Yucatán Peninsula Wrap – Part 1

I’ve hit a milestone in my travels and departed the Yucatán peninsula. Being in a new place really does help give perspective and clarity to how I just spent the past stretch of time, what I saw, what I learned, all the blog tagline verbs. So here I am to write about my experiences. To keep this post from getting too long, I’ll break it into two parts. The Yucatán Peninsula is home to 3 of Mexico’s states: Quintana Roo, Yucatán, and Campeche. I spent time in Quintana Roo and Yucatán. This post will just cover the Quintana Roo cities I stayed in: Tulum, Playa del Carmen and Cancun.

A quick note just to address what I think among very seasoned travelers is an obvious point that a portion will turn their nose up at. The cities I started off in were quite touristy. Quintana Roo is the most expensive state in México that notoriously caters very much to foreign travelers, especially Americans and Canadians. It’s home to the Riviera Maya, a famous strip of Caribbean coastline that has beautiful beaches and which attracts a lot of tourism. So if you’re looking for a journey through small towns in México that never see foreigners, this is not that. I also want to say that my experiences have spanned from spending time in a resort in Cancún to staying in a lady’s home in a local neighborhood in Mérida. So if you’re looking for exclusive tales of luxury travel, this is also not that. I’m a lady who managed to escape the Matrix and am taking life one day at a time, trying to build skills and figure out how to sustain a life that gives me freedom over my time and location on any given day. So no, I’m not roughin’ it, chasing adventure or working to appeal to anyone’s sense of what “travel” is. I’m just living my life and sharing what I thought and saw. Ok, that’s enough of that. Let’s get to Quintana Roooo.

Living in different places is shining a spotlight on what makes a place a good fit for me and since this post is also a journal of sorts to help me remember what I like about each place, I’m going to assign the icons below to each city to show what their strengths were to me. Please keep in mind this is my personal opinion and the experiences I happened to have. Any number of circumstances could have shifted even slightly to radically change my perceptions of these places and what I consider their strengths to be.

🍲Affordable, healthy food is extremely important to me because if I’m not eating well, my overall sense of well-being is in the gutter.

☀️Sunny, warm weather, that’s a check for all these places for sure. I will say moving inland had things a little dicey for me with most days peaking above 100F. Fun fact: did you know your elbows can sweat?

🏠Comfortable housing that’s affordable, safe, walkable, clean, spacious and well-designed. Walking is how I see a place and get the chance to interact with other people.

💪🏾Affordable and great place to work out. I’ve been focusing more on calisthenics this year because sometimes there are just no weights to lift. Plus, I think some calisthenics skills are just so cool and you won’t be able to tell me NOTHIN when I can do them, so enjoy humble Janee while you can.

This was my route:

First stop: Tulum (3 weeks) ☀️

I arrived in México on February 25 and landed in Tulum. I did a decent amount of research before-hand and was very well aware that Tulum is a hot-spot for vendors and even cops to do what they can to slice a little extra cheddar cheese off the tourists. Corruption abound, so you have to keep your wits about you. I still see people online complaining about the cops trying to extort them for money and cab drivers charging crazy amounts to travel very short distances. Here are the biggest tips I picked up, since, as one of my sisters once told me, I ain’t no chump. I think we should all not be chumps.

1. The ADO bus is very well-connected between airports and major cities and small towns throughout most of south/east México. I’ve been on 7 ADO buses and all of them have been clean, comfortable, have AC, and have been a breeze to travel on with my heavy luggage. They stow away your luggage in the under-carriage, so no need to worry about suitcases falling on your head. You can easily book and pay for your ticket online. It’s emailed to you right after booking and the driver will scan the QR code from your phone. They even accept PayPal!
2. Download the inDrive app for cheaper rides in Tulum. They don’t have Uber there, but inDrive lets you set the price you want to pay and drivers will either accept your bid or ignore it. You can raise your bid until someone accepts. You do have to pay the driver in cash though, so make sure you hit up an ATM and then a bank to get smaller change. Much much more affordable rides than taxis that pick you up off the street then ask for your firstborn once you’ve arrived to your destination.
3. Speaking of cash… I really shouldn’t have to say this as literally every article online talking about México travel says this, but make sure you keep a little cash (pesos) on you for taco stands, cold drink vendors, tips, and other small businesses that may not accept card. ATMs tend to spit out only big bills, so I recommend breaking them up at a bank. 20 and 50 peso notes are your friends. Also, try to stick with ATMs that are assigned to an actual bank. Apparently some ATMs are exclusively put there to skim your card info. BBVA, Santander, Banamex, Banorte and HSBC are some common reputable banks with ATMs around.

I already wrote a post on some of my time in Tulum, but looking back, what’s stuck for me is the heat, the way it felt natural and how it was easy to find relatively quiet areas that weren’t concrete jungle. That’s because it was mostly dirt roads throughout the neighborhoods outside of centro. Not very many parks, just one that was a 30 minute walk from my place that I made it to only once. I loved that it had an outdoor calisthenics gym, but I only went once. If I was staying in centro instead of La Veleta, I think I would’ve gone more and it would’ve shifted my experience in Tulum. Aside from the beach or patios at restaurants or cafes, I didn’t find too many places to relax outside. Tulum is the smallest town I spent time in and the energy there reflected it. I was honestly a little concerned for the local economy, as I can’t stress enough how empty the the town seemed sometimes, and it wasn’t even low-season yet. There was a lot of unfinished new construction, some nice new apartment buildings and lots of stray dogs and cats. There was a run club on Wednesdays in La Veleta that I’m kind of bummed I didn’t get the chance to join since I had other plans that day. Of course, people live in Tulum and so I did see people as I strayed from the tourist-centric strip. Kids walking from school, people just living their lives.

I only went to the beach 3 times for the 3 weeks I was there, surprisingly. Unless you’re staying in the hotel zone ($$$), getting to the beach takes about 15 minutes by car. The hotel zone is a long, narrow dirt road lined with shops, beach clubs, restaurants, cafes, long stretches without sidewalks and seemingly continuous traffic. I did not like the design or the accessibility of the beach in Tulum, to be honest. Many of the beaches were private and you had to pay for access or walk through a hotel and pretend like you belonged there. The one public beach I went to was pretty small and crowded. Also, all 3 of my visits to the beach had a lot of sargassum, which made getting into the water a lot less appealing anyway. So going to the beach really didn’t feel worth it to me. While in Tulum, my focus was mostly on integrating good daily habits into my life and learning how to use Davinci Resolve, an editing software I use for my YouTube videos. 👀Have you seen my YouTube videos?

Anyway with my priorities, the heat, and my desire to keep my expenses low, my days in Tulum weren’t exciting. Fine by me though because being exciting was not a priority, as you can see from the list above. Photos below.

[The formatting is weird and captions blur the bottom of the images, so I wanna call out the waffle photo below, that meal was BOMB. Gluten free cassava waffles from Nimai Café]

Second stop: Playa del Carmen (5 weeks) ☀️💪🏾🏠

Playa actually felt like home very quickly. I’m not even exaggerating – my very first day when I arrived and went out to walk around and check out the neighborhood/ get groceries, I met 3 different people, all of them walking up to me to talk or greeting me like they were excited to see me. One woman even invited me to her birthday party. There are a ton of English-speaking expats in PDC, which makes finding friends extremely easy if that’s what you’re looking for as an English-speaking visitor. There weren’t a ton of black people, but compared to everywhere else I’ve seen, Playa has a good amount of us.

Compared to Tulum, getting to the beach was a total breeze. In Playa, from what I could tell, all of the beaches are public and there is a ton of housing within a few blocks of the coastline. I could walk to 3 different beaches within 10 minutes from my place. That right there is exactly the kind of low-commitment beach chillin I can get with. Not that you need much at the beach, but if I had to go home to grab something or go put on more sunblock, it wasn’t a big deal to just stroll back home and get the thing.

I have to say, my favorite part about life in Playa had to be the deportiva. This park was utopian. Peak community-centered design. A track. Basketball courts. The coolest outdoor calisthenics gym. A little cafe. Friendly people everywhere to chat up. Every time I went, the place was bustling but not overly so. There were HIIT, yoga and dance classes. There were camps that had little kids running around and doing drills. Personal training sessions going on all over the place. You can tell Playa is a town where a lot of people prioritize health and fitness, so jumping into that scene was great. And even better, it didn’t have to cost money. I had my best workouts in México in Playa and spent $0. There was a great grocery store right next to the park too, which was just a 10-minute walk from my place. All free to use and very well utilized by the community. I could write an entire essay on the deportiva alone, but man I think you get it, that place captured my heart. The best part is that no matter what time of day you go, there are always people there, so it felt very safe. People would leave their stuff on the ground while they went to go run or work out. It was just great vibes.

While in Playa, I started an online web development boot camp and got myself into a great routine of waking up early (6-7am) to go work out at the deportiva before it got too hot outside. I’d go home, shower, have second breakfast and get into my web development course, writing or video editing. Some days I’d work from home, other days I wanted to go outside so I’d go to a nearby cafe, usually Ah Cacao, a cafe that specializes in chocolate drinks and snacks. They even had a chocolate tamal which was surprisingly good. PDC is full of digital nomads, so I’d be lucky to get a seat out on the patio where you could people-watch and engage in convos with passers-by. To be completely honest, I wasn’t in much of a social headspace while in Playa, so I didn’t spend too much time with other people. I didn’t want to spend money and I wanted to make sure I had all the time and mental capacity I needed to focus on what I wanted to do.

I got really lucky with my housing in Playa. There are several fb groups dedicated to helping people find short and long-term housing, subleases, etc. so while still in Tulum I posted that I was looking for an apartment for 1 month. Several people responded within an hour and one woman had an apartment to sublease urgently. We got on a video call so we could chat for a bit and she did a walkthrough of the apartment. Before noon, I was on the colectivo headed up to Playa to go check out the place in person and put down a deposit. By the end of the day (after a lot of back and forth about how best to mitigate risk), I returned to Tulum with the landlady’s copy of the key to the apartment and a signed contract in exchange for my deposit. The price was great and the apartment was luminous, clean and had a lot of outdoor space and a pool downstairs. The only con was that it was right next to Avenida Quinta (5th Avenue), a hmmm how do I say this – tacky pedestrian street that has a lot of restaurants/bars with very loud musical performances every night. In an attempt to appeal to the American/ Canadian ear, they went all out with the Tina Turner on their nightly set list 😂Amazingly, the loud music didn’t bother me and lulled me to sleep every night, even when I could hear 3 different bands clashing.

Overall, I ended up really enjoying my time in PDC. Even though I wasn’t committed to being social, I met really great people who were so welcoming and seemed to be genuinely friendly people. A woman who worked at a cafe I visited on the days I didn’t feel like Ah Cacao, a couple of guys I’d see at the gym regularly – one of whom gave me some great pull-up training tips, the other who dropped this gem on me when I asked him how he was at the gym every morning at 5:30 -“disciplina es la ultima forma de amor propio”…”discipline is the ultimate form of self-love”. I made so many random acquaintances- a guy who enjoyed swimming out in the ocean and who I’d run into at different beaches randomly, a couple of men I met walking around my first day, and a woman I met one night out at a restaurant. This woman, an American who has shaped her life beautifully, even offered to let me stay with her for a few days while I was between places after my sub-lease ended. I’m still so thankful to everyone for their kindness and sense of welcome and patience as I stumbled my way through conversations in Spanish. I can honestly see why so many people move to Playa from other parts of México and beyond. If you value sunlight, an active and healthy lifestyle, and lots of community groups and activities, the options are nearly endless whether you’re speaking Spanish or English.

Third stop (sort of): Cancún (3 days)

You know when you’re talking to friends and someone is randomly like, “hey, we should do this cool thing!” and then it never happens? Well don’t expect that nonsense from me and my sisters because we were texting one day when someone brought up the idea of a mini spring break vacay in Cancún and within the week, we had everything booked. This was a short trip, but super relaxing. We stayed at an all-inclusive resort – RIU Ventura – and had a great time. More on the resort later. My favorite part was all the food with no cooking or cleaning. Maddie’s was the unlimited drinks. Jasmine was relieved to have an easy and spontaneous break from the real-world. Something we all loved was quality sister time. Maddie is significantly younger than me and Jasmine (we’re twins), so it’s really amazing and gratifying to have deep adult conversations that we can all relate to in our adult lives. Life be lifing and it’s a beautiful thing to have sisters to talk to about it. Queue Sisters With Me by Tom Misch.

The resort was beach-front and right next to a public beach that was much nicer, more sprawling and seemingly better maintained than Tulum’s beach, but it was still the same situation of being some work to get to if you’re not staying in the hotel zone. We didn’t venture into town, so I can’t speak for what downtown Cancún is like. One day, we took the resort shuttle up the hotel zone strip to a different RIU resort for a party, so got to see more of the hotel zone. Big resorts, golf courses, some ruins, a couple of little strip malls was what I noticed. The story is actually kind of funny. We procrastinated on catching the shuttle to the party. Somehow we were in the lobby with our faces painted by the party crew ready to go one minute and then in the swim-up bar chillin and chattin the next… idk what happened. Also I dragged Maddie and Jasmine to a couple of cute photo-op spots I’d seen on my walk that morning. Once we finally did make it onto the shuttle, there was traffic and what should have been a 15-min ride took nearly an hour. That plus the shuttle being late to pick us up set us back a couple hours and we had a good 10 minutes to enjoy the party before they shut it down 😂

Even though I had just taken the ~1hr bus trip up from PDC, I was still in awe of the lovely shades of blue the ocean blessed us with as the back-drop to our brief sojourn in paradise. I was also surprised to get cold at night. The only time I even thought of a jacket in PDC was when I went to the movies, but I needed one nightly in Cancún. Being in a resort made my time in Cancún easy peasy and very enjoyable. Since I can’t speak to the town, here are my thoughts on the resort.

RIU Ventura Review

At the risk of sounding bougie, I don’t think I’ll be staying at a resort again unless it’s 5-star top of the line, the kind of place where everyone knows better than to cough over a buffet. Am I dreaming of the impossible? The resort grounds were really lovely though and there were several pools, a swim-up bar, and the beach was right there. There were a lot of food options- a buffet for breakfast lunch and dinner, a burger restaurant, and a little taco grill. The buffet was massive and had some gems. Maddie put me on to the chocolate donuts. One of my favorite things I’ve eaten this year yummm. For dinner, they have several restaurants where you’re expected to get cleaned up and put on decent clothes to be seated. There was Mexican, Italian, Asian Fusion, a steakhouse and a fine dining restaurant. I was personally a fan of the fine dining. Good, balanced meals and it felt like it was free.

The room was nice, it had a really great view of the ocean and an archaeological site across the street. The shower kept clogging and we should have had it fixed but, I’ll just speak for myself, I was too lazy to deal with it. I enjoyed sitting on the balcony, but it got nasty when the next-door neighbors started chain smoking cigarettes. Idk when this happened, but the smell makes me nauseous now, so that was a bummer. Resort life to me is about eating, drinking, chillin by the water, reading, talking, laughing, swimming. RIU gives you everything you need to do those things without having to worry about anything of significance. There’s a stage too where they put on performances I think every night. The cultural dance show was actually really cool and it was great to kick back, relax and enjoy it with what felt like a free drink. I won’t say the resort is premium, but it is very nice and I’m thankful we were able to pull together our piggy banks (plus some of Maddie’s reward points) to book ourselves a nice lil stay.

And that’s it for part 1! Can you believe that took me almost 2 days to write? Time to get back to my web development course after a little evening walk. Ciao!

P.S. The evening walk turned into me making a friend at the park (who also coincidentally also just left the Yucatán Peninsula) and going to eat some amazing quesabirria. We’re also doing an impromptu day-trip tomorrow. So web dev studies will resume when the spontaneity is done.