First days
This was a second part of our trip, which we started in the USA (West coast). We landed at Cancun airport, but we had no intention staying there so we rented a car (which took really long and the car was compared to that in USA much worse, but it drove us where we needed). We joined the road and headed down to Playa del Carmen, our base for the whole week. The weather in summer is humid and it rains occaisionaly so when we got into the city center we found most of the roads flooded, but the water dissapeared until the next morning. We decided to stay in a hotel close to the quinta avenida and close to the beach. We immediately fell in love with local food stalls along the road where they server really great tacos, quesadillas and other great food.
Trip to Tulum
We can never stay too long at the beach, one day is more then enough so we took the car and went on exploring, our first trip took us to Tulum, beautiful ruins close to the sea, with really nice views. First we visited the ruins, at first it was little bit unclear where to buy the tickets since there were many ticket booths selling different tickets, but soon we found out that those were only travel agency trying to make advantage of tourist and take them to the entrance by the trolley (the said it is 30 minuts, in fact it took us less than 10 minutes to walk to the gate). The actual tickets were quite cheap and the whole area nice, we even got to see some wild animals along the way. When we were done with the ruins we drove to the other side, where the beach was, parked along the road (as other cars) and relaxed at the beach for a while. When we got back to the car, we got parking ticket on the windshield, we wanted to ignore it, but when we saw the Policia municipal office, we decided to stop and pay. Good that we did, since the police took our licence plate and gave it back to us after we paid, before we did not even notice. So if you plan on parking along the road, make sure to bring your own screw driver, since we had to instal the plate back ourselves.
Trip to Chicen Itza and beautiful places along the way
After another lazy day we went on another daytrip from Playa del Carmen, this time we got up really early, we had a list of nice places around and decided we would give it a shot and see where we would end up (we packed few stuff in case we decided to spend the night somewhere else). We took the paid highway and went down to ruins of Ek Balam, where we got at around 8 am and there was almost no one, we had a lot of time to walk through the ruins and jungle surrounding it. Then we continued towards Valladolid, nice colorful city, where we enjoyed lunch in a local restaurant, really great, and then we continued to towards Cenote Ik Kil (probably one of the best known lakes). To be honest we were quite dissapointed, too many people, strange smell, so we just took few pictures, walked down and were back on our way to Chichén Itzá. The main pyramid is really impressive, big, nice, really worth the stop, if you do not mind many street sellers along the walkway. Our last stop was small city of Izamal. This city was almost entirely colored in ground yellow, with nice main building and small pyramid just outside the city center and again with noone there. We spend the rest of the afternoon here and then decided to go back to Playa del Carmen, where we got long after sunset. Just a quick tip, make sure to have enough fuel when you take the highway, there are almost no petrol station along the road and we saw at least 50 tarantula spiders and few snakes on the road, so it not might be a good place to get stuck.
Trip to Coba Ruins
After another lazy day we went on another great tour, this time to Coba ruins, one of the pyramid you are allowed to climb on. It was roughly 90 minutes ride from the city and we managed to get to the parking lot before lunch. Many peple rent a bike hire, since the distance to the pyramid is longer, but we decided to walk through the forest and search for the wildlife (we ended up seeing almost none), but the walk was nice and not that long. The pyramid itself is also great, really steep so some peple had troubles coming down, we found out that it was best to take of the slippers and walk barefoot. The view from the top was great, quite similar to that from Ek Balam or Izamal, vast jungle on each side and the land extremely flat. When we got back to Playa del Carmen we visited one of our favorite restaurants (El Fogon) and later had to change our flights, since we had a layover in Miami, but the airport was closed due to incoming hurricane. We did not really mind and booked flights to New York instead where we spend another 3 days before coming back home.
