Hell’s Half Acre

We finally made it to Bead Beach! I had to wake the boys from a deep sleep at 2pm, but they were happy to be included. They only stayed up to 5am this morning. We used to go to Beach Beach somewhat frequently until Hurricane Dean last year, and then all the signage we used to figure out which road to take were obliterated. Every time we’ve driven down to Tulum I check out the side roads and the last few times I thought I had figured out the approach to the beach. In Mexico, the beaches are supposed to be open to everyone but when a MegaResort builds on a beach it can be very difficult to get to the beach. That they are supposed to allow all Mexicans to use. I guess there is still access since the water isn’t walled off.

Anyway, Bead Beach is situated at the end of two MegaResorts. I honestly don’t even know which ones. That would probably make it easier to find, but I just look for the access road I’ve managed to memorize. Through massive throngs of resort-people our family trudged looking for our spot where we usually look for treasure. Past the red red red sunburnt people. Do people not realize when they are sunburnt? I have to ask because almost each and every person we saw was RED RED RED and NOT covering up! No t-shirts, no towels - nothing to save them from the sun (they’d obviously had WAY too much of). Course, it did provide much entertainment for Jamie and I while the kids frolicked. I had a really hard time finding “our spot” because the resort has gotten MUCH larger since the last time we were there and we finally figured out that they had almost (but not quite) obliterated “our spot”.

I know we MUST have stuck out like six giant sore thumbs trudging up the beach with plaid plastic bag of towels (colorful, not the blue resort ones), bag of horses (doesn’t everyone travel with a bag of plastic horses?), cooler bag with giant water bottle, mucho snorkel equipment and our treasure hunting materials, a plastic box, a small garbage can lid (honestly!), and other crap. Yes. Sore Thumbs indeed.

We’ll be going back soon though, as lounging on the loungers under a shady palapa, watching all the RED tourists, the kids playing on the whales (protectors of the beach erosion) and hunting for treasure makes for a more than marvelous afternoon. I’m not sure it gets any better than this.

Treasure courtesy of El Matancero. Sissy picks our destination next week, but we’ll definitely be coming back to Bead Beach. This time we’ll drag food down too.

UPDATE:  Why, oh why, did NO-ONE alert me to the plethora of typos in this post???