Ruinas de Tulúm y Cenote Dos Ojos

Yesterday evening I arrived in Tulúm, a small town at the beach in the Caribbean south of Cancún and about halfway to the border to Belize. I only visited the beach shor, so a post about the beach will follow in some days. In Tulúm, if you want to go anywhere you just take the bike. So my hostel offers to borrow bikes for free - and some of them are really frightening. The first one sounded like it will break in all its parts everytime I pedaled. Also, the chain fell of twice. I was lucky that everytime a helpful guy was near that got it back into its place. So I discovered the bikes don't like to be driven faster than grandma-speed. And that is how I discover Tulúm at the moment.

In the morning I visited the ruins of the mayan city Zama, now known as Tulúm, a city that was built 400 a.d. and controled the yucatan area until the spains arrived at the continent. The city is really lovely and the view is amazing. It even has its own caribbean beach. I was lucky to get there so early, just when the site opened, so the area was not filled with tourists - there were about 6 people at the site. When I got out, about 50 people were waiting at the ticket office, and another 100 were on their way to the ticket office.

At noon, I headed to the cenote "Dos Ojos" (= two eyes), which was recommended by the husband of the hostel owner, a german guy now living in Tulúm. It is one of the biggest cenotes in the area - actually they are two cenotes - and surrounded by some kind of park with lots of small cenotes. They are called ojos, because they are like circles of water with some kind of island in the middle. At Ojo Uno you only had a small part to swim, and only professional divers were allowed to dive through the tunnels "into the underworld".

Ojo Dos was bigger, you could nearly swim the hole circle (which is about as big as the half of a football field), and there were also tunnels for professional divers. It is really a paradise for diving. The water is so clear you feel like looking through glass. It feels like you can touch the ground if you just dip your finger into the water, while the water actually is about 4 meters deep. There were no colorful fishes to watch, only small brown ones and lots of stone formations, but it still was an amazing experience. All the divers needed some underwater flashlights for the tunnels because it got really dark in there. Most of the people explored the Ojos with snorkels, but I decided not to borrow or buy one, because I am fine with holding my breath pretty long. It's like I am more made for diving than swimming. I even thought about starting professional diving as a hobby but then I realized this might just be another expensive hobby I will never be willing to spend my money for.

After I explored both of the eyes underwater, I decided to relax a little and got to the rest area - some trees with hammocks inbetween them. It was so comfortable that in the end I just chilled there some hours. And then went for another dive in the cenote and so on. I didn't leave the park until all the shop owners started packing their stuff. Now I am absolutely sure that we need some cenotes in Austria!