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Adventures in Akumal, MEXICO, Part II
January 7th, 2010
I left off describing the beauty of our resort in Akumal, Mexico, but what I didn’t talk about were the surrounding sites and the incredible adventures we had visiting Tulum, Coba, Playa del Carmen, and Xelha.
In Tulum we walked around the ruins of a Pre-Columbian Mayan city and it was absolutely gorgeous. It consisted of several cliffside stone temples, overlooking the Caribbean Sea. There were watch towers, shrines, altars… even a palace! While I would highly recommend a visit to Tulum, I’d also warn you to bring comfy walking shoes and a LOT of water– around the middle of the day it gets super hot.
After a seaside lunch at a bar with swings instead of stools, we drove to to Koba. Quite the opposite of Tulum, Koba’s ruins were surrounded by dense jungle, so add mosquito repellent to list of outdoor survival equipment. We got to see a Mayan ball court where young men had to somehow get a ball through two rings at the top of a half-pipe shaped structure without using their feet or hands. Mayan priests would watch the match to determine the answer to important community decisions.
My cousins and I then rented bikes and biked two miles to the main temple, Nohoc Mul. We climbed all the way to the top (130 feet!!) and the view was absolutely gorgeous, with the sun setting over a sea of dark green treetops.
On New Year’s Eve, we went shopping in Playa del Carmen, a local town with lots and lots of stores with every kind of souvenir you could think of. It was there that I got my hair braided in those really tight braids with beads and yellow and green rubber bands. The shopping was fun, but if you hate feeling like a big fat American tourist, I wouldn’t recommend it.
Finally, on our last day, we went to a lagoon in Xelha, which aside from the view from Nohoc Mul, had some of the most gorgeous views of our trip. There was every kind of tropical animal imaginable– toucans, dolphins, more iguanas, monkeys, turtles, more brightly-colored fish, etc. The water was sky blue and perfect for snorkeling. There was a little area of palm trees with a hammock between every two, where people were just napping in the shade. Then there was a trail through a jungle and across a stream where people were tubing and jumping off a 25-foot cliff into the water below. We even got to swim in a cave and got our picture taken from a hole in the rock up above.
Whether you’re learning a dance, sleeping in the sand, scaling a 130-foot pyramid or diving off a cliff, you are guaranteed to have an amazing time on the Yucatan peninsula. So if the cold weather is getting you down, head on down and have a fiesta.
