“Oh. Mexico’s Byron Bay,” said a friend doubtfully when I revealed my plans to visit the increasingly fashionable – and pricey – seaside town of Tulum on Mexico’s Caribbean Coast. No shade on Byron Bay, of course, but I paled slightly. Crochet bikinis and handwritten neon signs behind palm-fringed alfresco cocktail bars have their place but I didn’t really want to spend too much time feeling like I was at Coachella-sur-Mer.
Tulum sits on the site of one of the greatest lost Mayan cities, one that dates back at least 1500 years. Surely it hasn’t been completely surrendered to the influencers and rich ravers?
Thankfully, I discovered that if you’re willing to put in a bit of legwork, the state of Quintana Roo, where Tulum is found, and the neighbouring Yucatán – which together make up that nubbin-y bit of the country that juts out into the Caribbean Sea like a jaunty thumbs-up – have many secrets to explore. This is our luxury guide to Tulum, Mexico.
The cuisine in this area is still heavily influenced by the Mayans, who valued spices and underground slow-cooking, as well as ingredients and techniques brought in by the invading Spanish and even the Dutch and Lebanese who have all made footprints on this land.
The cenotes – deep, jewel-blue freshwater pools that dot the north of the peninsula in a large curve, like a sapphire necklace – are some of the most beautiful and mysterious natural formations on earth. It’s worth tasting a little of the party in Tulum. But then get out and try everything else.
Where to stay in Tulum
Casa Malca
Casa Malca is a luxury beachfront hotel, filled with extravagant art and a fabulous and mysterious underground pool. According to rumour it was once owned by the late drug boss Pablo Escobar.
Maroma
Just north of Tulum, Belmond’s Maroma Riviera Maya is another luxurious option, with seaside vistas and a sun-bleached palette for a holiday state of mind.
The best restaurant in Tulum
My guide for this trip is Jose Luis Hinostroza, the executive chef of Arca restaurant, which recently earned a mention in the very first Mexico Michelin guide. Hinostroza also led Noma’s Tulum pop-up in 2017. If you’re going to eat anywhere in Tulum, Arca is where you want to go (that, and the cheap and tasty roadside Taqueria Honorio).
For my 13-course tasting experience beneath palms dotted with dancing lights like fireflies, Hinostroza prepares a sonnet to the sea; rich with sweet slivers of queen clam and geoduck, soft shell crab and spiky Caribbean lobster.
A jungle-fresh aguachile is made with sea urchin, screw snail, marigolds and mandarin, and served in a knobbled shell of avocado skin. Whole scarlet Campeche prawns are topped with green and gold discs of plantain and powdered chaya, or Mayan spinach, while layers of jungle gooseberry and abalone conceal a smooth base of dzikilpak, a traditional Mayan dip made from tomatoes and pumpkin seeds.
His flavours are so powerful they almost vibrate. “Mexicans love sour and chilli and salty. We aggressively season,” he explains. “We are always looking for more flavour.”
Tulum’s lively food markets
We continue our flavour hunt at the 100-year-old produce market Mercado Donato Bates in the Spanish colonial town of Valladolid. In 2012, the Mexican government designated Valladolid one of its Pueblos Mágicos, a place of deep “cultural richness”.
If the stalls filled with crackling castacán – Yucatán-style pork belly – and mountains of sunset-orange mamey sapote fruit and deep purple caimito, or star apple, are any indication, it’s also a place of deep culinary richness. The highlight is a taco from the florid and wide-smiling Don Nacho Díaz Taqueria.
Filled with cochinita pibil, Mayan-style barbecue pork cooked underground with achiote paste, black pepper, bitter orange and allspice leaves, it drips savoury juices down my wrists. “Tacos here are more saucy and stewy and braised,” Hinostroza explains. “In the north it’s about that burnt, Maillard reaction, charred flavour like al pastor. I can see the beauty in both.”
I can see beauty in almost everything in this region. The smoke-filled cantina in Valladolid where we retire later to smash mezcal shots and chilli-dipped orange segments to a rusty hurdy-gurdy version of The Entertainer wheezing over the crackling stereo.
A street-stall marquesita, a cigar-shaped deep-fried waffle stuffed with dulce de leche and salty cheese that tastes like Edam, a snack likely invented by the Dutch who’d stop in the region on the way to their Caribbean colonies. A morning spent watching cooks lower rows of pork longaniza – sausage – over deep ashy firepits behind a restaurant called Ahumados in Temozón, a region famous for its smoked meat.
The Tulum cenote to visit
And then, there’s the beauty of the landscape, some of it man-made, some of it carved from millennia of natural forces. The Toltec-built Chichén Itzá is the most famous in the Yucatán, but we head to the less-visited Mayan site Ek’ Balam, circa 300 AD, to climb its giddily high pyramid. If this were Australia there’d be handrails and warning signs but here we’re able to pick our way gingerly up the steep crumbling steps, getting a good sense of what it must have been like to be one of the “chosen ones” marched to their sacrificial end.
More than anywhere else I am bewitched by the beauty of the deep blue pool, strewn with twisted vines and mossed rocks, that is the Hubiku Cenote. “Hubiku” means “great lord” in the Mayan language and they believed this natural freshwater pool marked the entry to the underworld. Modern science has determined that the cenotes were formed by the impact of a catastrophic meteorite that killed the dinosaurs, which also created sinkholes in the limestone bedrock that filled with rainwater and there is something very powerful about their presence. It feels like being inside an ancient, liquefied gemstone as I duck dive beneath the surface into its deep, graduated blue.
Rising into the cool cave air with my hair plastered to my neck like seaweed, I exhale, imagining the unexplored depths of ancient nothingness stretching far beneath my paddling feet. Tulum might seem like a town that’s all about glamorous superficiality. But there’s a lot going on if you dive beneath the surface.
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