Finding Tulum

Our first morning in Tulum we woke up in our hot tents, unzipped our doorway, and wandered out to the street that runs through Zona Hotelera in Tulum. We passed lots of long, lithe white people wearing expensive clothes. We saw lots of signs in English advertising things I like ("yoga! smoothies! cleanses! beautiful clothes!") but didn't necessarily expect to find written in English in a seaside Mexican town. I mean, I'd heard Tulum had a long history of Americans traveling to do yoga but I didn't think it had been annexed by Malibu...

I was getting a little salty. This is not unusual for me early in travel. I have a weird habit of feeling unclear and not super comfortable arriving in a new place. Then, something opens and I fall in love.

Kevin and I decided to go into town to see if we could actually see residential neighborhoods and schools and churches and evidence that we hadn't landed in some weird outlier. The taxi sped us up the highway to town proper. He spoke Spanish (amazing!). We saw actual people living actual lives. Things got dirtier and more real. He said people lived this far (a car or bike ride) from the beach because they actually know this environment. It's safer to give the sea some space.

As we thanked the taxi and exited, we found a little garden restaurant. We settled in to begin hunting for a place to stay in town. Tulum was beginning to reveal itself.

We got our game plan together. Our belongings were safely stored at our airbnb in Zona Hotelera so we were unencumbered to walk around town and see if there was a hotel we could reserve for the upcoming few nights. We probably walked in and out of 8 places but it was actually fun. In each setting we saw other possibilities of passing our time. We talked to people and got suggestions and ideas. Ultimately, we found two places on the outskirts of town that were affordable, could accommodate us, and felt good. We booked them and decided that our time in town would be base camp for exploring the wider Yucatan peninsula.

We call the art of figuring it out as you go "Guerilla Vacationing"

I started to feel like I had a sense of where I was. Tulum has three zones: Pueblo (the town), Zona Hotelera (the fancy), and Zona Arqueologia (pretty great, we'll get to that). Zona Hotelera is the concentration of resorts on a gorgeous strip of soft beach. Again, if you have a weekend free and want to be hot and happy, go! This is where we landed in our little camp site.

Pueblo is where people actually live. There are neighborhoods and permaculture farms and Indigenous community projects and hipster coffee shops and poverty and wealth and international schools and dirt and it kind of feels like a truck stop because of the highway running through. I love it. It's really weird and it's really wonderful. You drive or bike in any direction and there's a cenote. You can bike to public access spots at the beach. There are Mayan ruins and the streets are named for astrology and esotericism.

Zona Arqueologia is the quieter, less developed, more publicly accessible part of the beach leading up to the Mayan ruins. It's lovely but it is a drive or bike ride from town.

I'm starting to learn the value of secrets and privacy. Tulum felt like a place that knows that lesson. The cards you hold. What you reveal.