Leaving Mexico

After a few chilled out days in Tulum we decided to head to towards the border. Tulum was a lovely place but it seems full of quaint little restaurants, hotels etc that well meaning expats (who know what tourists want and how to make money) have set up with a focus on ecotourism. It seems there is a trend of gradually moving down the coast as each of these places gets ‘too touristy’.

While in Tulum I checked out the ruins (with several bus loads of people from Cancun arriving at the same time…argh).

Gorgeous ruins by the ocean - the Mayans had the right idea ;-)

And swam in a ceynote.

We arrived in the border town of Chetumal and took a bus to the tiny town of Xpujil. There are very few tourists here but some people use it as a base for exploring the local ruins, the largest of which is Calakmul.

We took a wild 3 hr round trip out to the ruins the following day where our driver actually ran off the road at one point. The Calakmul ruins are huge and not yet very well known. The difficultly in getting there also means there are few tourists and all of structures and pyramids can still be climbed on. I climbed 3 pyramids, several other structures and was delightfully tired afterwards.

One of the pyramids at Calakmul

Later on back in town we ate at a tiny local restaurant by the road. Check out the 'English' side of the menu!

Anyone for 'villager liked' or 'nosedives'?

The problem of being vegetarian is that people (for some reason) think that chicken is not meat . Unfortunately the vegetarian enchilladas verde came out with pollo and I felt terrible as the lady had gone to so much effort and I really didn’t want to eat it. She very kindly made another which was delicious and I left paying extra to make up for it.

Today we said goodbye to Mexico and caught a water taxi to San Pedro in Belize. It’s very quiet here, relaxed, with lots are local crafts, artworks etc.  Everyone also speaks English here – we can actually converse with the locals who are quite keen to chat :-)
The plan at this stage is to spend a couple of days or so in Belize on our way to Guatemala.