Hi everybody,
As I have already told you in other posts, my idea was to go to Argentina and start touring all South America. In September 2021 Argentina was closed to tourism and in South America in general, it was still difficult to travel.
As we wanted to have a beach and we had already been to Mexico twice (and we had liked it), we opted for this country again to spend a few months until the situation normalized.
I wanted to go to Sayulita, but I ruled it out because I couldn’t find any decent accommodation for our budget. We decided to go to Playa del Carmen because we saw in blogs and reviews that perhaps it was different from Tulum; We had been there in 2018 and we didn’t like it at all. Also, we had seen good accommodations on Airbnb.
Thus, after 48 hours of travel, we arrived in Playa del Carmen.
Going in the taxi from the airport I already found everything very ugly.
The first day we went out for a walk, we realized that this was not what we expected at all.
Downtown Playa del Carmen is ugly and dirty. Then there is an urbanization called Playa Car and it is a little more decent, it is where most of the North Americans live. It is not bad, but it gives the feeling of being in something that is false.
The beach in the center is horrible and the hotels are practically in the water.
Towards the Xcaret side are all the mega massive resorts and at the end, right next to Xcaret, we found a little piece of beach that is almost virgin. It was a wonderful beach that was almost always beautiful, and it saved our stay in Playa del Carmen, we went there every weekend to spend the day. Also, as you had to walk a lot to get there, there were no people.
As there are no accesses since the resorts closed everything, the only way to get there was to walk from where Playa Car began.
Just before we reached our idyllic beach, there was a hotel that looked different because it had a lot less people and the buildings were at a normal distance from the sea. Then we saw that it was a vegan resort with prices starting at $900 per night. We loved it until we saw the price.
We also went to explore to the opposite side of the Xcaret and that is the area where the locals go to. There are some kilometers without resorts and with public accesses. Then you can see some hotels, but less massive. This part had a nicer vibe than the resort area.
In this part you can also see garbage because most of the locals are as pigs as the tourists and since there are no resorts, nobody cleans the beach. Here we found a little piece of beach that was also special, without people and with palm trees from which we got a few coconuts.
We spent the first month very well in terms of temperature. Even at night it was cold for me. After a month there, apart from the fact that all the possible problems with the accommodation began, it also began to be unbearably hot, so the last 3 weeks seemed eternal, and we wanted to leave.
A funny anecdote is that we had the return flight in 6 months, but since we could not show it at the time of entering the country because we did not have Wi-Fi, instead of putting us the 6-month stay in the immigration form, they wrote 2 months. I was upset because if we stayed more than 2 months, we were going to have to pay a fine of around $80 per person.
I was already prepared to start my battle against all the ministries that were necessary, but the first day I already lost the desire to be there for more than 2 months. In fact, the last 2 weeks the thinking was like “Thanks god we didn’t even get to spend the full two months in this crap.”
After having gone through a global pandemic and having been much more attentive to hygiene (if possible), in Playa del Carmen I totally ruled out going to a restaurant or eating anything on the street because I realized the poor hygiene in preparing and handling food.
In short, I do not even recommend Playa del Carmen for vacations. There are more beautiful, cheaper, less massive places and where the environment is taken care of. To live much less because there is not even a decent sidewalk; life would be very limited living in such a place because there is not even a well-stocked supermarket.
It is a place destroyed by mass tourism where people go to get drunk and high. In fact, I think those who leave delighted is because they were drunk all the time. In the pedestrian street we always saw people drugged already from noon and even the locals were seen drunk since the morning.
Of course, the rest of the people looked happy. You saw them walking barefoot in the street kicking the garbage, on the beach taking photos next to the garbage, and bathing when the water was brown and smelled like a sewer.
Diego and I felt weird about being “so demanding” and expecting everything to be clean.
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