Tour de México Part 2

I hope you all have had enough time to read my last post about Part 1 of my holiday travels around Mexico. If not, go back and read that one first! :)

Like I said last time, after Puebla, a town in central Mexico about an hour south of Mexico City, I flew to Memphis, Tennessee, where I spent Christmas with my dad, my brother and sister, my dad’s girlfriend, and her two daughters. I was debating for awhile whether or not I wanted to go home for the holidays, but ironically, Mexico made me decide to go. The culture here is so family-oriented that it has really made me appreciate my own family, and I couldn’t imagine spending the holidays without them.

After Christmas, my brother, sister, and I flew to New Hope, Pennsylvania, to where my mom just recently moved. There we spent New Years with my mom, her boyfriend, his daughter, and my boyfriend, who flew up from South Carolina. Needless to say, my family is rapidly expanding! And I love it.

However, as this is a blog about Mexico, I won’t go into too many details about my time at home. Just know that I had a wonderful time, and it was a great refresher to kick off my second semester in Monterrey.

Cancun: January 1-3
On January 1, my brother, sister, boyfriend, and I flew from Pennsylvania to Cancun, Mexico, where we met my dad for a week of traveling through the Yucatan peninsula. I was very excited to show them the country that to me has become like home. However, my one previous time in the Yucatan peninsula was 6 hours in Tulum off of a cruise ship, so this part of Mexico was almost all new to me too!

Cancun is divided into two parts: 1) downtown Cancun, which is the main city, where all “normal” life goes on, and 2) the “Zona Hotelera” (Hotel Zone), which is a peninsula jutting out into the Caribbean, where all of the tourist resorts are. We spent our one full day there wandering a few different beaches in the Zona Hotelera, and discovered that the stories are true: Cancun has amazing beaches. However, as great as the beaches were, we also discovered that Cancun is best if you have money to splurge on the beachfront resorts (which we didn’t). Instead, we stayed in a basic, but cute, locally owned hotel in downtown Cancun, and enjoyed getting to know the more “local” culture. We did, however, still enjoy a great seafood meal at a water-side restaurant in the Zona Hotelera and watched the sunset!

Tulum: January 3-7
From Cancun, we took a bus to Tulum, which is a few hours south of Cancun. It is another incredibly beautiful beach town, but with a much more relaxed, “hippy” vibe (great for my family, which is made up of a bunch of people who should have been born in the 60s ;) ).

One of the things that Tulum is famous for is its Mayan ruins site, which was actually just about a ten minute walk from our hotel! I had already been there once on the cruise a few years ago, but it was still amazing to go back! Not only is it fascinating to see the ruins of an indigenous tribe that were built hundreds and hundreds of years ago, but the ruins are on a cliff overlooking the clearest green water of the Caribbean Sea and the whitest sand I’ve ever seen.





In my opinion, Tulum is one of the best places in Mexico you can vacation to. There you can relax on some of the most gorgeous beaches in the world while walking through an extraordinary piece of Mexico’s history. After we walked around the ruins, we walked down to the beach below and relaxed for the afternoon.

The next two days in Tulum we spent renting bikes and discovering that there were even more spectacular beaches! In fact, Tulum was set up along a long strip of beach, so we could ride our bikes on the road next to the beaches and pick where we wanted to go! Just like the beach by the ruins, the sand was the whitest I had ever seen and the water the clearest. There’s not much else I can say about the beaches except that it was paradise. I highly recommend Tulum as a relaxing vacation get-away; it is my idea of perfection. In fact, we ended up staying an extra day because we couldn’t pull ourselves away!

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention something else that Tulum was perfect for: a marriage proposal! My dad’s girlfriend Jennifer flew in on Wednesday, January 6, to spend the second half of the week with us. That evening, on the perfect beach, under a perfect sunset, my dad proposed! We kids were all waiting for them at a beachside restaurant, where we celebrated with a wonderful dinner, wine, and live music.

Chichén Itzá: January 7
On Thursday, January 7, we rented a car to drive to Mérida, the capital of Yucatan, located on the west side of the peninsula about 30 minutes from the Gulf of Mexico.

Before arriving in Mérida, though, we made a stop halfway at Chichén Itzá, the most famous of the Mayan ruins sites, and one of the new seven wonders of the world. Chichén Itzá is so much more than the ruins in Tulum, and so much more than just another ruins site. It is strongly recommended that you hire a guide, which we did, because he will explain to you all of the archeological intricacies that make the site so unique.



It is made up of temples and pyramids that are ingeniously crafted to coincide with the Mayan astronomical calendar. For example, on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes every year, at particular times of day, the sun shines on the main temple, El Castillo, in such a way that it produces an illusion of a serpent crawling down the temple’s stairs:


**I took this picture from http://www.diagnosis2012.co.uk/kuk.gif so that you can see the snake on the day of the equinox. Can you see it there towards the left??

In fact, the whole structure of El Castillo is essentially designed to be a Mayan calendar, where each of the levels and staircases are the days and months of the year.

The acoustics in Chichén Itzá are also very scientific. For example, in the Gran Juego de Pelota (the great ball court where the Mayans would play an ingenious ball game, although no one is sure exactly how it was played), if you clap you can hear the clap echoed clearly 7 times.

Every night at Chichén Itzá there is a light show, which you can attend for free if you toured the site that day. We decided to stay to see it, and we were so glad we did! The temples and structures were lit up in different colors as the whole history of the place was told:



Whereas I believe that Tulum is one of the best beaches you can go to in Mexico, if you’re looking to experience Mexico’s rich history, I highly recommend Chichén Itzá.

Mérida: January 7-9
Mérida is a great colonial city, much like Puebla (which, if you remember, was the last place I went in central Mexico before going home for the holidays). As it is the capital of the Yucatan, it is very rich is traditional Mexican culture. We spent the few days that we had there walking around and taking pictures of the central plaza, the many churches, and the beautiful architecture of the houses:



We also did a bus tour around the city which gave us a great overview of the sites and history. Like Puebla, Mérida has many beautifully-colored houses and churches.

Mérida is also known for its great hammocks (in fact, I think it’s the hammock capital of Mexico), so if you want a hammock, it’s a great place to go. We also found some great hand-woven blankets for very cheap.

Unfortunately, as we only had about a day and a half in Mérida, we didn’t have time to explore the many museums and a great many other things that the city has to offer, but we did get a wonderful overview during the time that we were there, which I will soon show you through my pictures.