So the reason for the radio silence is that my wife and I just got back from a very nice vacation in Tulum, Mexico, where we have been so many times it feels practically like a vacation home. This winter was brutal in the Northeast and we were in serious need of some warm, sunny beach time, which that magical place on the Mexican Caribbean never fails to provide.

I first went to Tulum in the 90s just for a quick visit while staying at Isla de Mujeres off of Cancun and Playa del Carmen up the road (now a sprawling metropolis in its own right), mainly just to see the seaside Mayan ruins. That led to my wife and I going down there for spring vacations beginning in the early 2000s. We initially stayed at Cabanas Copal and then Azulik towards the north end of the resort area many times. At first there weren’t that many hotels in the whole Tulum strip and virtually none south of the small checkpoint down the road from Zamas, essentially only the Maya Tulum yoga spa right on the spit of the small bay, then a little down the road/beach there was Posada Margherita, the original Tulum “destination” restaurant run by some charming Italian ex-pats with help from some very sandy dogs, and just a few other small places scattered on the beach along accessible by dirt road. Hemingway on the beach — which despite the name does not have a real bar! — and El Tábano, on the inland side of the road and still serving up wonderful Mexican comfort food cooked up by a troop of hard working abuelas, were some of the last restaurants and hotels that far south, not including a few exotic outliers tucked into the palms on the beach and in the jungle.

This time we stayed at the very reasonable and good Coco Tulum Hotel on that once-sparsely developed southern part. But now, after countless fashion photo shoots and ad campaigns, as well as travel write-ups in pretty much every major publication in the US and abroad, that southern strip between the checkpoint and the Sian Ka’an Biosphere is packed back-to-back with places to stay and eat. Due to the ease of travel from the East Coast (it’s about a three and a half hour flight to Cancun from New York and then about an hour and a half drive down to Tulum) and the magic of the name “Tulum”, snowbirds flock there in ever increasing numbers. Thankfully, it never feels crowded or overpopulated on the beach side because it is so long and the resorts all have their own large sectors. But inland you find that it is absolutely hopping. It’s startling to see tattooed hipsters from Brooklyn and well to do people from all over the world, as well as the traditional backpackers, jamming the paved roads and pathways of what used to be a rutted trail unsuitable for bicycles. There’s even a must-try restaurant, Hartwood, where people line up for dinner reservations in the early afternoon as if it were Per Se in Manhattan. I hear great things about it but there’s no way I’m spending my vacation trying to make the scene in what is to me an escape from all that sort of pretentious jive. Not that there’s anything wrong with it…

The Bay at Zamas at sunset

In fact, as it’s turned out with the way the southern sector has been (over) developed, it’s the northern “town” section that’s most like it was a decade ago. There’s still the little convenience store where you can get bottled water, sunscreen and tequila, although now the ATM out front spits out American dollars instead of pesos (in fact there are a lot of ATMs spread all throughout Tulum, a far cry from the traveler’s check days of yore). And there’s still Zamas with its spectacular bay view so perfect at sunset for watching squadrons of pelicans and gulls dive for fish as you sip a margarita and then move over to its solid restaurant serving a pleasing variety of Yucatanian and Italian fare often accompanied by live music. (My big cavil about the current state of Tulum resort cuisine: too much damn Italian food and not enough solid Mexican offerings — you can’t all be Posada Margherita, guys — give me more banana leaf-wrapped fish in sour orange sauce with rice and beans and less pizza & pasta, please!) Again, it is absolutely stunning to see that the area that was once the most rustic and sparse, that southern strip, is now chock-a-block with resorts and restaurants on both sides of the road.

Obviously, though, I can understand why. It’s great for the local economy — the taxi drivers alone are kept constantly busy ferrying people from one groovy restaurant to another. The endless beach is made of beautiful soft white sand and the water tends to be choppy, at least when we go, and sometimes seaweed-y but always gorgeously turquoise in color and delightfully warm. It is still pleasingly low light at night for the sea turtles and in March-April there is a steady breeze that keeps you from feeling hot in the day even if you’re laying out for 6 hours at a time. That breeze also makes Tulum perfect for kite surfing, which has really taken off as a recreation in that densely populated southern zone. Watching those guys go speeding and flying through the waves is pretty good entertainment and next time I’m down there I just might try to learn that skill. And the overall vibe remains very cool and pleasant despite the increase in volume, with the locals being very kind and generous and the visitors all seeming to exude blissful contentment. When a place is that beautiful, you’d really have to work to not be happy.

We rented a Jeep 4×4 and took a day to drive down past the hubbub and into the Sian Ka’an Biosphere, the massive nature preserve and Unesco world heritage site featuring largely unspoiled jungle, beaches and mangrove forests teaming with wildlife. We drove all the way down to Punta Allen, which is about midway between Tulum and the Belize border on that East Coast side. Now, it’s only 40 kilometers from Tulum to Punta Allen but the road gets rougher and rougher and the last 4-5k or so is so deeply rutted and cratered that you have to drive it in low 4-wheel drive. It was a blast doing that sort of off-road rally-style driving and I definitely see the rugged appeal of a true 4×4 now. There’s not really much to do in Punta Allen unless you’ve arranged a fishing trip or boat ride out for some snorkeling or scuba. So we basically drove it just for the hell of it and to say we’d done it.

Punta Allen

On the way back we stopped at one of the very few hotels currently extant in the Biosphere, Sol Caribe, and had some amazing fish tacos for lunch. The beach was gorgeous and uninhabited as far as the eye could see, just like the southern Tulum strip had been when my wife and I first started going there over a decade ago. And I wondered how long it would be before the big money got to the local government and softened the restrictions for development in Sian Ka’an. If I were a betting man I would say that in the next decade the resorts will invade the Biosphere and spread down from Tulum proper because the demands of vacationers to visit this beautiful place seems to have no limits. The hotel business in Tulum is simply minting money so how long can an environmental heritage site hold out against that pressure for more jobs and ever more places for reasonably well-off people to stay and spend their money?

And it came to me that you can bitch and moan about the places that you once “discovered” changing and growing beyond your original experience of them but it doesn’t do any damn good. Sure, it sucks when a special place loses its character because everybody now knows the secret and sees all the things that you originally saw that make it so special. But that is the nature of the passage of time. Nothing stays the same just because you want it to, not New York, not Frisco, not Brooklyn, not Tulum, Mexico. When the word gets disseminated nowadays the word is out to millions in the blink of an eye. It’s possible that there won’t be that many quiet, untrodden places to visit on the planet in another hundred years or so. They won’t all be big cities, of course, but they’ll be more Wi-Fi’d up and more generic than they used to be when you really had to work to get somewhere remote and be truly off the grid. The only solution I can see is to get the most out of these special places while you can and maybe keep an eye out for other ones that are only just now coming to broader attention even if the journey is a little further. Time changes everything, including ourselves. There’s no stopping it no matter how you might wish to. It changed Tulum and I’ve watched it happen over the course of 6 or 7 trips spaced out over nearly 20 years. It’s still a great place to vacation and get away from a New York winter. But it’ll never be what it once was and going forward it won’t even be what it is right now the next time we visit. It’s a strange thing to be aware of that kind of change. But then that’s what happens when you know a place like Tulum so well for so long.

So my advice, my experience, is that when you find a special place in this world, wherever it may be, be it city, country or far flung foreign land, enjoy the hell out of it while you’re living in it. Because even while you’re experiencing it, in some small or even large way, it’s changing around you. That’s the only constant in this world and it happens much faster than it used to.