Almuerzo en Tulum

Like I said, the visitors center was a tourist trap; I wanted at least one truly authentic experience on the trip and I wasn't about to let anything (language barriers, crime, the potential for serious GI distress) stand in my way. No, we would get some tacos.

I explained - in what Spanish I could muster - to our driver that we wanted to go into Tulum proper (five minutes from the ruins) for lunch. The driver wanted to stay and eat at "one of the two" restaurants at the visitors center. My ass. What followed was a brief, likely comic, argument whereby I informed him that we had the van for three more hours and would be going into Tulum for lunch. The argument ended either when I ran out of vocabulary to mangle or with the offer to buy him lunch, I forget. Anyway, we headed into town and had an excellent lunch at Taqueria El Mariachi, which I had read about in a guidebook.

These were arracheras, sort of a precursor to the fajita, usually with just onions instead of onions and bell peppers. Very nice. Beckett and Brenden had two orange drinks eats. The non-driving men had a few Sols and felt life was quite nice, you know?

Every few miles on the highway there'd be these pointless checkpoints. Basically just Mexican dudes with AR-15s waving all the traffic over some speedbumps.

Beckett and I had to go (Sols and orange drinks, you know), so we stopped the van - strangely enough within a hundred yards of the checkpoint - and did our business. Beckett has not learned the lessons of discrete public indecency. I blame all the time he spent around our good friend Tom during his formative years.


Brenden is clearly not sure what to think of his cousin. A little weird for sure.