Tulum

Tulum has lots to offer – Caribbean beaches, ancient ruins, cenotes and more but all we got to see was our hostel room’s 4 walls and not much else! When I managed to get myself ill I ended up stuck 2/3rd’s the way up Everest, not the best place to be, when Shona does the same somehow she coincides it with being stuck in the small coastal town of Tulum whilst a tropical storm passes through and its barely worth going outside! If we thought the storm sitting off the coast in Puerto Escondido was annoying and giving us some rain to contend with, we were wrong…tropical storm Alex, yep it was actually graded, was making its path of destruction up the eastern coast of Mexico just as we arrived. Now I’m not 100% sure on the naming convention given to tropical storms, but this being the 1st of the season it gets a name beginning with A, the next B and you get the picture. Who decides on these I don’t know, but Alex doesn’t sound that scary, hey if we had been here on the 3rd storm we could have been stuck in tropical storm Colin – who would call a storm Colin!?! Alex did its best to wash away poor old Tulum, in the course of 2 days it chucked down so much water that the streets became rivers. So as Shona stayed firmly in bed, having bravely endured a 17 hour bus journey the night she got sick, I just – well I didn’t really do much. I got to know the local chemist quite well, I visited him a few times and on each occasion in my best Spanish tried to explain that I have a sick girlfriend and her needs. The only other time I ventured out was to watch the football, England v Germany, the less said about that the better although sitting in a bar with a beer and water gently lapping my feet whilst watching football I could get use to that – hang on, I’m about 3km from the sea… The street river had started to flow into the bar, but no one seemed to care, I’m guessing with a whole alphabet of silly named storms heading this way they are more than used to it each year. So that was Tulum, no idea what the beach looks like (we hear its nice!), no idea what the ruins look like (old and a little bit ruined I’m guessing!), as for a cenote I had no idea what one of them was before I arrived and I am still non the wiser!