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IHTFP

December 5, 2007   

Anyone familiar with MIT culture will know that IHTFP can stand for a lot of things. Two of the most common ones are: “I hate this f*ing place,” and “I have truly found paradise.”

Self portrait

Yeah, that second one sounds about right. I have a lot to say about the vacation, but that will come later, when I organize all the photos and my vacation journal. Mostly, Seppo and I agreed that it was one of the best weeks of our lives and that we definitely want to do it again. It feels like an affordable enough vacation that we could do this every year or so, on top of any other travelling we already plan to do.

Seppo on swing by our cabana

You can see Max’s cabana on the right, and ours half obscured by his, just to its left. Note: Seppo is only wearing long pants because he thought he’d wear clothes that will let him arrive at SF in comfort, but it was too hot, so he changed back. I was actually standing ankle-deep in the water when I took this picture.

Everyday was in the low 80s. Early in the morning or late at night, it fell to around 77 degrees. The sun was hot and shining, but the ocean breezes kept us from getting uncomfortable. It was warm enough that we were usually just in our bathing suits, about 90% of the time there, hanging around in hammocks and jumping in the waves. The water was warm and crystal clear and clean.

All my life, I’ve dreamt of going somewhere where the water was clear, the sand was white, and the breezes were warm. This was all that and more. The sand was so incredibly fine and soft, like powder in many places. We played in the water everyday, trying to varying degrees of success to bodysurf. 🙂

The pictures can’t capture the true beauty and warmth of the place.

Walking toward beach

It was paradise.

14 Comments
Angry Chad
December 5, 2007 at 12:55 pm

“It feels like an affordable enough vacation that we could do this every year or so, on top of any other traveling we already plan to do.”

If you don’t mind me asking, what’s the ballpark on a vacation like this? Awesome as Cabo was, I’d *love* to be right on the water like that.

ei-nyung
December 5, 2007 at 2:04 pm

I’ll give you the exact numbers, as close as I can remember.

– Air tix around $330 per person, plus fees, using Orbitz. Someone Max was talking to flew out on a last minute ticket, and it was $440. Your price will differ, given you are coming from Michigan, but I bet it won’t be too bad.

– This is the truly ridiculous part: $35/night for a cabana. It was the end of the off-season, so it was $35, versus $50/night as it is for the high season. The rooms w/ two queen beds and a futon that could sleep two (so a total of 6 people) were around $120 a night. This gives you a private bath but I’d much rather stay in the cabana on the water.

– Food ranged from $2 a meal to as high as $30 a meal when we were trying out some of the fancier places. At no time did we actively try to save money. Now, knowing what is available in the region, I can confidently say that you can have awesome food and drinks for around $20-30 per day per person. When you go into town (about 6km or so away), you can get a crazy amount of food for like $1-4, but by the beach, things were more like $8-20.

Transportation was in taxis when not just walking along the beach to other places. The range of taxi rides was about $3 to $7.

What else… We didn’t really spend money on anything else.

I could roll out of bed and take five steps out of the door to hit the swings, hammocks, and palm trees, then another 50 feet to the water.

Internet use in town was 6 pesos for 30 minutes. That’s like $0.55 for half an hour.

We withdrew 400 pesos (MXD) (around $365 USD) when we got there, and didn’t withdraw any more for the 6 days. Because we were with a couple of other friends who were interested in trying more fancy places, we probably spent more than we would have by ourselves, but we still got a big bang for our buck.

I will post more extensively on the details later (especially about the flaming streams of liquid — this is not a euphemism!), but we checked out in person and online (after getting back) some of the other places in the area, and we had the nicest beach stretch of anything within a 4km stretch, possibly more. It was clean, well-maintained, completely uncrowded (around 3 of the days, our group was the only people out on the beach), and amazingly relaxing. The other places were also something like $250 to $3000 per night.

ei-nyung
December 5, 2007 at 2:18 pm

Oh, I didn’t mean to be mysterious. We stayed here: Los Arrecifes.

The map under the “Rates” link is all wrong. They have changed a lot of the layouts. Right now, there are only two ocean-front cabanas and they have built a beautiful set of suites with floor to ceiling windows there. I actually thought the owner might be living there, but I wasn’t sure.

I definitely want to find out how much it would be to rent that new place, if they do rent it. I’d like to take my entire family there.

h
December 5, 2007 at 2:46 pm

Glad you guys had a good time. You didn’t go do any daytrips outside of the Tulum area?

When I went to Tulum I stayed at a similar place just down the road called Zamas. I also had a cabana right on the beach, plus a private bathroom and private hammocks, and it was twice the price. (just mentioning it for comparison purposes)

The water and sand is just like that in Thailand too, by the way. The plane tickets are more expensive, though. 🙂

Andre Alforque
December 5, 2007 at 2:47 pm

The pictures can’t capture the true beauty and warmth of the place.

What you’ve posted thus far conveys that perfectly, Especially this one, and especially when I’m looking outside my window and seeing a bunch of snow.

ei-nyung
December 5, 2007 at 3:19 pm

We did go to the Tulum ruins (6.5km north of where we stayed), which were amazing and definitely worth seeing, but other than that, we played in the water and ate food. 🙂 It was perfect.

ei-nyung
December 5, 2007 at 3:21 pm

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, we ate at Zamas one evening. I think we ate there on either Friday or Saturday night.

Roopa
December 5, 2007 at 6:40 pm

your pictures are gorgeous! i’m so happy that you got a luscious helping of paradise 🙂

ei-nyung
December 5, 2007 at 7:44 pm

Going back to the accomodations, I think the non-cabana rooms w/ bath were actually somewhere between $70 and $100 per day, not $120. Hard to say.

casacaudill
December 5, 2007 at 11:28 pm

this is my idea of a perfect vacation. we might have to look into this (we’d want to add 2 days or so in Merida as well).

Alan
December 5, 2007 at 11:29 pm

We’re in for next year. :^)

I just checked and I’ve got over 3 weeks of vacation. How long was the flight?

ei-nyung
December 6, 2007 at 12:52 am

We flew direct on Alaskan Airlines (strange, but true) from SFO to Cancun. Tulum is about two hours south of Cancun. The flight was just under 5 hours, I think.

We took a bus down to Playa del Carmen, another developed touristy area/major bus travelling hub 1 hour south of Cancun and stopped over to eat dinner. Then we took another 1 hour bus down to Tulum, then took a short cab ride to the cabanas.

Coming back, we had a layover in Phoenix, so it took longer, adding about two hours to the total trip. In reality, there was a weather related delay, so we got into SFO a total of about 8 hours after we got on the first plane.

If we do this again, we’d probably rent a car. However, I am glad we didn’t the first time, because the extremely tall and unmarked speedbumps could wreck a car and hurt people. Our friend Holly had actually gotten into an accident a couple of years ago in Tulum on a scooter due to the speedbumps, so it’s no joke.

Hmm, now that I think about it, I don’t actually know if we would rent next time. I don’t know where we’d park when we went into town, and it’d be one more thing to worry about. It would be convenient for the transit between the airport and Tulum, but that’s about it. Everything else was walkable or taxi-able with very little worry.

Plus, the driving is a little erratic, e.g. the drivers seem to ignore any concept of lanes. Heh. Yeah, so maybe not. It would have been handy with the number of people we ended up travelling with (5, including us), but maybe for just us two, it wouldn’t be.

It was also nice going with someone who had already been there and knew his way around. It took a lot of the stress off. 🙂

Anonymous
December 6, 2007 at 9:22 am

I don’t think I could be much more jealous. 🙂

It seems unreal. Like those places don’t exist anymore as they must have been overrun by tourists by now.

How did you even hear about this place?

A_B

ei-nyung
December 6, 2007 at 5:44 pm

Hello! *waves furiously*

Our friend Max one day emailed us and a couple of other people and said that he was going to Mexico and would anyone else like to join him? The best part was that he had basically had a full outline of his travel plans and cost estimates already in that email, so it was very easy to look over the details and just say yes.

I looked on http://www.tulum.info after getting back, and there are people who have been going regularly for many years now who complain that it was getting too developed already. I can sort of see how changes are coming down the pipeline, and that makes me sad as well.

It was really nice. In Playa del Carmen (our mid-way stopover between Cancun and Tulum), there were tons of people milling about and lots of locals hustling for business. In Tulum, there was pretty much nothing like that.

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