Quintana Roo & Yucatán – Northbound and Down

THE YUCATÁN PENINSULA

After a few weeks spent in the interior, we were looking forward to getting back to the coast. Our first stop on the Yucatán Peninsula was Lake Bacalar, where the water was an incredible topaz color. We spent a few days here working and swimming between afternoon storms.

TULUM

From Bacalar, we headed to Tulum for even more beautiful water. We spent the first night in a sandy lot surrounded by tress behind a bar/hostel/resturant. There we met some nice folks from Veracruz who shared their beer and fish with us.

On our first full day we visited the ruins of Tulum and thought that these guys had chosen a pretty good place to call home. We decided to take a cue from them and looked for a new camping spot right on the water so we could take advantage of the ocean breeze during the hot nights.

We found the Tulum coastline to be pretty built up, so we headed further out of town to camp on a local restaurant’s beachfront property. Here we spent a few days lounging in hammocks and snorkeling before heading back to town to knock out some freelance work at an airbnb.

BEACH BUMS

Once our work was done we hit the road. We toyed with the idea of checking out Cancún, but decided we’d rather skip it and set up camp just south of town in Puerto Morelos. There we were in a sandy lot beside a small, local hotel sandwiched in-between large resorts packed full of American tourists celebrating the July 4th weekend. We got the same fireworks show, and accompanying lightning storm, for a lot less.

CENOTES

We’d passed up a lot of the well known cenotes because of cost or crowds, but now we were a little off the beaten path, and decided to randomly select centoes we found on iOverlander to visit. Our first pick was Cenote Fantasma, which was amazing—we had the whole place all to ourselves and the friendly folks there let us camp in the lot.

Next we continued inland, stopping in Valladolid for a night to work, and then to our next cenote—Cenote Shanil-ha. Again we were allowed to camp right next to the entrance to the cenote, and after 5pm we had the whole place to ourselves. Increíble!