The sound of waves here is constant; I hear them as I sit on the white sand beach, I hear them when I am in bed, laying in the dark under the mosquito netting, and perhaps I hear them in my sleep. They are gentle waves of turquoise blue water and they don’t so much strike the shore as they massage it.
Jen and I arrived in Tulum a few days ago and we are staying in a cabana on the beach about 5 Km south of the Tulum ruins. Our cabana is literally a shack of thin wooden sticks with a thatch roof. The floor is sand and there are two-inch gaps between the sticks in the wall – hence the mosquito netting.
This place has as great a claim on the title of "Paradise" as any place I’ve yet to see. For 300 pesos a night we have been staying at the Cabanas Copal, which has no electricity but instead has a bright green lizard that lives outside of our cabana and I think this is a pretty good trade. Without any electric lights, the stars are very vivid and we can see the dim glowing belt of the Milky Way as it stretches from horizon to horizon. The stars are so bright that it seems like even the ocean is full of their thousand shimmering points. This isn't too far off, we discover. The ocean has its own stars – there are bio-luminescent creatures (probably dinoflagelets) no bigger than a period on a page that glow when disturbed. When Jen and I go swimming at night, stardust swirls around our bodies.
Tonight we are moving about 200 feet down the beach to the cabanas at the Papaya Playa Cabanas, trading our green lizard for 100 less pesos a night. We spend our days here laying on the beach and snorkeling in the clear, shimmering water. We've seen lobsters, barracuda, shimmering coral fish, and dark holes, which must be cenotes, that leak cold fresh water from the sea floor. The fresh water does not mix well with the salt water and it creates similar swirls to when you shake oil and vinegar in salad dressing.
The down side to this paradise (and doesn’t is seem as if every paradise has a catch) are the bugs. Since we are basically outdoors all of the time (the exception being when we are under the mosquito net), we are an all day buffet for the local insect life. I itch all the time – but it’s not too bad of a price to pay. Afterall, I can hear the waves in my sleep and when I go swimming at night, I see star dust coming from my finger tips.
