Visiting Tulum: Flow of the Tropics

“I strongly believe that’s it’s only recently humanity has learned to replicate the mysticism nature so frequently creates to boggle us.” – Old Sean

Tropics Tour

I’m on a minor vacation binge.

This may seem rather odd, considering my place of residence is Cancun, a land of endless sun, white sand beaches and picturesque blue seas, but like anywhere in the world, a change of pace and fresh experiences are always nice.

My first miniature vacation was to the unassuming town of Puerto Morelos.  Located directly south of Cancun, this is a small shamble of a town, with a bustling little section of narrow coastline separated by a wide swamp.  The walk from the bus station to the beach is an easy half hour jaunt and entirely flat, making it one of the least strenuous treks of my young life.

That being said, the walk is plastered with warning signs for large reptiles, most notably crocodiles.  Dense mangrove roots cluster in from the sides, so I spent more time peering into the thicket than watching the clouds or enjoying the weather.

That being said, Puerto Morelos is a nice little area.  Not nearly as busy as Cancun, there’s a series of expensive restaurants huddled on a single street.  The beach, not terribly impressive, is still nice with big clumps of bubbled seaweed squelching onto the shore during high tide.  Hotel employees are sent to rake up the daily seaweed to make the beach more appealing for tourists.

However, the main reason which most people go to Puerto Morelos is for scuba diving and snorkeling. 

Barrier Reef

Just off the coast of Puerto Morales is the world’s second largest barrier reef.  The Mesoamerican Barrier Reef’s northernmost point starts here. Numerous guided tours jetty people out into the ocean, where they can diver or snorkel amongst the marine biosphere.

I’m steadfastly dismissive of tours in general, but this one was nice.  Mostly because I was allowed to wander my own direction once in the water and being submerged tends to limit chatter anyway.  I initially wanted to rent equipment cheaply and swim alone or with a friend. While this is apparently allowed, I wasn’t able to find a confirmation until I had already arrived for my tour.

We skimmed across still waters towards a series of breaking waves, which swelled and shattered where the barrier reef nestled in the water.  Dark shapes, like craggy tree stumps occasionally appear over the sea foam, blocks of coral and stone that are risen just above the low-tide surfaces.

I waddled heroically in my flippers to our tiny vessel’s rail and chucked myself into the water, preferring to attach my life jacket to a rope around my waist rather than wear it the entire time. 

The rules of the reef were simple: Don’t touch and don’t swim vertically (lest the swirls from one’s feet disturbs the ocean floor).  Don’t wear chemical sunscreen or other potential reef-killers and if one can avoid drowning, that tends to make everyone’s life much easier.

Gracings of Sea Floors

As bubbles from the last wave dissipated, eyes locked onto an utterly alien world.  Large, placid fish of dull colors grazed on fields of sea grass with a lazy flip of their fins to stay in one spot.  Great, brown and green sponges of plants twisted up from the floor, jutting out in impossible directions.  More colorful than the reefs themselves were hoards of fish keeping a weary distance from the flailing humans above.  Aquatic acrobatics were needed to evade the pillars of coral, especially when the current dictated odd directions, and fair amounts of time was spent snaking across the gaps in the plant life.

The fish and other creatures were certainly the most eye-catching.  Some so bright they appeared neon, thin needles swimming through the sea in odd bursts of speed, perfectly divided fish, one half a canary yellow and the other a vivid purple, a great plate-like fish with virtually no side-fins but odd top and bottom dorsal fins which flexed the creature forward, proud crustaceans ignoring everything above, and great rounded boulders of living creatures all formed into a brain-like etching.

Unfortunately, while my phone is waterproof, I sincerely doubt it’s THAT waterproof, so I failed to take any photos.

The Tulum Tour

Following our hour in the surf, I wandered home for a day of rest in Cancun before heading off to my next trip: Tulum.

Tulum is a city even further south along the Yucatan’s Peninsula’s coast, the ancient site of a Mayan walled city overlooking their major port for Coba.  The ruins overlooking the cliffs and peering down at the famous beaches are impressive, though only open for a narrow portion of the day during COVID.

Regardless, I found a quiet hotel where I hunkered down for the night.  It was a unique lodging experience.

“Hello,” I said, to the lady at the counter of the cluttered and un-airconditioned convenience store.  “Hola, como estas?,” I corrected myself a moment later.

“Bien,” she replied before quickly speeding up her language past the rate I could follow.

I drew my phone out of my pocket and activated a translation feature along with an app.  “I’m looking for my hotel,” I tapped, “But I think I have the wrong address.”

She glanced at my phone and nodded sagely.  “Si, aqui.  Here,” she confirmed.

I glanced around the shop.  A tower of water bottles, still in their crates, sagged over my head.  There was a man behind me holding a pack of beer, humming tonelessly. 

“Hotel?” I confirmed doubtfully.

“Si,” she replied, and then ducked to look at her phone, shooing me into a corner while the next man made his purchase.  A few minutes later, I was led out of the building, around a few corners towards a gate wide enough to drive a truck.  The door mumbled open, lower bolt kicking gravel out of the way as I was led up three flights of stairs to a locked room.

“Hotel,” the woman confirmed again, pressing a key into my hand.  She patted me on the shoulder, pointed to the bike outside my room and wandered back downstairs.  I shouldered my way into the room, which was quite nice and overlooked a single tree where a bird squawked at me knowingly.

It would do. 

Bikes and Blunders

The rest of my day was spent on my new borrowed bike, pedaling along the main portions of the city, easily getting outpaced by the numerous cyclists of Tulum.  My bright yellow-basket machine took me far, towards more narrow beaches with great round rocks and down Tulum’s main tourist-restaurant street (307).

After exhausting my out-of-shape body, I settled in for the night, preparing for a bit of work before play the next day.

I had an unfortunate stint with the internet where I was due at work at 5 AM.  The internet simply didn’t function and I called the front desk, surprised to get an answer on the eighth ring. 

“Y’ello?” the voice yawned.  It was a twangy English.

“Hey, this is room 307,” I said.  “The internet isn’t working and I have work in half an hour.”

“Well, nobody’s there till eight,” the voice replied.  It was said kindly.

“If you tell me where the router is, I can unplug it,” I offered. 

Thus, the next thirty minutes of my morning were spent doing odd acrobatics throughout the hotel.  There were two routers on two floors that could potentially supply my room with a powerful bandwidth.  The routers were, for security reasons, plugged into the high ceilings and unreachable by anyone not professionally active in the NBA.

So I was sent hunting for a ladder found on the roof, which was stealthily carried down two flights of stairs.  All in a timely enough manner that I arrived to work somewhat on schedule.  And so my day began in earnest.

The Biosphere Bribe

After work was breakfast.  After breakfast was a call to my family back in the US.  And then it was time for entertainment.

Now, there are a lot of things to do in Tulum.  Many are interesting, some are expensive but all are pretty fun. 

However, I had my heart set on Siam Ka’an, the enormous biosphere located to the south of the city. The tours into the area were enormously expensive, so I decided to try my luck at entering as a solo hiker.

Getting there took some juggling, but if one takes a bus and actively tells the driver to stop at the Muyil Bus Station, one can simple trek into the Muyil Ruins, which serve as an entry towards the hiking trails of the biosphere.

Normally.

“Closed?” I asked the ranger, who had the gates bolted behind him.  “I thought it closed at 5?”

“We close early,” he replied.  “Coronavirus.  Close at 3.”

My face fell and the ranger gave me a friendly nudge.  “Come in 50 pesos,” he reminded me, pointing to the sign above the entrance.  At first, I thought he was saying I had saved money but his wink and grin enlightened me.

“Ah,” I clicked my tongue happily and fished out 50 pesos, a positively cute bribe. 

The ranger pointed with his entire palm towards an offshoot path circumventing some barbed wire. 

“Very quiet,” he nodded, the went back to his hut with a hammock, radio and snack. 

I nodded sagely and started on my trail.

Exploring the Biosphere

The Sian Ka’an Biosphere is a jungle-swamp of fresh-flowing water bubbling up from cenotes.  The woods are extremely dense, with great pools of bright leaves cluttering up entire networks. 

Large portions would be nigh impassible if not for a somewhat nerve-wracking boardwalk narrowly snaking through the jungle.  Falling from the boardwalk would be fine; the ground was less than a foot away.  But the creaking of wood lead me to stick close to the edges, where the structure was sturdiest.  In some areas, the water trickled audibly.  In others, it was so still that the jungle doubled, creating it’s own towers in the mirror-like surface. 

I kept silent as I wandered, thankful for the clutter of wind in the trees to mask most noises.  In the depths of the swamp I saw Mayan holdouts.  Some were stones carved into cliff walls, occasionally collapsed into water.  More impressive were the few standing ruins, which stood on solid ground in tall clearings.  I skirted these carefully, keeping close to the tree-line.  This was the Archeological Zone of Muyil.

Further into the forest was El Mirador Sian Ka’an.  Built along the creaking boardwalk this was a towering, rickety and bizarre observation post.  Splinters looked practically fuzzy on the wood and the swaying structure was so steep, the stairs functioned better when I treated them as a ladder.  The view of the tower peers over the canopy,  into the pale blue surface of Laguna de Muyil.  The Lagoon was connected to three others by a series of canals dug by ancient Mayan architects.

Wildlife, especially in the absence of all other people, was abundant.  A deer splashed away, it’s long legs dipping into the water.  Numerous birds flitted throughout the trail with criminal ease, while I fought bramble every fifth step.  A small creature, like a baby pig snuffled around an area I had just walked, which I later learned was a Collared Peccary.  There was also a supremely tiny raccoon which bundled along the trail.  I asked about it later (I didn’t know there were raccoons in Mexico) and I was told that there’s a species called the Cozumel Raccoon, though they’re critically endangered.  As such, I’m not entirely sure what I saw.  There were also enormous blue butterflies that were beyond vivid in narrow sunbeams. 

Near Death

Not quite finished, I continued walking along the back trails, walking on the outside of my foot for silence and twisting my body to slip by the scrapes of branches.  There was a sudden crackling and snapping noise, like a person moving through the brush.  Not wanting to be seen, I hunkered down in an shallow cave for a moment, but saw nothing for a pair of minutes and the sound vanished.

Confused, I continued along, but the sounds appeared again, this time closer.  I crouched, glancing about.  Again, the forest only swayed.  Perplexed once more, I walked three steps which likely saved my life.

When I started camping, my friends on the trail who were more experienced than me warned me against setting up a hammock or tent beneath a dead tree.  These trees, no matter how sturdy-looking, are known to drop enormous logs are random intervals, often known as windowmakers.

One such log slammed to the ground directly behind me, woodchips pattering the back of my leg. 

I danced forward awkwardly, grateful nobody was around to see my aborted skip and did the human thing.  I looked up.

Peering down at me were a pair of morbid, interested spider monkeys.  When they saw me looking, they made an odd chitter, shook branches at me before looping away.

To be perfectly frank, death by spider-monkey wouldn’t have been an upsetting way to go.  That and running into a tunnel painted onto a wall are the most cartoonish deaths I can imagine. 

However, I decided my luck was thinning and started to snake my way out of the jungle.  I managed to hitch a ride on the main road which took me nearly straight to the bus station, where I found dinner, ate an unholy amount of ice-cream (the debit card minimum transaction was 150 pesos, which translates into a lot of ice cream) and finally drove home. 

My vacations are over and I’m back in Cancun, working and studying for the next week.  But not much longer.  Soon, I’ll be moving to Playa Del Carmen, my  last residence in Mexico before my visa is up.

So until then,

Best regards and excellent trails,

Old Sean

Written January 16th 2021

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