Tulum - Paradise Lost

Tulum was a name I heard up and down the Americas. People raved about the place. Everyone on the web had good things to say. But for me, it wasn't quite what I had expected.

Lazy days in the lazy waves

The one thing I heard over and over again was how beautiful the area around Tulum is, and it absolutely was. Lush Yucatec forest, white sand beaches, turquoise water and fascinating Caribbean wildlife surrounds the area. You can see Iguanas, Sea Turtles, colourful tropical fish and enough parrots to fill the shoulders of every pirate in the seven seas. I took so many photos that I filled up my camera, deleted some, then filled it again. There are some really cool ruins nearby as well. Not as breathtaking as Chichen Itza, but still good. There are cenotes too of course, and I went with friends to a cool festival held next to one of them. 

To say that this place is a natural paradise is an understatement. However...

I couldn't love it. At one point this place had been a well-kept secret, a quiet haven compared to the busyness of Cancun or its neighbours, Playa del Carmen or Isla Mujeres. Over the last ten years it has become more and more popular, to the point where it is becoming just another resort town. Most of the once tranquil beachfront is only available to paying customers. Alternative retreats featuring the latest in whatever nonsense the cashed up hippie community is peddling this season dominate the scene. Even the town of Tulum, set a couple of kilometres back from the beach and once the place to go for bargain accomodation and a more local experience, has become extremely pricey and no longer has any local feel. 

They wanted 300 pesos to sit in the chairs so we set up right next to them in protest.

This kind of stuff bothers me for two reasons. It's partly because once the moneyed tourists move in, natural wonders of a place are no longer everyone's to enjoy, as I found out when some resort staff informed me that it would be a 400 peso ($30AUD) charge for my friends and I to set up our towels in the shade of a tree just a few metres from the ocean. It also means that the nature is exploited unsustainably. For example, I went with a group to a turtle beach which included a couple of biologists who were shocked at how poorly the environment was being conserved for the endangered turtles.

Mostly, it bothers me because in a small community like Tulum, the fabric of the community is changed forever. The tourists that stay in the resorts, and even the glamour backpackers who stay in the fancier hostels don't really come to spend time in the community. They aren't mindful of how their actions impact the local area, they're just there to do what they want - drink, eat familiar food and be waited on hand and foot then post it to instagram. I felt it most in the way that locals talked to me - almost every conversation I had with locals was people trying to sell me things. Very few were interested in just having a chat with someone new like people had been in other places.

One good chat I had was with a Mayan bloke who was selling souvenirs near the ruins. Among them were some traditional wooden war masks that had NFL logos plastered on them. He said he hated selling those things. He was proud of being Mayan, proud of the fact that schools in his state were finally teaching the regional Mayan language alongside Spanish, and proud of his heritage. The NFL masks were a corruption of his culture, but as he said himself, a peso is a peso, and Americans buy them.

For me, this was the darker side of tourism. Tulum, once a hidden gem, is now little more than a tourist colony where foreign money swills around and drains out back to the United States. From what I understand, the locals get to keep very little of the financial benefit their extraordinary home has brought them. I hate negatively reviewing places, but some of them just deserve it.

Friends, do yourselves a favour. Stay elsewhere.

This photo reminds me of the Bikini Atoll nuclear test picture



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Huarmey - Mud, Sweat and Volunteers

Image
Mariciela in what used to be her bedroom After hearing so much about volunteering from other friends on the road, I decided to give up a couple of weeks to volunteer in a small town badly hit by flooding in March this year. So after a 23 hour bus to Lima, a night in the capital and another 5 hour bus up the coast, I found myself at the scene of one of the most catastrophic disasters to hit Peru in decades. Around the time I was flying into South America, most of the coastal provinces of Peru, normally a desert area, were subject to more rain than they would normally get in a year in a less than week. A lot of significant damage was done in the north of the country which is where most of the disaster response has occurred, but next to the small but important provincial town of Huarmey, the normally very placid local river became a raging torrent that sent flood water as high as 2 metres in two separate floods a few days apart. Before... The organisation I work for, All ...
Read more

Chicken Bus Fear - Should You Catch One?

To get around Central America without wheels of your own, you have two options: chicken buses, or tourist shuttles. Many travellers are nervous of chicken buses and choose to pay very high prices for shuttles, but you don't need to! Here is my list of reasons for shaking off the chicken bus fear and taking the wild ride with the locals: - Chicken buses are cheap! The general price for an inter-city chicken bus is about $1-2 per hour of driving. For example, the bus between Leon and Managua that takes around 2 hours generally costs 50-60 Cordoba or $2, while the minimum shuttle price is $9 for the same amount of time! - There's snacks on chicken buses! Nicaragua in particular has a thriving network of people dedicated to selling fresh food on chicken buses. Whether you want some fresh baked corn bread, donuts with treacle sauce, coconut bread, hot tamales, pineapple pastry popcorn, sweets or just some fruit and veg, the chicken buses have it all. The vendors board the bus ...
Read more

La Vida Nica - Chicken Buses

Image
I thought I would end my blog's long hiatus by doing a few posts about the 6 months I spent in Central America, most of that in Nicaragua. First up in the series is the iconic method of public transport in all Central American countries: the Chicken Bus! These types of buses run inter-city and suburban transport routes across Central America. The name comes from the habit of some locals to take their farm animals with them, and the name has stuck in the tourist community. It isn't as common as people make it out to be - I think in over 100 chicken bus rides I only saw a handful of chickens and a few boxes of chicks. That said, it does always make you giggle when you hear the box above your head tweeting as you drive. To run the bus you need at least two people: the chofer  (driver) and at least one  ayudante  (assistant). The driver's job is simple: navigating the route in as little time as possible, usually achieved through driving that would make Vin Diesel ...
Read more