Budget Travel: Tulum, Mexico

For spring break this year, A and I decided to take a trip out of the country and into Mexico. We ventured to a town about an hour and a half south of Cancun and 45 min south of Playa del Carmen called Tulum. Right now, Tulum is an up and coming tourist destination, so it doesn't have the craziness associated Cancun and even Playa del Carmen. Which also means, that it doesn't have the same accommodations as either of the two bigger cities. Tulum has yet to have an all-inclusive, Apple Vacation type of hotel. Rather, it has all these cabanas along the beaches of the Yucatan peninsula. So for $90 a night, we had a small one room with a bathroom house made of adobe with a thatched roof. Since all the cabanas along the beach run on their own generators, we only had electricity whenever the sun went down. The bathroom had a toilet, sink and a shower with hot water. Since the cabanas are a little rustic, we would get our occasional bugs running around and at night we would get eaten up by mosquitoes if we didn't put on bug spray. However, the white sandy beaches and the warm clean water completely made up for the night of mosquito bites. We would get a stretch of beach that was basically ours. Since our area only had 8 cabanas, we pretty much had a decent sized area of the beach to just ourselves. When we wanted to eat, we would walk down the beach to different restaurants which were located in the other hotel cabanas or we would take a taxi to downtown Tulum (about a $6 taxi ride). There was such a huge variety of restaurants within walking distance from our cabana and a lot of great restaurants in downtown Tulum. We wish we could have eaten at more places while we were down there, but every restaurant that we went to gave us so much food that we were completely stuffed. Since this is a bit rustic, it is not for everyone, especially the all inclusive type, but for the others, like A and I, this is a great escape from the real world. We will definitely go back to Tulum again next year and most likely back to the same cabanas.