Eating out in Playa del Carmen

Posted on October 31, 2012 by somewhatinterested

A great taco meal at 100% natural

There are heaps of restaurants in Playa – most are centred around the tourist strip (5th avenue), and all market themselves pretty aggressively to get you in there. Here are the places in town that stood out for us – both good and bad.

The good

Skinny Bikini Potatoes – Calle 20 between 5th and 10th Avenue
Excellent food – great service and great drinks specials. Live DJ some nights. Highly recommended.

El Jurador – Constituents between 25 and 30, across road from Mega
Excellent fish and shrimp tacos (19 pesos each!), great milkshakes, good priced beers, excellent ceviches. A great inexpensive option – our favourite place in Playa!

Ambasciate D’Italia, on corner of 5th Avenueand 24
This is definitely the best Italian we’ve had in Playa. Excellent fresh pasta – great service and great value. If you dine before 7pm the deal is even better. Highly recommended.

Taqueria Arandas, Corner 10th avenue and Calle 16
Excellent cheap (13 pesos each) meat based tacos (including beef tongue and other delicacies). Doesn’t open until 7pm but stays open till late. Not recommended for vegetarians though.

100% Natural
An excellent chain you’ll find around Mexico (Oaxaca, Mexico City etc) – this is always reliably good. It’s one of the few places that serves fresh and healthy food options. They actually have things like salads and vegetables! Sometimes hard to come by in Mexico. Highly recommended.

Kaxapa Factory, Av Constituyentes, betwen 10 and 15 avenues
Great inexpensive Venezuelan food and friendly service. Most of their food is gluten free and they have great vegetarian and vegan options.

The bad

Lucky Luciano (5th avenue corner Calle 28)
Famous for their pizzas (which admittedly we didn’t try) but in terms of pasta they got a big fail. My pasta was made with 2 minute noodles – they even seemed to use the packet flavouring – which was then bizarrely mixed with very nice fresh vegetables. They clearly don’t know how to make pasta. And it was expensive.

Babes (Calle 10 between 5th and 10th)
A Lonely Planet and Trip Advisor favourite, this was a big disappointment. The entre was sensation al(seafood rolls) but the two mains were both terrible. Both used great fresh ingredients, but were drenched in a sickly sweet sauce. This is Thai food for people who’ve never eaten proper Thai food, and who love their meals very sweet.

Mayan ruins of Coba and Tulum

Posted on October 26, 2012 by somewhatinterested

Coba and Tulum are two fantastic Mayan ruins nearby to Playa del Carmen – below are some photos from both.

Tulum gets a lot of tourists because it’s so close to Playa and Cancun (and has a beautiful beach) – whereas Coba is a bit further away, and a bit quieter (if you arrive before or after the tour groups do). Coba is also a much larger site – there’s about 6km of walking needed to access all the ruins. If you’re not up to walking, you can hire a bicycle (35MXD) or get someone else to drive you around in a cyclo/bicycle-taxi (140MXD normally but 70MXD in the low season).

These sites are both worth checking out!

: Tulum is a Pre-Columbian Maya walled city which served as a major port for Cobá. Tulum was one of the last cities inhabited and built by the Mayans, and was at its height between the 13th and 15th centuries.

: The beautiful Carribbean by the Tulum ruins

: Central ruins in Tulum

: La Iglesia at Coba

: A ball court in Coba

: The Nohoch Mul pyramid, the tallest in the Yucatan at 42 metres

: View from the top of the Nohoch Mul pyramid (42m high)

: A series of stone and plaster roads run from central Coba to various smaller sites in the area. These are known by the Maya term sacbe – the longest is over 100 kilometres.

Beautiful Europeans (and some Mexicans): The Playa Del Carmen story

Posted on October 15, 2012 by somewhatinterested

The main beach in Playa del Carmen. Most of it in the main part of town is taken up with lounges and chairs owned by the various beach clubs. Each seem to play the same Ibiza summer party hits album while serving overpriced drinks and food. But it’s pretty hard to beat that view!

It’s been over two weeks since we left the very quiet and beautiful beaches of Tulum, and arrived at the very busy but still very nice beaches of Playa Del Carmen.

San Cristobal de las Casas certainly felt very touristy but it’s got nothing on Playa del Carmen. Playa is a complete tourist town – we haven’t been to Cancun yet but apparently this is a hipper version of that town.

Certainly the Lonely Planet description seems very accurate so far – the beaches and streets are full of well toned and tanned Europeans – the fat tourists that are common on Australian beaches are few and far between (apparently they tend to go to the all inclusive resorts in Cancun). Understandably too, as it is quite intimidating walking along the beach when the majority of people are beautiful Europeans. Well they certainly all seem to work out.

While most of Mexico’s tourists are American (90%), the balance here is more global – Americans make up 33%, Europeans 24%, Canadians 20%, Mexicans 19% and the remainder are from South America and the rest of the world.

A big plus of being in a tourist town is that you have choices – heaps of different food options, lots of different kinds of bars, great gyms (there’s even bikram yoga), really well stocked supermarkets, plenty of ATMS and lot more people speaking English. We’ve been able to order meals with tofu, coffee with soy milk – there’s even decaf (three key symbols of Mexico’s middle class progress).

Playa del Carmen like Cancun has a big nightlife scene and being a tourist town you can find a good party any night of the week. Although as it’s low season most places are pretty quiet right now.

The negatives? Well you get hassled a lot to buy stuff, it feels a bit generic (it reminds me of the Gold Coast – but a classier version), and it’s more expensive than the rest of Mexico (but still way cheaper than Melbourne).

Although, the tourist side of things exists pretty much only in the 2 blocks parallel with the beach – head one block further away from the beach and it’s very different. Head a few more blocks away from the beach and it’s like any other Mexican city – just with more foreigners.

So if you’re looking for a luxurious beach holiday where there are heaps of adventure options and places to party – Playa is for you. But if you’re after something quieter, there’s plenty of equally amazing beaches north and south of here with far fewer people. The Caribbean Coast is very long and there are plenty of places where you can enjoy it!

Costs in Playa

We’ve rented an apartment for one month for US$850 – 2 bedroom – 5 blocks from the beach – includes cable, internet, maid service and pool. There are a lot of vacation rental options for $1,500+ a week, so we got this at a good price (it costs $1,400 in the high season). Non vacation rentals usually require a 6 months+ contract, but again due to it being low season we could negotiate a good deal. There were also studio and 1 bedroom options available from $500/month. We rented through Carmen Sol, who are excellent – we’d highly recommend them to anyone looking for a rental in Playa.

Here’s a general idea of other costs in Playa: (1 Australian dollar is around 13 Mexican pesos)

Coffee (American style) – 20 pesos
Tacos at a local restaurant – 10-20 pesos
Tacos at a restaurant on the tourist strip – 30-70 pesos
Movie at a cinema – 40 pesos (makes paying $18.50 in Australia seem ridiculous)
Average dinner in a fancy restaurant – AUD$35
Beer – 30 pesos (10 pesos when buying from a supermarket)
Vodka and Lime – 60-80 pesos
A bottle of Smirnoff vodka from the supermarket – 120 pesos
Glass of wine – 50 pesos
Local bus to the shopping centre – 5 pesos (same cost to virtually anywhere in town)

A traumatised monkey made available for paid photos on the main street in Playa. Other exploited animals there include a toucan, parrots, a baby lion, and baby leopards and tigers (the last two live in a hotel on the main street!). Happily the monkey peed all over this guys shoulder.

Snorkelling in cenotes

Posted on September 22, 2012 by ladybuginred

One of the most incredible water experiences I’ve had so far has been snorkelling in some of the cenotes in Tulum. A cenote is ‘a deep natural pit or sinkhole, characteristic of Mexico, resulting from the collapse of limestone bedrock that expose groundwater underneath’ according to Wikipedia. This part of Mexico has more than half of the world’s longest underwater caves – all of the cenotes connect up through the underground river system.

The Grand Cenote was by far the most spectacular, with turquoise blue water flowing through an amazing cave surrounded by lush green garden. There’s not much point in me saying any more about it, as the pictures say it better …

PS 24 Sep – We’ve just added in some shots from the Maya Cenote just outside of Chichen Itza – amazing!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I didn’t come here to swim at an unraked beach

Posted on September 20, 2012 by somewhatinterested

I have to admit I had some trepidation coming to stay at Parayso Hotel and Spa, in Tulum, Mexico. Sure it looked really nice on the website, has an unbeatable location (right on the beach) and was amazing value (half price!), but there was still the chance that my beach paradise could be tainted. Yes you all know what I’m taking about – the scourge that is the unraked beach.

I’d heard about them before – in passing in a hostel kitchen, in low whispers at a nearby bar, but I never thought I would come across one myself. John* (not his real name), a very helpful reviewer on TripAdvisor had warned me. When he stayed here all manner of things went wrong – the most significant being, that the beach was left unraked.

I don’t know what the Mexicans were thinking. John didn’t come all this way to have to step over seaweed on the way to the beach. Actually he was expecting some Mexicans to carry him so he didn’t have to get his feet all sandy. But he realised it doesn’t work like that anymore and he accepted it.

What he didn’t accept however was an unraked beach. And why should he? He paid good money* to stay here, good money to be on a beach with beautiful white sand, great weather, comfortable chairs and no debris. Sadly for John, this was not to be.

The spectre of John loomed large over me this morning as I ventured to the beach at 8am. The sun was shining, the birds were out, the sea calm. But I didn’t know what to expect when I stepped out onto the soft white sand. Was my passage to the ocean going to be smooth, or were the soles of my delicate feet going to be assaulted by beach debris?

It was a turning point, a sliding doors moment that could have changed the course of this trip – and changed my impression of Mexico forever.

Luckily for Mexico, as I approached the beach, I saw one of the staff members dutifully raking up the seaweed, and placing it into a wheelbarrow. Bless his little underpaid socks.

My beach visit was perfect as a result, and I shall no doubt return in the future. John however will carry the scars with him evermore.

Footnote
(* well actually we’re only paying $35 a night to stay here, so chances are he didn’t pay that much)

Exhibit A – the unraked beach. Note how the sand is tainted by the presence of beach debris. This is not the way nature intended a beach to be.

Exhibit B – the raked beach. This is the kind of beach that makes you want to walk on it. It also comes out better in photos.

Some old stuff

Posted on September 10, 2012 by somewhatinterested

There are heaps of amazing historical buildings and temples in Mexico. This post will give you absolutely no information about any of them. But I’ve included some nice photos.