We arrived in Tulum late on Thursday evening, so checked straight into our hostel and went out to grab some dinner. We went to a street vendor where, despite what you ordered (be it quesdailla, taco, habana, tortilla...) you got pretty much the same dish - who says variety is the spice of life?! It was yummy though, and cheeap. So win win. We went back to the hostel, got a mojito and a sol and were planning to have an early night when we bumped into a friend from Bocas, and ended up hitting the streets of Tulum for a fun night!

The next morning we realised the true wondrousness of The Weary Traveller (our hostel)... The breakfast! It was an all you can make/ eat buffet of toast, butter, jam, eggs, pancakes, french toast, coffee... The trick was to stuff yourself to double capacity to avoid the expense of lunch, and then hold out till dinner. We got the shuttle to the beach then, which was incredible - Tulum has one of the top beaches in the world! Powdery white sand, fringing palm trees, fabby heat and the clearest turquoise water.

After a nutritious dinner of rice and beans (homemade it should be noted), we went out to this beach party - it was open air with a patio and a swimming pool con a bridge going over it. They also played recognisable music which was another plus. Fire dancers on stilts appeared and put on a show with breakdancers, which was entertaining. And then the electricity kept cutting out, plunging everyone into both darkness and silence. We love a good reliable power grid...

The next day Al was looking distinctly peaky (we may not have mastered the knack of rice and beans...) so we headed back to the hostel so she could get some much needed r & r. She rapidly became struck down by Montezuma's revenge however, leaving me to spend a (guiltily highly enjoyable) day wallowing in various coffee shops/ the bakery/ learning to use 'devil sticks' from this hippy (who, by the way, was not a friend of soap.)

For our final day in Tulum, we had booked a cenote snorkelling tour, starting with a spot of turtle spying, which was incredible. We were con these 3 Swedes - one of whom kicked Al in the face (underwater, that is) and didn't apologise. Seeing the turtles was so cool - they were really big too - the shells were at least 1m long! Our guide was like "touch them!" ... Really?? Go and touch an endangered species in their natural habitat?? Oh well, to hell with conservation we thought - let's live like a Central American con zero regulations! So down we dived and stroked the shell which was surprisingly smooth. When we emerged out of the water, this massive purple cloud of perfect storm proportions had descended upon us, and very rapidly the heavens opened and it began to monsoon! We took shelter on our way back to the van, and watched the road become a river. Happily though, the rain did stop - not that we weren't loving the idea of snorkelling in submerged caves during torrential downpour... The only downside was that it was both cloudy and not warm, and it had become apparent that we were not to be wearing wetsuits. The actual dive was very cool though (in both senses of the word) - you'd stick your head up and almost whack yourself on a stalactite they were so low, then you'd look underwater and it would open up into caverns and arches and tunnels... So cool! An excellent ending to our time in Tulum.