Tulum, Mexico
September 2010
Louise left for Cancun a day before I did, planning to meet me at the airport when I arrived the next day. (It’s small. We won’t have any trouble finding each other………) I spent about an hour walking along the front of my terminal, from the arrival area to the departure area, with loads of people offering taxi services, to which I kept replying that I was waiting for my friend. Finally one guy told me that there were 3 terminals and he suspected she was waiting at a different one. He offered to help me call her and took me inside the terminal to a bank of phones. (I didn’t have any pesos and didn’t think about using a charge card in a phone. Shows how out-of-touch I am!)We tried both her Danish cell phone which was supposed to work in Mexico and her US cell phone which was not supposed to work in Mexico. Neither one worked. So he asked me to give him her full name, which I did, plus the description that she is tall and blonde – both stand-out attributes in Mexico.
So he jumped into a car and drove off. To return in about 5 minutes, with Louise in the car with him! He again offered to help us get a taxi, but we hadn’t decided where we wanted to go, so tipped him – after all, he had gone above and beyond in finding her and bringing her to me. Then we sat at a lunch counter, bought water, and looked at maps. After a short discussion, we decided to go to Tulum, expecting to go by bus.
Our little man informed us that the buses didn’t go from Tulum to the airport except Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays as at this time of year there aren’t enough tourists to make it worthwhile. We probably could have taken a taxi to the bus station in Cancun and gotten one there, but elected to take a taxi instead, which we did.
About 2 hours later, we arrived near Tulum. Our driver asked where we wanted to go and we told him we hadn’t booked a hotel but were looking for something peaceful near the water and not too expensive. So he drove us down this very narrow road and said “If you see something you like, let me know and I’ll stop.” (Or Spanish words to that effect…) We did. He did. And he waited while we inquired about rooms and prices. Which is how we found Piedra Escondida.
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| Beach at Piedra Escondida |
We also had our own small deck with a love seat facing the sea and two Adirondack chairs and a hammock on the side facing the restaurant. I didn’t take pictures of our room when we first arrived and after the first night, they folded the bedspreads up and tucked them away. The towel critters were made from our bath and hand towels. Note that the pretty headboard is painted on the wall! The décor on the bed critters is live flowers and leaves.
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| Rose's Bed Critter at Piedra Escondida |
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| Louise's Bed Critter at Piedra Escondida |
After lunch at what looked like a local lunch stop – 50 pesos set price sign on the wall, when we said we wanted to eat, they said come here, took us to the stove and said “This pot is chicken soup. This pot isn’t…” (Or at least that was what we understood with our limited Spanish!) We got something good to eat, accompanied by huge chalices of a fresh fruit drink. (Conversion rate is roughly 12 pesos to the dollar, so it was a little over $4 each for lunch!)
We had noticed that there was a “Mayan church” shown on the map. The cab driver described how to get there and that we would see a children’s play park and the church would be behind it. So we walked down the appropriate street and saw what looked to me like a backyard swing set. And behind that was a little plaza with a couple of crosses. So we figured we were in the right place. The entry of the church was a covered portico with Ministry of Tourism signs requesting that no pictures be taken. So we complied. The entry portico had 3 or 4 hammocks plus stone benches along the sides. There was also a shoe-sized ledge on which there were shoes, plus some shoes directly in front of the door. So we took off our shoes and went inside.
The walls of the “church” were bare. There were no windows, but there were benches along both side walls and two doors open to the outside further along on the side walls. Plus a door opposite the one we entered which opened into a very dark room. At the door into the darkness was an older man – barefoot and shirtless – sitting on a pretty blue chair and holding a stick that at first I took to be a cane. But on looking more closely, it didn’t look like it could possibly support any weight.
There was chanting coming from inside the dark room, so we sat on a side bench to wait for whoever was chanting to finish and come out. He didn’t. He was like the energizer bunny of chanters. He just kept going and going. After a while, a young couple with a tiny baby came out of the dark room and sat on the bench on the opposite wall from us. And the man kept chanting, and occasionally ringing a bell. Once in a while were a few Catholic sounding words in Spanish, but mostly I couldn’t understand what he was saying.
After another while, a man in about his 40s came in, dressed in jeans with fancy stitching on the pockets, bare feet, and a muscle shirt, with an improbable (for Mexico) shade of orange hair. He greeted the old man at the dark door (man inside was still chanting…) and the old man stood up, handed over his stick and left. So the stick might have been some sort of badge of office – or way to block people from going in if they tried… We eventually decided that the chanting stood a good chance of going on for days and gave up.
While we were putting our shoes back on – back out in the portico where the old man was reclining in a hammock and a younger man (possibly a boy, I didn’t take a good look) was in another hammock talking with him – an older woman came out with the baby. Louise attempted to ask if the baby was being baptized, but neither of us knew the right words, so she tried to ask if the baby was being named that day, but it might be that she actually asked if it was the baby’s name day. In any case, the answer was yes. We chatted brokenly some more and found that the baby was named Lucinda and was 2 months old. And having put our shoes back on, went in search of bottled water to buy and a taxi to take us back to Piedra Escondida.
Once we got back, we changed into our bathing suits and Louise went into the water, where she found out that, as we had suspected, Piedra Escondida means hidden stone. The sandy beach was actually brain coral once you got into the water. It was the same color as the sand, so you couldn’t see the stones, but could easily find them with your feet. So although the water was wonderful, the footing was really hard – pun intended.
The following morning, I got to enjoy the sunrise and the morning fly-by of frigate birds and pelicans. The first morning, there was a formation of 3 frigate birds who went by from my right to my left, disappearing out of sight and then returning from the right again. The second morning, the fly-by was 3 frigate birds in formation, 3 pelicans, in formation, followed by 4 more frigate birds. After two good-morning passes, the birds split up for solitary fishing. But it was amazing to see them soar into an almost gale-force wind, making good forward progress against the wind without appearing to move their wings at all!
When the maintenance guys showed up to rake the beach, they saw this:
One of them started digging carefully with a shovel. We asked what he was doing and he explained that the tracks were from a sea turtle who had come ashore to lay her eggs! (Note the little red sign in the second picture. It says “Sea turtle nest. Please be careful.”) He hit a rock and decided that the turtle had given up on that spot, so he moved to another location and uncovered a nest of eggs, digging with his hands once he thought he was down far enough.
Note that some of the eggs are a darker shade. They might be immature eggs, but I’m not sure. They were also a little dented and might have been laid in August. Again, my Spanish is not quite up to speed…
Breakfast was included with our room price and was eaten out under a pergola unless it rained. First morning we finished breakfast indoors; second morning they didn’t even bother to set up outdoors. But the rain was always warm, so you didn’t mind getting wet. (It also helped that we were just able to walk across the beach in our bare feet for breakfast and no one said “No shoes, no shirt, no service!”)
We decided to get lunch at a taco stand across the street from our hotel. While we were there, it rained. (We had rain every day, but the showers, although intense, were usually short-lived.) So they let a tarp down from the front of the pergola (which was also tarp-covered) to keep the rain from blowing in on us.
Aren’t the chairs pretty? After this meal, we checked out of Piedra Escondido and took a taxi to Valladolid. But that’s another day’s writing…
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| Restaurant Rain Shelter |
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