As some of you may have gathered, Wen and I are in Mexico. Neither of us have been here before, and both of us are exercising our jointly ropey Spanish in order to get the right tacos and buy a variety of bus tickets.
The jet lag is working in our favour, so we've been out and about from the early hours; today we set off for Tulum's Mayan ruins just after 0700. This meant that we'd walked for a couple of hours, checked out the very dramatic clifftop ruins, had a solid breakfast of cochinita pibil tacos, and collapsed back into our air conditioned hotel room all by 1130. Sickening, I know.
After cooling down and with the afternoon stretching ahead of us, we worked out which cenote we wanted to visit. We chose the Casa Cenote, which it turns out is down a dirt road and adjacent to a beach colony with an armed guard. Totally normal, yes. The cenote was beautiful - a large open pool of cool turquoise water connected by narrower channels, and its mix of fresh and salt water meant a variety of fish (and a caiman, apparently!) were swimming around us. The Yucatan peninsula is riddled with cenotes so, depending on the weather, we'll either get another one in tomorrow morning before heading to Valladolid or we'll get our fix once we get there.
What we have eaten
- Tacos. Really quite a lot of tacos. Particularly good ones: suadero (pork rib meat) from Tacqueria Ñero; cochinita pibil from Don Beto near the ruins; bifstek con queso (steak and cheese mmmmmm) from Tropi Tacos; and the al pastor from Tacqueria la Riviera Costena.
- We also ate some pretty good tamales during a downpour from Tamales Don Taco.
- Looking forward to eating some Mayan specialities (particularly poc chuc - pork marinated in citrus and grilled) when we go to Valladolid and Merida this week.