Riviera Maya – Are You For SCUBA?

December 1 – 10, 2017

If you don’t get the reference in the title, watch the clip and then make sure you watch Along Came Polly, it’s a classic. While I’m definitely trying to keep to a strict budget ($1,000 per month) while on this trip, I knew that I’d want to have flexibility for SCUBA, as it’s something I’ve been doing for 14 years, but haven’t had the opportunity to do consistently. That was the purpose of flying over to the eastern coast of Mexico, and for making an easy entry point to Guatemala, where I knew I’d be meeting up with Sarah’s brother and sister in mid-December (who happened to be vacationing there together). This is going to be a combo-post, taking in my time in Cancun, Playa del Carmen, and Tulum from 12/1-12/10, when I left for Guatemala.

Cancun

While many backpackers skip Cancun entirely because of its highly touristic nature and expense / lack of hostels, I had heard from some folks that there was a really cool dive site off of Isla Mujeres (opposite Cancun) called MUSA, an underwater museum / exhibition of statues that artists made and sunk in 2009. Now, 8 years later, these statues are covered in coral and wildlife, and would make for a surreal dive. When I looked up photos of the place, I was hooked.

I arrived late on 12/1 into the airport and got the ADO bus into the city center, where my gracious Couchsurfing host, Julian, offered to swoop me and go back to his apartment. I was really happy to be surfing here since it’s so expensive, and it would help offset the cost of the SCUBA a bit. Julian was in his 40s and lived with a roommate in a condo apartment near the center. I slept on a cot in his room, but was mostly just happy to have a nice hot shower and it not be freezing when I got out, like in San Cristobal.

The next morning, he made breakfast of eggs and some salchicha. I had forgotten to mention to him that I was eating vegetarian, plus, I wasn’t mad about having a hearty breakfast before my dives that afternoon. I also shared some of my natural / homemade “Nutella” spread that I brought from Mazunte, affectionately called Mazuntella, and we got to know each other a bit. His whole family lives in Cancun, and he’s lived there for 25 years. He had lots of stories about how much the place has changed in that time. He works for a hotel taking reservations in Playa del Carmen, meaning he commutes 1.5 hrs each way 6 days a week. I happened to have caught him on his day off, so I was even more grateful that he took me in. I took a taxi from the apartment to the designated “zona hotelera” where I got settled with SCUBA Diving Cancun, the company I chose based on some TripAdvisor reviews (so essential when most places don’t have websites).

The first dive was going to be the MUSA dive, and I was stoked. The water was a comfortable 80 F, but I was stupid and didn’t insist on renting a wetsuit. Although 80 degrees sounds nice, but after 45 minutes, you get cold if you’re not at least wearing a shorty (half-suit). The only way to describe this underwater museum is eerie. As you’ll see in the photos, it’s a lot of groupings of life-sized statues of people with blank expressions. To see that on land would be weird enough, but underwater, where all you can hear is your breathing, and there are pieces of seaweed and coral hanging off of odd places on these statues, it was nothing short of bizarre. Besides the groupings of people statues, there was also a concrete model of a VW Beetle and then one of a man in a prostrate pose that we saw, but my GoPro gave out before we got there.

The second dive was a pretty standard reef dive, which in Cancun, is not really their specialty (see: Cozumel). The other frustrating part was that we had a few divers who were getting certified on the boat, which means that you can’t go as deep (since they’re not yet certified), and they generally are shorter because the less-experienced divers aren’t as good at monitoring and stabilizing their air consumption. All that said, a “sub-par” dive in Cancun, is still composed of nearly 60 minutes of bliss underwater with coral and fish that would astound anybody. I decided to stay for dinner in Cancun before heading down to Playa, and headed to the Mercado 28 where they sell lots of artisanal stuff, plus have lots of outdoor restaurants. I finally relented to one of the many people hawking their restaurants and sat down to a delicious veggie meal of grilled nopal (cactus) on top of a bed of the standard Mexican cuisine – thick tortilla, beans, veggies, sour cream, and queso fresco. It was exactly the hefty meal I needed after a day of diving, which always manages to zap the energy – something with the nitrogen in your blood, but also just being out in the sun and hauling the equipment all day. Julian was kind enough to let me wash up at his place before I left, and he even drove me to the bus station again, where I boarded one of the hourly buses to Playa del Carmen, about an hour’s drive south along the coast.

Playa del Carmen

Plays del Carmen, aka “Playa”, is just a weird place to end up. It’s equal parts Cancun, Vegas, Disney Land and bougie shopping, all in a small town about 50 square blocks. I arrived late in the evening and the amount of bustle, neon t-shirts and cigar shops was only outdone by the mix of Israeli backpackers, bachelorette parties and older white folks on vacation. It was a stark reminder that I was there with a purpose – dive the cenotes. Cenotes are underground caves and caverns that boast some of the clearest visibility and coolest formations on Earth. See this Planet Earth clip about it. All that said, the beach was quite beautiful, albeit a huge day-party scene, and the sunrise was fantastic (see my time-lapse video).

The hostel I stayed at, Enjoy Playa Hostel, was solid, with a nice ground floor courtyard, and a rooftop terrace with hammocks aplenty. It was billed as a party hostel, which since my last backpacking trip a few years ago, has become a standard term signifying loud music and lots of drunk people coming and going through the night (light sleepers beware). That said, the first couple nights were uneventful in that department. But then, there was one guy who, despite being very fit-looking, had a terrible snoring problem. Thankfully, he would arrive home after 4am so I didn’t have trouble getting to sleep, but the potency was undeniable. I even recorded some of it because I couldn’t believe how loud it was. I’ve been describing it as the sound of a dying animal mixed with the sound of someone making fake, egregious snoring sounds. Take a listen. Someone also then turned me on to wax earplugs (thanks for bringing me those, Sarah!), which make a pretty noticeable difference.

My Dutch friend Alie, from Mazunte, who I’d followed to San Cristobal, arrived after my first day and we decided to do a day of diving along the reef first, and then the next day go to cenotes. Alie wasn’t fully convinced she wanted to go, and we also wanted to test out the dive operator first (Phocea was great, highly recommend). The first dives were broadly great, but uneventful. We had to deal with some novice divers, but we saw a couple of sea turtles, lobsters and a few people saw a group of sharks, but they were too far away for me to notice. I was a bit frustrated because my GoPro shut off halfway through the dive, even though I had charged it the night before. I spent the afternoon unsuccessfully trying to track down a replacement, as my model was too old.

That afternoon I also got my first haircut. I always get a little nervous about haircuts – I only ever went to two people in the 6+ years I lived in NYC. This was no different, and I did some searching for a barber and found a couple I would check out. On my way out though, I found a little old woman on the corner of my block who offered half the price of the others. She was playing a telenovela and didn’t have a wait, so I jumped in the chair. My last international haircut was in 2013 at a super hipster barber shop in Chiang Mai, Thailand, by a guy who referred to himself as “X”. Not Mr. X, just X. He was cool, and the haircut went fine, but I felt a little more comfortable in this woman’s hands. We enjoyed our conversation, I learned some new vocabulary (both from her and the telenovela), and I was shorn, including a beard trim, for just 150p.

The following day was scheduled for the cenote dives. Quick primer on cenotes – they are huge sinkholes, formed by the collapse of limestone bedrock that exposes groundwater underneath. They’re known as being special because of not only the geological formations you see within the caves (stalactites, no stalagmites since nothing can drip), but also the unique way that light enters and plays around in the cavern (cavern = see sunlight / surface, cave = rock overhead). The above-linked Planet Earth episode is a great place to start, but you can also read more here. The Yucatan peninsula of Mexico has the most in the world, with something in the neighborhood of 2,000 cenotes in the small area. People often have found them in their backyard. It’s widely considered to be some of the best SCUBA in the world, and spoiler alert, it didn’t disappoint.

We were extra careful about the cold, because even though the air and ocean temperatures were in the high 80s, temps in the freshwater cenotes would be in the low 70s. Plus it’s a dark cave. The dive shop didn’t have 7mm suits, so we decided to get creative and don two 3mm wetsuits (great call, Alie!). Thankfully this wasn’t meant to be a very athletic dive, because I definitely felt encumbered. We were in a group of four divers, which is the maximum per cave-certified instructor / guide. We were joined by an 18-year old Aussie guy who’d just finished his dive instructor course, and a 26-year old American girl who was in the midst of her dive master training. The conversations we had in the pickup truck on the way into the jungle and throughout the day definitely made me start salivating to do a dive master course and start getting paid to do this.

We drove about 30 minutes south and west of Playa into the jungle to the Chac Mool cenotes, which were semi-privately run by a guy and his son. Unfortunately, this prohibited me from taking my camera, as the son was the official photographer and wouldn’t allow outsiders to take away his business. Sadly, his photos weren’t very many in the end, and for $60, our group decided to pass. However, I will say that this place was so incredible, that the photos you find on Google (here, here, and here) will accurately portray what we saw.

These dives were simply incredible and probably the best dives I’ve ever experienced, along with one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. The cenotes we dived weren’t very deep (max of 47 feet), allowing for greater air preservation. However, the benefit was that the light reached all the way down to the bottom because of the crystal clear water, which is generated mostly by rainfall, aquifers, and water that seeps through the limestone cave roof. The way the light plays off the water and the reflections from the trees above (remember, we’re in the jungle) was only surpassed by the tree roots that dropped a few meters into the water through the rock.

We went down as a group in single file, always allowing for some distance between the person in front of you so that you don’t kick up dirt, and also because it’s dark and you’re using a flashlight. We spent time in the cavern section (surface still visible) and the cave portion, where you’re completely covered. One really fantastic feature of some cenotes is a halocline (Wiki link), which is a layer of water where saltwater that seeps in from the ocean meets the freshwater of the cave. The depths of these layers vary, but the ones we saw were a couple of meters. The effect is that it creates a layer of blurry water, that ends up looking like a bed of fog on the ground, but it’s just an ILLUSION!

This was one of the craziest things I’ve ever experienced in terms of a visual stimulus. You let the person go ahead of you a few extra meters and they just disappear. Then, as you slowly enter the halocline, the water in front of you becomes blurry like tempered glass, almost like how the heat bends the air in the desert. Then you’re in a nearly complete fog-state, but you can see body parts of the person in front of you sticking out the bottom of the cline. Once you get through it, you can look back above you and see the next person’s shadow making their way through. There are no words to describe this, it’s just fantastic and any diver reading this needs to put it on the top of their dive list.

Chichen Itza

After some back and forth, I decided it was worth my time and money to visit Chichen Itza, which are some of the largest and best-preserved Mayan ruins. I’d seen plenty of ruins in the past, but when it’s a national treasure, you sort of don’t have a choice. I ended up booking a bus tour, not something I’d normally opt for, because I couldn’t find anyone to rent a car with. The main benefit of renting a car in this situation was being able to arrive at the park when it opens, and getting time to yourself before the hoards of people from the bus tours arrive. I was informed that my bus tour would leave early in the morning and arrive to the ruins by mid-morning. Unfortunately, this bit of information was wrong, and we ended up not getting there until mid-afternoon when both the sun and tourist population are at their highest. Initially, I was frustrated by this, but quickly I was able to subside this – there was literally nothing I could do to change it, so I practiced some present moment gratitude and decided to enjoy the day to its fullest regardless.

My overall impression of the ruins is that they are magnificent. Thinking about how people built such remarkable structures 1,000+ years ago bends my mind. That said, it felt a lot like Disney, with tons of vendors hawking random goods, tons and tons of tourists, and even more selfie sticks.

While photos of the main temple make it look like it has evenly sized stairs, it turns out to be an illusion, whereby the steps at the bottom are the smallest, and at the top the steepest to create the image that they are equal. Another fun fact is that there are 91 steps on each of the four sides, plus the temple mount at the top, creating a total of 365, one for each day of the year. Further, on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, the sun strikes the sides of the stairs in such a way that it creates a shadow of a serpent slithering down, an homage to the Mayan serpent-god Kulkulkan. Apparently, this draws hundreds of thousands of people every six months to the ruins to watch. One of the other main features our guide took us to was the ball court, which was quite huge. The sport involves using your hips to bounce and pass a hard rock / ball around a court. Apparently, the winning team would get to choose someone to sacrifice to the gods, and often, as it is quite an honor, the star player of the winning team would volunteer to do this.

Tulum

I stayed a final night in Playa, as it was cheaper than Tulum, and I knew that after getting back from the Chichen Itza tour at 8pm, I’d probably not want to schlep down to Tulum and settle into a hostel. I ended up arriving in the morning instead and chilling out the whole day working on photos and other internet-related minutiae. I stayed at the DayTripper Hostel, which was really fantastic. Great vibes of people, good social-but-not-obnoxious atmosphere, rooftop common areas, and dorm beds with curtains, reading lights and power outlets. It’s really the small things that make the hostel, and this one nailed it.

I spent the next day on the beach, which was pristine and super calm. It felt good to be back on the beach after a couple of weeks of “city” travels and a day to just read and relax. My friend Alie ended up coming down for a couple of days and staying in the same place, so we had a nice reunion and assembled a crew for a few games of Spades, and an outdoor movie night nearby with a showing of The English Patient.

The following day we took a little trip up the highway towards Playa to a beach called Akumal (colectivo fare = 30p). This was known for the ability to snorkel for free with lots of sea turtles. Turns out that they’re very strict about a very specific section of the beach – requiring life vests, rented snorkel gear, and paying for a local guide. However, we’d gotten intel that if you just walk a little past this area, it’s an open beach, where you can still swim with the turtles sans restrictions. We opted for that and were treated to a beautiful snorkel jaunt full of turtles and colorful coral. After, we settled for a bit of bougie resort restaurant lunch – the BBQ ribs that our friend Christie had looked delicious. I picked up a bottle of habañero sauce at the local OXXO (convenience store), and we made our way back to Tulum.

This is probably a good time to emphasize how tasty the food is in Mexico, and particularly, Tulum was a treat. Writing this from Ecuador currently, I can explain to you my Theory Of Western Hemisphere Tastiness, whereby the further away from Mexico you are, the less flavorful and tasty the food is. Ecuador is a bit of an exception, but still, I knew that I would be needing some hot sauce on-demand as I wound through Central and more so, South America. The highlights in Tulum were some of the best tacos and tostadas I’ve ever had at a little cafeteria restaurant by the bus station (link) where the tacos were 4p each!! Additionally, one night we went out from the hostel to celebrate the last night of one of the volunteers’ trip and I got a late night burrito (also pictured below), that was just incredible. Ever since my days in finance wolfing down Chipotle burritos in Midtown every other day, I’d shied away from them, even when visiting California (in favor of tacos). But, this might bring me back to the dark side.

Overall, I felt Tulum was a bit tough as a backpacker because most of the fantastically beautiful photos you see are directly on the beach, where only the expensive resorts and boutique hotels lie. I had planned on going to a recommended juice / smoothie place on the beach, but turns out their acai bowls rivaled NYC prices, so I had to pass. That said, it was quite beautiful and tranquil, though the town itself doesn’t have a ton to write home about. I had a great few days relaxing before heading into Guatemala, which was sure to be more active, and met some wonderful people along the way.

In fact, on my way out of the hostel, I was talking to one of the volunteers Felipe. He did a walk across the southwest US for several months, and we just got to talking about life and the universe and compassion. He gave me a really lovely string bracelet, which I unfortunately lost that night on the bus, but he says he’s writing a book about his experiences, so hopefully I can share that some time. It just reinforces for me how many beautiful and truly interesting people there are to meet in the world, even in your own backyard. You just need to keep your eyes open for it and ask the right questions, beyond the typical “where are you going? where did you come from?” routine.

I left Tulum late on the 10th to head south to Guatemala. It would be my first land border crossing in a few years, and doing so overnight always leads to something interesting, so stay tuned.