Friday, 21 September 2018

Day 184 - Arriving In Playa Del Carmen!

We arrived in  Playa del Carmen just before 8am. A bit stiff,  a bit tired & a bit grumpy. My ankles were swollen as per usual.
After shouldering our packs, we walked the 1 kilometres distance to our hostel & checked in. We must of looked like Zombies, ahaha.

Tom booked the first 2 nights accommodation for Playa del Carmen & we think he must of had his fancy pants on & too many filters on the search criteria for booking.com. Our hostel reservation was in a private double room, right in the centre of town with a pool, bar, yoga retreat & restaurant, it was $50 a night. Well worth every cent & at the time we just assumed all of Playa would be like this. However if we can do it cheaper, we definitely will! Especially with South East Asia & all the resorts & luxury available there for a lot cheaper. We are meeting our close friends Nat & Dom in Thailand in November, we will save the luxury for then.
It was well worth it for the 2 nights & we met some great people there.



After checking in, we had some missions to do. We've been very lucky with hotels & hostels in Mexico giving us early check in & late check out times at no extra charge. One of the perks of travelling in the low season!
First mission was breakfast which we ate downstairs in the hostel's restaurant. After this we walked through Playa to find a laundry service, this actually took a lot longer than we planned & the first 2 we went to were shut/being renovated. We eventually found a service about 1.5 kilometres away from the hostel that did our 9 kg's of washing for 140 pesos.

The nest mission was to find Tom some new thongs, I dont now how he has been surviving all this time with only the hiking boots. We found some in a cheap souvenir shop for $9 AUD, a bit more than we would normally want to pay for pluggers, but anyway.

Next was a haircut for Tom! We went into the first barber we had seen after walking past about 50 on the way to the laundromat. Th guy did an amazing job on Tom's hair, shaping it in a really nice way to suit his face & head shape. It was one of the best haircuts I think he has ever got & for only 70 pesos.

Finally it was time to head back to the hostel and relax by the pool for a few hours before it was time to go pick the washing up & eat dinner. The first time we tried to pick the washing up, it wasn't quite ready yet, which was a little bit annoying. Tom walked back 2 hours later to pick it up. I had really bad chaffe from wearing a certain pair of denim pants, with a large seam down the inner thighs yesterday while sweating & walking around at Aluxes for 4 hours.




























For dinner, we ate at a restaurant that specialises in food from Guatemala. It was 2 different types of pancake's made from corn flour, but cooked very differently & stuffed with various vegetable fillings & salsa. It was very delicious, but strange at the same time. The flavour changed a lot from sweet to salty & it was very confusing.

The hostel offers a free hour of drinking between 8 & 9pm every night so that guest's can socialise. Tom & I were there half an hour early to try the Local Mezcal & then stocked up on free Gin & Tonic's. We were open to the idea of going out afterwards, however the gin made our lack of decent sleep the previous night int he bus very apparent & instead we hit the hay.

- Alli

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