For our first full day in Tulum, we split our time between Tulum pueblo (the town) and Tulum playa (the beach). We woke up to the sound of birds and slightly chilly air - we didn't expect it to cool down so much at night, but we grabbed a blanket for the bed after the first cold sleep! After we woke up, we sat on the upstairs patio for a little while before we decided to start the day. The first thing we did was set out for coffee. I'd bookmarked a place before we came that had great reviews for coffee so we decided to check it out. A good decision! We ended up going there three times over the course of the week.
We sat out back in the garden with the banana trees and little lizards everywhere. The food was delicious! I had chilaquiles, which is kind of like...breakfast nachos with a sauce over it. We've had it here in Brooklyn before, but this one was probably tastier! Matt had huevos rancheros and we all shared a fresh fruit plate. Also, the coffee was perfect! After filling our bellies with delicious food, we made for the beach. Our apartment was great because it was on the eastern edge of town, so it was about a 10-minute walk into the center of town or a 20-minute bike ride to the beach. The whole way to the beach road, there's a nice wide bike path. "The beach" in Tulum is mostly lined with 'eco-chic' small hotels that all have bars and restaurants. There are a few public beaches, but we thought we should do the whole tropical-beach thing and get some drinks in the sand!
The beach was just as pretty as I'd imagined! The water was completely clear and so blue, the sand was lovely, the drinks were great (a bit expensive at $9 each - but we figured we were paying for the experience). I had my very first piña colada! I thought it was a pretty appropriate place to have my first one. We sat in a nice shaded cabana for a few hours.
(You can click on the panorama to make it bigger!)
When we had our fill of beach drinks, we rode back home...realizing on the way back that we'd been going downhill to the beach almost the whole time and our single-speed bikes required more work than we were expecting on the way home! Luckily, we had nothing to do (the best part of vacation) so we could relax on the patio before heading out for dinner! The tacos we had as an after-dinner snack last night? We decided to do a full-sized meal at the taqueria. Somehow, sitting at a table with a plastic table cloth in a covered alley between two buildings, eating tacos that are less than 50 cents each, at a place that doesn't even serve beer, with servers that let you muddle through elementary Spanish instead of speaking to you in their (probably better) English...was pretty much the exact experience I was hoping for in Mexico? Not that we were blazing a new trail or anything, there were plenty of visitors as well as locals, but it felt pretty normal. Or as normal as you can get in a fairly touristy town!
After dinner, we ended our first day at a mojito bar around the corner. They squeeze fresh sugarcane out front in an old VW bug! And they have live music every night (we went here three times, so that's verified!). And the drinks were 100pesos each (about $4.75). It seemed a cool mix of people - there was a lot of English and Spanish being spoken. The drinks were outstanding - I got the Azteca the first night, with prickly pear (not tuna!), mint, cactus, and lime. The perfect end to an amazing first day!
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