The Adventure Mayas minivan by to pick us up at 8:15 to go on our excursions, so room service was scheduled an hour earlier. Room service came even earlier than our alarms and woke us up with another loud buzzer at our doorbell. A family of 8 from Kansas from our hotel as well as another couple from another hotel were going too, so we packed 12 of us into the van and drove towards Tulum. We passed Playa de Carmen and stopped briefly at the Adventure Mayas van station for a bathroom stop that had funny men/women signs and then continued onto Tulum. The drive was around 1 hour, 45 minutes total as we arrived in Tulum at the Mayan ruins site where there were some acrobats swinging from a tower and a Mexican marketplace, which was very convenient for us to buy the gifts we wanted to bring home for the kids. There was a tour guide for the Mayan ruins who shared some history of the Mayans such as interesting facts about their astrology and the fishing history of this settlement, plus other weird mythology stuff about snakes with feathers and the way they pierced their
faces and their skulls on purpose in order to do this. We walked around the broken stone ruins on pathways that Steve had to duck down to go through, since Mayans were short, and saw some neat structures that were right on the coast.
After leaving the ruins, our next stop was the site in the jungle where we were going to ride ATVs and explore an underground river cave, called a cenote. We drove through an unpaved road full of potholes with no street signs to get deep into the jungle. Steve was trying to pay attention to the directions in case we got stuck and needed to figure out how to get back to the main road, but even with his expert sense of direction, which he learned from being a pizza delivery boy while in high school, he might have had a hard time finding a way back. We started first with the underground river cave swimming. The cave had lights and the guide brought a flashlight, as we were also equipped with lifejackets and goggles. Right when we walked down into the caves, the flashlight showed us a group of about a hundred fruit
bats, not the bloodsucking ones, hanging from the ceiling of the cave. The water was cool and had some special calcium in it that was supposed to be good for your skin, so Tory went in at 44 years old and when she came out she looked 34. After swimming in the caves we got ready to go on the ATVs by listening to driving instructions and we buy damage insurance, which we declined since Steve wasnt going to crash again since he had already learned his lesson by crashing ATVs a few times when he was younger. We put on helmets and had an awesome or so ride through the jungle on a dirt path with tons of rocks that made it very bumpy and dusty. Steve and Tory both loved it and were glad that we did 2 single riders instead of a double rider on one ATV. We rode back to the hotel then cooled off in the pool, dipped in the jacuzzi, then showered and got ready for dinner. The greek restaurant Olios food was not great so we left and went back to the Japanases restaurant for sushi before calling it a night.
