Text
Long Walks on the Beach...





Our “beach days” (Saturday - Wednesday) looked pretty much like this:
Wake up, breakfast, hang out on the beach (Al swimming, Erin occasionally joining, and lots of lounging on the beach furniture), long walk along the beach, sometimes a workout, lunch on the beach (either at our hotel or another beachside cafe), more lounging, afternoon excursion up and down the canopied beachside road (check out a cenote, restaurant, or just generally explore), shower/relax in the room, dinner, bed!
There was so much to look at during our walks on the beach. Although the beach is lined pretty much continuously with hotels, it felt the opposite of “built up.” All the hotels were small boutique properties, billed as “eco lodges,” which I gather means that they are meant to be in tune with the natural surroundings and to have minimal environmental impact. They are pretty off-the-grid. All of the hotels are run on either generators or solar/wind power. Most are built with local materials (wood and palms from the surrounding jungle). Our hotel used saltwater for the shower water, and across the entire village, putting toilet paper in the toliets is a no no!
As we walked along the beach, it was fun to check out all the different eco-lodges. Each featured a different type of beach furniture set up and we enjoyed comparing these -- all kinds of lounge chairs, hammocks, and sun shelters. We always agreed that Viento de Mar’s burlap beds and tiki huts were the best set up along the beach. There were lots of swings along the beach, and some hotels even featured swing/suspended beach beds! Turning to the ocean side, there were always kite surfers to watch, and with the constant wind, the weather was always changing up and down the beach, clouds moving quickly across the sky, transforming the water’s blue and turquoise shades in front of our eyes. Amazingly, the beach never felt crowded. It’s actually the LEAST crowded beach either of us has been on. With one exception -- the small stretch of sand in front of the hippie beachside campground had a LOT of people in close quarters :)!
0 notes
Text
Land Sports
We stumbled upon this spot on the beach with a ton of rustic exercise equipment made out of stuff like wood and sandstone. It was called the Jungle Gym! What a cool idea! We got in a few workouts there. Working out is definitely less painful in sea breeze with a view of turquoise waters! We had fun doing clean & jerks with their logs and Al did muscle ups on some super high rings! The stone and wood materials weren’t the most dense, so everything looked heavier than it really was. 💪💪💪
Erin speaking: One of my favorite things about our Tulum vacation was how easy it was to stay active. Usually vacation throws off my training game. In the past, it’s always seemed like working out takes away from the “fun time” of vacation, so I tend to get in fewer workouts than I would like (sometimes none). Then, upon return from vacation, I experience lots of inertia in trying to get back into my routine (which leads to even more time off!). But our trip to Tulum was different. With the help of my Coach, Bryan, I was able to get in one workout every day (except for our travel/airport days)! These ranged from weight training at the Jungle Gym to yoga to sprints and walks on the beach to simple bodyweight workouts. It helped that Tulum’s culture is centered around health and wellness. There are dozens of yoga studios in the hotels and beach clubs along the water. Massage therapists have set up massage tables in tents and shelters all along the beach, and the cuisine relies heavily on fresh fruits and vegetables. Though we are not vegetarian, Tulum definitely seemed like vegetarian heaven -- lots of vegetarian and vegan options on menus, and even all-vegetarian all-vegan restaurants!
0 notes
Photo




Cetli! You can see the kitchen to the right behind Al. Each mole dish came with delicious seasoned rice wrapped in a corn husk. The garlic butter with the appetizer came wrapped in the corn husk as well. We loved the red-headed calaca woman in the piece of art on the wall. I kind of wish we’d bought it. Cetli was an indoor/outdoor space; there was a garden wall across the front of the restaurant, but it was basically open air, as you can see in the picture of me.
0 notes
Text
Cetli
One of the reasons we were excited about visiting Tulum was the food. We had heard it was great – and it was. Our MO was pretty much to work our way down the Eater Tulum list, here.
On Sunday night, we made our first trip into town for dinner at Cetli, a cozy spot serving traditional Mexican fare. It doubles as an art gallery. We loved the paintings and decor – especially the many calaveras (skulls) and calacas (skeleton people) in the Mexican Dia De Los Muertos tradition. Cetli served us with a complimentary appetizer consisting of Mexican cheeses, mini homemade corn tortillas with beans and cheese, a mini empanada, fresh orange sprinkled with spicy grasshoppers (didn’t know that’s what it was the first time we ate it…looked like spicy red pepper with some extra ‘crunchiness’ to it), and my favorite, bread with homemade garlic butter. We had a great spinach salad (except for it wasn’t spinach – it was a local lettuce that I liked even better) with plums, apples, and grapefruit. For entrees, we had mole dishes. Al had green almond mole chicken enchiladas, and I had traditional dark & chocolately mole covering plaintain-stuffed chicken. Both dishes were incredible, the enchiladas especially. Such rich flavors! Dessert completely blew us out of the water – homemade bread pudding in some sort of crazy vanilla-y cream sauce with strawberries. Cetli had maybe 8 or 10 tables across two rooms, yet the restaurant staff (at dinnertime) appeared to consist of two people in the kitchen plus a waiter. The kitchen was visible from our table – looked like a pretty basic operation – which made the quality of the food even more amazing. As soon as we finished dinner on Sunday, we promptly made another reservation to return on Friday, for our last night in Tulum. (On Friday, we both ordered the chicken enchiladas in the green almond mole - it was that good!).
0 notes
Text
Water Sports
As I mentioned before, there are strong winds on the Tulum beach, and they are pretty much constant. Naturally, the most popular (and really the only) water sport on the beach is kite surfing. Al was fascinated with the kite surfers, and I have to admit, they were pretty cool to watch. They make it look easy. But when we inquired as to how long it might take to learn to kite surf, the reply was a minimum of 10 hours. Which makes sense -- you are basically controlling a giant kite in crazy winds while wake boarding. The fact that kite surfing wasn’t in the cards for us did not deter us from making our own fun in the waves. Al’s absolute favorite thing to do in the beach is go out into the waves and ride them, jump over them, play in them. The waves were pretty rough (and big!) in Tulum. When we first arrived, it was possible to swim out past the breaking point and have some fun floating/jumping with the (non-breaking) waves out there. But for most of our trip, the waves seemed to be breaking constantly, both close into the shore and far out. We got tossed around a lot -- my swimsuit was constantly filled with sand, and both of our sinuses got thoroughly flushed by salt water. It was great!
0 notes