost. But where was the place I stayed before? I was sure it was only a little further along the beach towards the headland with the Mayan ruins. And there they were - or what was left of them. A few sticks, some rectangular depressions in the sand and lost of debris. The place I had stayed, and my memory at last caught up to tell me it was El Mirador, had been flattened by Wilma. The cabana I had shared with a German backpacker was a wall, a door and a place where rubbish collected.


Remains of the old place

We had met an American who lived in Isla de Mujeres who claimed that as it was the rainy season we would get an hour of rain each day at 3pm but that a low depression was moving south-west from Florida. How quickly we were to discover it was heading our way. The first day the rains came at mid-day and stayed for the rest of the day. Then the second held dry until 3pm but after a dawn downpour and then the rains came at midday on the 3rd day too. Each day we had a 3 or 4 hour window of sun to swim and sunbathe in before huge dark grey towering columns of clouds moved in from the sea like marauding armies crossing a plain. Spectacular to watch, bands of rain drenched everything in their paths. The first night we watched four lightning storms play themselves out silently behind different cloud banks, like the spaceships in Close Encounters silently communicating to each other. The light show was awesome. So were the gale force winds and sheets of rain. Our plans to go to Caye Caullker in Belize for a week or two of snorkelling were looking somewhat unlikely. This was simply reinforced reading a Mexican paper over a woman's shoulder. Even my limited Spanish could not hide the two pages of news about the low front that could turn into a tropical depression that was swinging in towards Belize and the Yucatan from the Caribbean. The news warned of two to three days of stormy weather. There wouldn't be a lot to see at sea.

So, we have hastily re-arranged our plans to head straight to the Peten jungle of northern Guatemala and start language school. The rainy season will be here for a few weeks so we may as well enjoy the mornings then go to afternoon language classes overlooking the jungle-cloaked lake Peten. Not a bad plan B. We can then go to the Cayes in December after volunteering when the rains should have passed, the waves dropped and the silts settled.

Tulum worked out as a great place to rest up after the flight. Highlights were of course swimming in the turquoise sea, lying on the fine white sand and enjoying some Caribbean heat. The storms have been great to watch and rain isn't so bad when its so warm you can still wander around in swimmers. Our cabana has been beautiful to wake up in, light drifting through the poles that make up the front wall. We have also been inadvertently entertained by someone who must have been Boss Hogg retired from trying to chase the Dukes of Hazard on holiday in Mexico. Loud, dang-gawd, Texan stereotypes live and breathe! There's a few Tulum photos on my flickr photostream - flickr stream

Now we have a sultry night ahead of us in a clapboard guest house near the waterfront in Belize City, from where i'm online via their wireless network, before catching the bus to Guatemala in the morning.