Procrastinet

Trip Report: Tulum, Mexico - Day 1

filed under: Stuff you never, ever needed to know

I expected to pop out of bed as soon as the alarm went off at 5am, with the excitement of an impending vacation. But the alarm found me groggy and almost unable to move. I trudged out to get the car, double parked and came in to haul Max out of bed, still asleep and whimpering. He balanced precariously at the toilet and asked to go back to bed. “Okay,” I said, “but we’re going to get in the car first…” Still bleary, his eyes mostly closed, he smiled. “Mystery vacation!” he said.

I tried not to tell the family where we were going on our “Mystery Vacation,” though it had slipped to Lisa two days earlier that we were going to Mexico. Max was still surprised, for what it was worth, and Lisa didn’t know we were going to Tulum – she just knew it was “one of those eco-things.”

Max is in love with the AirTrain to JFK. I swear it’s his favorite part of the trip.

Everything was smooth through check-in, but the flight left about an hour late after congestion on the runways. The flight was uneventful, with Max peacefully watching television (bless you, JetBlue).

We were coming in to land, the jungle about 1000 feet below us and the crew in their “prepare for landing” positions, when suddenly the engines screamed back to life and the plane banked up as sharply as it would go. The whole plane took a collective deep breath as we pulled slowly back up into the sky, turning sharply as we went, the engines howling. “Um…” I said to Lisa.

Eventually we leveled off and the captain came on. “Sorry about that folks, someone… um… hit a bird down there, and they’re cleaning off the runway. We figured we’d… wait until it was clean and then come in and try again…” At this point I saw a plume of smoke coming from the jungle near the airport, and worried in the back of my head that whoever “hit a bird” hadn’t made it back into the air.

Okay, so maybe I worried that in the front of my head. Whatever. I wasn’t scared. Okay, yes, it was scary.

So then we landed safely, got through immigration and customs without any hitch, met our America Car Rental rep outside, and were in the van to the office in no time.

The guys at America were great, and the two timeshare guys hanging out at the office (who were flacking a new resort pretty darn hard) were very friendly, and pushy in an easily resistible way. One of the guys had lived for a long time in South Philly, and missed the cheese steaks. Go figure.

(picture with our Jeep, the next day. Yes, I'm aware how pudgy I look.)

We jumped in the red Jeep, got the directions (which I didn’t really need, as it’s basically “turn right on 307, go to Tulum”), told the timeshare guys no three or eight more times, and headed for the Pemex to fill up. Lisa got snacks at the 7-11 (classy and local, right? What can I say, we were hungry – and at least the jamon y queso was on a tortilla…) and we got on the road.

Next stop was an hour and a half later at the San Francisco De Asis supermarket, for beer, ice, a Styrofoam cooler, limes, and a knife to cut them with. I went in while the fam stayed in the car, and was pleased to successfully air my sub-gradeschool Spanish. “Hielo?” I said to the cashier, remembering that one word from somewhere, and then followed his pointing until I found somebody to give me some. The cashier looked about 15. Actually, everyone who worked at the Super looked about 15, or younger.

All the way down the beach road, I kept shouting out the names of the restaurants and cabanas we were passing, because after a month of obsessive reading of tulum.info I felt like they were all old friends. The weather was great, the topes were bumpy, the Jeep was rattly, and we couldn’t stop grinning.

I thought Hamaca Loca was right next door to Dos Ceibas, so I was confused when we went four or five doors past without seeing it. But there it was, just as the southern beach road bends around to the left. We pulled onto the lovely, narrow grounds and parked on the sand.

A guy named Claudio came out to greet us. Claudio is magnificently friendly and speaks almost no English. We established that we spoke very little Spanish (I get by on words strung together, Lisa does better as she at least studied it in school), and after that we mostly just smiled at each other a lot. He helped us carry our bags to the cabana, gave us the key, waved happily, and went away.

“Um… don’t we have to… necessito registrar?” I ventured. This confused Claudio. “Never mind,” I said, and he beamed and disappeared.

Hamaca Loca is that kind of place. If you met some folks while backpacking, and they offered to put you up if you ever came through Tulum because they had a nice guesthouse, it would feel much the same as staying at HL. It’s beyond laid back. It was Sunday night before anyone thought to ask us to pay.

Oddly, the hamacas at Hamaca Loca (“Crazy Hammock”) were pretty tatty – the multi-colored one was torn down the middle with one useable side, and the green one was coming unraveled but had a one-foot-wide section that you could balance on. “These hamacas,” I announced to the family, “sure are loca.” What can I say. I’m a wit.

Priorities: cerveza y playa.

I didn’t know how Max would take to the beach, as in the past he’s been too little and too afraid of the waves. This time, after some hesitation, he fell madly in love with it. The sand, the waves, the clear water, he loved it all.

As the picture caption reads on Flickr, the rules to Max’s new favorite game, Throw Sand at the Ocean, are as follows:

(1) pick up handfuls of sand;
(2) shout;
(3) throw sand at the ocean;
(4) repeat for two hours.

The waves were just big enough to merit boogie boarding, so I went up to find Claudio and see if Hamaca Loca had any around. Claudio was sitting having a cigarette with a woman who also seemed to work/live there (whose name I never got, though we talked many times). Through her mangled English and my even more mangled Spanish, we communicated that yes, everything was just wonderful, yes we loved Tulum so far, and that according to her it was the most beautiful place in all of Mexico. “I believe,” says me, forgetting to add the “lo” in “yo lo creo…”

The whole time, already beach-drunk, I was grinning like a doofus.

So it turned out, to my disproportionate delight, that they did have a boogie board, and I went back to beach and splashed contentedly in the gentle waves for a while.

Now, we had set up a system to try to bribe Max into trying new things on vacation. He’s a boy who usually prefers the familiar, so we were apprehensive about his encounter with all things Mexico. By this system, if he tried nine new things, we’d buy him a tricycle (rank bribery is all that motivates him, what can I say, the kid’s a little capitalist).

I announced with great fanfare that being held in the waves counted as one, playing on his own in the surf counted as a second, and that if he would try boogie boarding that would be three already.

So out we went, the brave little tot clinging to the board.

We had a fun, gentle little ride on a wave or two:

And then Daddy lost hold of the board and the boy, who had in his not-yet-four-years of life never been totally submerged in water, slid off the front and was rolled by a wave. The water was crystal clear, and the image of his little pale body under six inches of water, his face squeezed shut in terror, will be with me forever. Good work, Daddy!

Obviously, he was fine, as I knew rationally he would be – it was just a good dunking, the surf was still gentle, and he kept his mouth shut and didn’t inhale any. He was crying when I pulled him out, and asked to go back to the cabana, and I thought maybe I’d spoiled the beach part of the beach vacation already.

But he bucked up and went right to playing in the waves. Brave little fellah.

Within our first twenty minutes at the beach we had another disaster in the making. I was holding Max in the waves, and decided to sit down in the shallow water with him in my lap so the surf could break right over us. Max was terrified but loved it. The second wave that came our way was bigger than I expected, and I had to life Max over my head while I took the brunt of it on my chest and face. The problem was, I hadn’t expected to be swimming yet, and still had my glasses on.

The wave took them off and swept them away.

Great, I’m thinking, Lisa doesn’t drive a stick, and now we have three more days of vacation with me 1/2 blind. “Take the kid! Take the kid! I have to find my glasses!” I shouted, and Lisa deposited him on the beach and came back out to help me look as I searched around on the sand in a foot or so of rolling water with my hands and feet. Nothing. More waves swept in, and still nothing.

Lisa walked quite calmly along the shore for about eight feet, then shouted “Ah-ha!” and came up with my glasses. Unbelievable. Good job, hon.

We headed up the beach to Dos Ceibas for dinner, arriving at 6:30pm. The one guy in the office seemed bemused to see us. “Cena?” we asked hopefully?

“Not yet, not yet,” he said “7:40. Come back 7:40.”

So we walked up the beach all the way to the Ana y Jose Beach Club (garishly lit, with uniformed guards at either side of the beach, and all in all entirely non-contextual, as we say in snotty Brooklyn circles), and all the way back, and managed to kill an hour of the intervening time. We passed several purple man-o-war-esque jellyfish, including one the size of my pinky that Max christened “CutiePie” and spent the whole walk back looking for. Alas, CutiePie had been swept away.

Dos Ceibas has a beautiful, candle-lit garden restaurant. Just smashing, and for the first half hour we had it all to ourselves. Mario, the all-around guy there, brought us our margaritas and took our orders: the grilled shrimp and calamari for Lisa, the fish fillet Tikil Kin (sp?) for me, and pizza for Max (thank heavens for pizza and fries, it kept the kid from starving). Plus a terrific guacamole and quesadilla appetizer that we utterly failed to get Max to try a bite of, even with attempted bribery.

Lisa’s grilled stuff was good, my fish was great (coconut sauce and spices, stuffed with grilled shrimp – just fantastic), the wall of candles-in-nooks was wonderfully romantic. Really couldn’t have been better.

Except when I decided to try a mojito for my second drink. It was a valiant effort on Mario’s part, with tons of fresh mint but not enough sugar, and ended up tasting like iced grass clippings. I was afraid if I didn’t drink it, Mario would think I couldn’t handle my liquor, though. So I surreptitiously poured about 1/2 of it out under the table. I’m classy like that.

Hey, at least it was a sand floor.

Back up the beach in the dark, and to bed for the whole family. Not the *best* night’s sleep I’ve ever had, as Max was restless and the quality of the Hamaca Loca mattresses is… um… not the best. Next time I would bring a battery powered fan, even if it was tiny, just to get some air moving. I got used to it for the next two nights, but that first night was fitful.

Still and all – with one day down of our four day insta-vacation (counting Friday and Monday as full days, which isn’t really accurate), we were having a delightful time.

Posted by rjt at May 16, 2007 04:48 PM