On Sunday, February 27, our first leg of the trip had ended and our second leg began in earnest. It started with us meeting around ten in the morning for a bus trip to Tulum, which is only about an hour-and-a-half away from Playa del Carmen. Even though we stayed in a secluded area with no electricity, Tulum turned out to be pretty fun. Mostly, I think, because Tulum is where Sheldon got his grove back as I was finally able to shake the funk that had surrounded me for the better part of the previous week.
It was around noon by the time we got to the “resort” in which we were staying in Tulum. I made it to our cabaña to find that it was breezy, with a good view of the ocean once you stepped out the front door, and had absolutely no electricity. That wasn’t a huge deal since I really didn’t plan to spend any time in there at night until it was time to go to sleep, but it made it so I had to make other plans to recharge all of the electronics that I had brought with me. This planning was made a tad bit more difficult by the fact that Papaya Playa, where we stayed, has absolutely no electricity from 12:20 am to 8:00 am. This turned out to be only a minor problem, however.
When we arrived at Papaya Playa, the weather was gorgeous. It was about 80 degrees with big puffy clouds and a good breezed coming in off the water. After putting my things away and getting settled I came back to the front of the resort to get some lunch before heading to the beach. I ordered quesadillas, which seemed simple enough, but I and the girls that I was eating with all ended up waiting about 90 minutes to get our food. One girl was told about midway into the wait that there was no chicken so she had to change her chicken sandwich order. When the food came, it turned out there was enough chicken for others, just not for her. Odd.
While we waited, the weather started to take a turn for the worse. We had a few brief torrential downpours and the winds from the beach got stronger and stronger. By the time we got our food, which was good but not worth a ninety-minute wait, spending the entire afternoon on the beach stopped sounding like such a great idea.
I ended up farting around for a while, hoping for the weather to break, but it never really did. At around five o’clock, I headed to the little bar with the swing-set seats. After a few drinks, a few friends came over and joined me and I started to feel better and it was around this time that the funk fever started to break. The highlight at the bar was when a snake, maybe a meter long, came crawling under me and the girl who was sitting next to me. While we weren’t in mortal danger, we lifted our feet up to avoid the little bugger while the bartender, who was obviously not a professional snake hander, gradually got rid of the snake.
The group of holdovers from the prior leg of the trip, six of us, went into the city to find someplace for dinner. Problematically, we didn’t know where to get dropped off so we went to the supermarket and decided to walk around that area. Unfortunately, there weren’t a lot of restaurants around, especially anything Mexican, but we ended up having pizza that was actually quite good at a nearby Italian restaurant. After dinner, we returned to the hotel bar and I had a few drinks with a couple of girls that I am traveling with and ended up talking to a girl from England about soccer for about an hour. I made it to bed just before the electricity went off in the hotel. I’ll get into the second day of the Tulum trip in the next entry.
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