Musings from Posada los Mapaches

Eleven pm, Posada Los Mapaches, Tulum, Mexico

It has been dark for hours – just as long, in fact, as if I were at home. This, however, is where the similarity ends.

I'm sitting in the walled yard of the Posada los Mapaches, wearing shorts and a short-sleeved blouse. A sudden breeze stirs the palm fronds and flamboyan  leaves above me, but when I look up, almost expecting another sudden downpour like this morning to blow in, I see stars and the moon. A few days past full, it is shrinking not on its right side like it would be at home but on top, resting on its rounded bottom in the velvet sky. Night insects – cicadas? - have been chirping softly but without interruption since night fell a little after five. For some reason my mind concentrates more on them than on the traffic noise from the highway, the only thing that mars this idyllic setting a little. Mosquitoes, claimed to be quite bad by some of the people who reviewed this hostel on Hostelworld, are no problem at all, certainly nothing even close to what we experienced in Alberta this summer.

It is hard to believe that we arrived only yesterday evening – winter and cold and the life at home are already far, far away.

After a five-and-a-half hour flight from Calgary we landed in Cancun at 3:30 yesterday afternoon, picked up our car and made our way to Tulum along the coastal Highway, 307. Traffic was steady, but not excessive at first, and thinned out more and more after Playa del Carmen. Driving seems to be less crazy than in Argentina, a fact none of us laments.

When I looked for rooms in Tulum on the internet I fell in love with this place: Mayan style huts right across from the entrance to the Tulum ruins, about two kilometers north of Tulum. There is only one private room, which my brother-in-law Kurt and sister-in-law Gerda are using, and four dorm-style rooms for four people each, with bunk beds, one of which we share with a guy from Spain. The bathrooms are shared, but everything is clean, and the owners are very friendly. Chelo, a woman of around sixty, is the owner/manager, together with her two sons. She greeted us with a big hug when we met her this morning.

We decided to spend the day at the beach, and visit the ruins in the afternoon, but we woke up to dark skies, the humid air pregnant with rain, and sure enough, breakfast was barely over when the skies opened. It didn't last very long, however, and by about ten-thirty we were on our way to the beach. Already tour busses and tourists were everywhere – until we had passed the entrance to the ruins, and the surrounding market where merchants offered all kinds of more or less authentic Mayan art and crafts.

We managed to ignore their offers and beckoning and kept walking, and soon we had reached the beach – almost free of people at this time. We spread our towels in the shade of some palm trees, making sure that we didn't come to sit right under the coconuts. Supposedly more people are killed each year by falling coconuts than by sharks ...

The beach is every bit as beautiful as the descriptions we read: powder-fine white sand, no rocks, no shells, the ocean a deep blue-green in the distance, but the most vivid turquoise close to the beach, until it starts to pick up that powdery sand and looks like cafe con leche – mucha leche.

It is late, after midnight, the cicadas are still singing, and the traffic noise has ebbed a bit. I better go to bed like the rest of the group: tomorrow is another day!