Our trip to Coba ruins, Punta Laguna, Valladolid and Ek Balam ruins
In January of 2010, Mark and I decided to do an overnight trip from Playa del Carmen in order to see some of the ruins. This was a great way to experience the ruins, as well as some of the other sights along the way. Before you see the pictures below, I will first fill you in on some of the details. We decided to rent a car for the trip, which we normally don't like to do. We prefer to let others negotiate the crazy Mexican traffic for us. But this gave us the most flexibility, which we needed in order to do everything that we wanted to do.
We started out by spending the night in Tulum the night before our adventure started, just to be sure that we were early to the ruins the next morning, plus we love the town of Tulum. We found a charming boutique hotel in Tulum that we absolutely recommend, the Secret Garden Hotel! It was only $25usd per night with lovely owners. We got up early the next morning, around 6am, in order to be at the ruins close to when they opened that day. Coba is about an hour from Tulum. We rented bikes at the ruins (excellent decision) and spent a couple of hours enjoying the site. It is large and very spread out, you really need the bikes. And climbing the pyramid was definitely a highlight. Wear tennis shoes, this is not a good place for flip flops! We had an early lunch at the restaurant there (nothing remarkable) and then set out to find the monkey preserve, Punta Laguna.
We spent a little over an hour here enjoying seeing the monkeys with our guide (must -have here, wouldn't have found the monkeys ourselves) who helped us to find the families of monkeys and tell us about the different families we were seeing. They have given the monkeys names, and we enjoyed hearing about their different personalities. Even though they are in the wild, these guides are with them every day and know a lot about them. Two highlights were seeing Lola with her new baby, and seeing the alpha male, Tula, jump across a wide path to another tree! Highly recommend this adventure, bring sunscreen and bug spray.
Next, on to Valladolid, a charming colonial town in the interior. This was about an hour from Coba. We found our hotel easily and had a nice meal and explored the town. We will be back some day to spend more time there as we really enjoyed the town square, the market and the people. Early the next morning (yes, early again!) we set off about 20 minutes north to the ruins of Ek Balam. These ruins were our favorite because they were (1) much closer together than Coba and easier to visualize the "town", and (2) they are still being uncovered so many of the ruins are still overgrown and being explored. We can't wait to go back in 5 years or so and see what else they have found! Mark couldn't believe that I wanted to climb this pyramid also since we had already climbed one - but he did it for me and immediately declared his pyramid climbing days to be o-v-e-r! They are steep and quite scary, but these were on my bucket list and I can't explain how exhilarating the experience was! The view from the top was 360 degrees, unlike Coba which was about 180 degrees. These two ruins' experiences were so different from each other, I am glad we chose them for this trip.
Many people are surprised that we didn't choose to visit Chichen Itza first as it is so famous. We decided that these two ruins were less commercialized and far fewer tourists visit them. Thus, there is more access to the various structures and you can experience more of the true flavor of the ruins. Plus, you can still climb these pyramids and you no longer can climb the one at CI. So this made sense for us. We'll see CI on another visit and it won't have changed very much from 2010, we believe, while these will change rapidly as more and more tourists come to see them.
I hope you enjoy our photos and choose to take on this adventure yourself some day! (Click the "play" button when you hover in the top left corner of the large picture).
We started out by spending the night in Tulum the night before our adventure started, just to be sure that we were early to the ruins the next morning, plus we love the town of Tulum. We found a charming boutique hotel in Tulum that we absolutely recommend, the Secret Garden Hotel! It was only $25usd per night with lovely owners. We got up early the next morning, around 6am, in order to be at the ruins close to when they opened that day. Coba is about an hour from Tulum. We rented bikes at the ruins (excellent decision) and spent a couple of hours enjoying the site. It is large and very spread out, you really need the bikes. And climbing the pyramid was definitely a highlight. Wear tennis shoes, this is not a good place for flip flops! We had an early lunch at the restaurant there (nothing remarkable) and then set out to find the monkey preserve, Punta Laguna.
We spent a little over an hour here enjoying seeing the monkeys with our guide (must -have here, wouldn't have found the monkeys ourselves) who helped us to find the families of monkeys and tell us about the different families we were seeing. They have given the monkeys names, and we enjoyed hearing about their different personalities. Even though they are in the wild, these guides are with them every day and know a lot about them. Two highlights were seeing Lola with her new baby, and seeing the alpha male, Tula, jump across a wide path to another tree! Highly recommend this adventure, bring sunscreen and bug spray.
Next, on to Valladolid, a charming colonial town in the interior. This was about an hour from Coba. We found our hotel easily and had a nice meal and explored the town. We will be back some day to spend more time there as we really enjoyed the town square, the market and the people. Early the next morning (yes, early again!) we set off about 20 minutes north to the ruins of Ek Balam. These ruins were our favorite because they were (1) much closer together than Coba and easier to visualize the "town", and (2) they are still being uncovered so many of the ruins are still overgrown and being explored. We can't wait to go back in 5 years or so and see what else they have found! Mark couldn't believe that I wanted to climb this pyramid also since we had already climbed one - but he did it for me and immediately declared his pyramid climbing days to be o-v-e-r! They are steep and quite scary, but these were on my bucket list and I can't explain how exhilarating the experience was! The view from the top was 360 degrees, unlike Coba which was about 180 degrees. These two ruins' experiences were so different from each other, I am glad we chose them for this trip.
Many people are surprised that we didn't choose to visit Chichen Itza first as it is so famous. We decided that these two ruins were less commercialized and far fewer tourists visit them. Thus, there is more access to the various structures and you can experience more of the true flavor of the ruins. Plus, you can still climb these pyramids and you no longer can climb the one at CI. So this made sense for us. We'll see CI on another visit and it won't have changed very much from 2010, we believe, while these will change rapidly as more and more tourists come to see them.
I hope you enjoy our photos and choose to take on this adventure yourself some day! (Click the "play" button when you hover in the top left corner of the large picture).
