Let it be known: every friend from home that I meet during my travels shall receive a blog post!  This is the first home friend blog post!  Amanda, Greg, it was a pleasure:

When I first announced to my friends from home that I was going to spend the next year or so traveling (instead of sitting on my sofa for incredibly long periods of time at high frequency), my first week in Mexico happened to overlap with Amanda and Greg's planned vacation to Tulum.  I knew that I wanted to tour the Yucatan and I did not have an itinerary.  The Yucatan is so easy to get around, you can really start from any major point (i.e. Merida, Cancun, Tulum) and still see it all.  I decided after landing in Cancun to make my way down to Tulum so that I could perform my first reconnaissance mission: meeting Amanda and Greg on the beach.

We met at Sante Fe beach in Tulum.  Amanda was texting me that she was approaching and to hold my position.  I knew from scouting my position at various angles that should Amanda and Greg arrive at the rendez-vous point as scheduled, their glaring white skin and gringo outfits would stand out like the Hot Topic at the Staten Island Mall.  Soon, Amanda and Greg arrived and we gave each other big hugs and lots of love.  This was the beginning of two days together that represented so many years of friendship.  It is amazing to think that I've known Amanda since age 18 and at age 35, we can do something as lovely and adult as enjoying beers on the beach and driving around the Yucatan appreciating Mayan civilization.

When our beach afternoon ended, we headed back to our respective Tulum places and readied ourselves for the Papaya Playa Project Full Moon Party.  It would be trendy beyond our wildest expectations. It's wealthy hipster Brooklyn on the Bay.  There seemed to be a glitter theme as some women were wearing glitter makeup.  I couldn't specifically identify any gays but there were lots of bros bro-ing it up and wearing very similar button-down shirts.  The crowd did not seem to have any specific cohesion but everyone was quite attractive, drinking, doing very simple dance moves (Amanda can do an excellent impression) and keeping rather calm. 

Amanda, Greg and I spent the night beachfront, talking about life and planning our next travel day together.   They had graciously invited me to join them for their ride to the Coba ruins and see some cenotes after.  We really had such a blast together doing this.  Coba's signage could have used some cleaning up, as it was rather difficult to tell what we were looking at.  We rented bikes and made our way through the jungle appreciating the beauty around us.  Greg hiked his way up the temple.  Amanda and I stayed behind to make sure that things and what not were not bad but that they would be good and also U.S. Americans and the Iraq.

Our Coba cultural experience was topped off with a visit to the three nearby cenotes.  These were cenotes fully covered in caves.  We were mostly the only people there.  We had the entire thing to ourselves and it was beyond cool.  So many jokes in the cenote, too many to count.  Poor Greg started theorizing how we could survive an apocalypse in a cenote by gutting the fish and eating them raw.  The real issue would be, where would he go to the bathroom without being embarrassed that Amanda and I would see him?  It's a valid point.

We had a lovely lunch in the center of the town of Coba.  A day earlier, I had a lovely acai bowl specifically made for hipsters.  You see, it was at the place right across from Hostel Che.  A tiny little breakfast-only nook owned by a family from Veracruz.  They like to winter in Tulum.  The mom was making my bowl of berries and she started sharing with me some of her thoughts about her favorite places in Tulum.  She recommended Kaan Luum and wrote down the name on a sheet of paper for me.  She explained that they have a "special mud" that is very good for the skin.  I was super excited.  She said it was better than other cenotes and was kind of like its own thing. 

Naturally, I recommended Kaan Luum as our icing on the cake to our amazing day.  It was on the way to Tulum and it was going to be perfect as great. 

After we easily parked and payed our entrance fee, a guy in the parking lot showed me two pictures from Google on his phone.  He showed me the crystal blue advertising pic and the very green algae pic that he said is the current color from the rain.  I think he maybe was disappointed?  He said they won't give us our money back.  It was a weird moment but I chalked it up to a friendly local person just being really nice and maybe a bit quirky.  We made our way down a very pretty boardwalk to the bathroom changing area.  It was at this point that we saw the magic mud.  It mostly looked like mud.  It was located very close and sometimes underneath the elevated bathroom structure.  We also noted that the odor emanating from the elevated bathroom platform reminded us of the things that happen inside bathrooms that come out of our bodies.  We had to wait on line to change and the smell was just getting worse.  I think we were all in denial.  We could not possibly believe that it could get worse.  Oh, it did.

Greg and I just had to pee.  Poor Amanda had to change into her lady-bathing suit.  As Greg and I were waiting for Amanda to come out, we realized we were in a cesspool.  A real cesspool.  We started looking at the people around us in disbelief that they either knew about this already and did not care or maybe did not realize it at all?  When Amanda left the bathroom, we told her we were leaving immediately no matter what.  Poor Amanda did not seem upset at this decision as her experience in the women's changing room was so bad she had to leave the door open while changing. 

We decided to walk to the beautiful water at Kaan Luum so we could dip our feet in and say we were there.  The problem was that we could not get the stench out of our noses.  Had we all peed earlier and changed before we got there, we would have skipped the bathroom entirely and probably never known the horror.  It is now impossible for us to love Kaan Luum because of what it did to us.  The water also was not green like the guy from the parking lot showed me, so now I have no idea what that whole thing was about.

We ended our day with a spectacular dinner at Hartwood.  That's the restaurant where all of the people from the Full Moon party go to eat.  We went to two bars on the resort strip afterwards.  The last bar had a "cenote" inside of it!   It was really more like a pond with still water but whatever.  It was so cool.  The waiter was smoking a J and offered us a hit.  That was too cool for school, but we all said no.   When the night ended, we did our hugs, gave each other more love and sent each other off.

Thank you Amanda, Cenotes, Coba, Greg and Kaan Luum for being awesome, beautiful, memorable, funny and literally shitty, respectively.