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El Faro Hotel & Beach Club
Calle 10 N. & Zona Federal Maritima (right on the damn beach)
52-987-30970
mail@hotelfaro.com
My faithful readers (and even the faithless sluts that grab little peeks at other guides on the side) have figured out by now that I travel light and sleep cheap, that I consider $20 hotels an outrageous expense--especially in places like Mexico where you should be able to stay cheap as dirt. Some may have also noticed a slight condescension towards those who lap luxury, especially the numerous tribe with more money than good sense. So it may come as a shock that I'm about to recommend a Mexican "Hotel and Beach Club", basically just cabañas right on the sand, where rooms range from $85 a night to over $200. Needless to say I didn't PAY for it, I was the guest of...let's just say an admirer who should have known better.
Playa Carmen, of all places! Tourists trapped up against the water and swilling about aimlessly. Being fatuous in Italian. A system of one-way streets into dead ends that would turn The Dalai Lama into a serial roadrager. And yet here, right in the middle of all this, is El Faro. The place is just so nice. You walk up off the beach on a clever little steps that gives you the option of passing with your feel dry or sluicing the nasty sand of your toes. Into a tropical garden with pool ( in case the Caribbean right there in front of you escapes your attention). The rooms surround the courtyard at various levels, and are exactly what you'd expect of a tropical luxury hotel: queen and king beds, big lazy balconies and patios, white cloth, thatch ceilings, marble baths (big enough for three adults, as it turns out). And more things you'd be stupid to expect in a tropical escape: direct dial phones (?), air-conditioning, free Internet access (the HBO of the future). Absolutely tiptop, this place--all the goodies to pamper yourself into total exhaustion, but with a beachcomber feel. Oh, and they throw in breakfast. Well, they don't throw it in, although we requested that at some point. But they don't charge you to eat it, is my point. Breakfast club by the sea, wrapped in snow white sheets, tippling hair of chihuahua. Olé, baby.
I'm not going into all that pricing structure nonsense. What the hell is a "Junior Suite" anyway? Is it waiting to grow a hide-a-bed? A tip-out? Only for size 4 and under? Named after an egotist? Who cares? You can get the prices, and pics, etc. from their website. It's a great place to kick back: share it with somebody you just can't believe would give you a tumble.
Hotel Posada Sian-Ka'an
Avenue 5 between 2nd and 4th N. (50 yards from the beach)
52-987-3-02-02
jaguar@plaa.com.mx
God knows who reads these things, but let's just say you're not some pseudo-rich jerk who can sleep comfortably in a $250 hotel room and needs to be right on the sand so he can drink by the pool. Let's also say you're not some self-impoverished stumblebum who quails at the idea of paying over $20 a night. Let's also say you are a bit of a hedonist, but have some taste and appreciation for nice, simple things with some grace about them. In that case, the Sian Ka-an is perfect for you. I just love this place.
It's not really a very Mexican place (except the painting of the buxom swimmer on the wall behind the open-air shower) but it's very definitely Caribbean. I liked it a first glance, a big square white house with balconies, like a planter's home in Jamaica. Little porches of unfinished wood beam hang out to catch breezes and view the sea, there's even a big tree growing up through the roof. A very offhand, unselfconscious kind of romance the place has. It also has kitchenettes and a laundry, but does NOT have TV or A.C. The "eco" word gets mentioned, but really it's just not that kind of place. It's the kind of place where you live in airy rooms with great views and just dig it, go out and take pictures to show your bored and jealous friends. And when you leave, you walk out the little gate and either turn right to shopping and coffee houses and terminal chic, or left Fonto a white sand beach where an expanse of shifting blue awaits your pleasure. Personally, I think this is the nicest place in Playa and rooms range from about $25 a night up to $40 for marine views. Beat that.
Don't worry about the weird name. It's common in Mexico, for some reason, for places to be called "Hotel" and "Posada" (meaning "Inn") at the same time. And in the Yucatan a word like "Sian Ka-an" (from the Mayan: "Place of the Site of the Location of the Spot") is no big deal. They have places around here named Oxkutscab and Tixcogob, man. Dzilbalchan, Dzinup, Xclakal, Xul-Ha, Hochob, Holbox, Xkaladzonof, X-Masil, Chikinzlofla. There's even an Xpo, but it ain't pronounced like they do in Houston. So do what everybody else does, fake it. The Mayas themselves can't pronounce these things. I mean, come on...Xclaf? They just put the names on the map to confuse invading armies. It didn't work. But it sure freaked out my spell checker. Check the website, Xzkcl.ctlom.
Siesta Fiesta Hotel/ Posada Freud
8710 Fifth Avenue, Centro
siestafiesta50@hotmail.com
If the "Hotel Posada" Sian Ka-an bothered your sense of wording, you'll love the Siesta Fiesta. Or, you're liable to love it anyway if like the idea of something cute, wacky, and jungly in the way of a place to hang. The S/F runs back from 5th Avenue (one street in from the beach) like a alleyway lined with towering rooms twined into jungle vines and created with a fine sense of total anarchy. Windows and balconies jut out at random. (Some of the services are also randomized--the girls in the room next to me had no door to their balcony during a cold, windy "norte" last night and ended up in the peculiar position of being so cold they couldn't sleep in the tropics). Rooms vary wildly, so take a look before you leap. Everything is wildly here in fact, except the stodgy German owner. This place is just a lot of fun, a treehouse sort of deal. The Ewoks stay here on vacation. Rooms run $20 to 30 (depending on if they have doors?) but in high season bump up another quick $10.
The S/F was once one with the similar hotel next door to it, the Posada Freud (and don't even get me started on a name like that) but a sale and subsequent activities caused them to be separated by the ugly concrete "Berlin Wall". The Freud is different from the Siesta Fiesta, but just as wacked-out in a different way--more Peter Pan than Ewok or Tarzan. It's higher priced than the S/F for some reason, but cool enough for memories and quiet enough for Freudian sleeps.
Complimento La Ruina/ Cafe Sofia
Right on the damn beach, foot of Second Street
Ruina -- 304-95
Sofia --??
You might notice, I didn't like much of the scene in Playa del Carmen. Which is not to say that you wouldn't. Especially if you like sunshine and endless coffee chatter, speak Italian, and have nice tits that you want to sun dry. Some neat hotels, though. But pricey. It might not seem that way to you, reading this in the States, but around here anybody worth their backpack and Birkenstocks whines about the way prices are skyrocketing. And they are. This is Mexico. Hell it's damn near into Guatemala. A place on the beach with no floor or bath should cost like $5, not $20. And the prices are going up so fast the hippie tour guide books can't keep up. These places were listed at around $7 in "Let's Go Mexico", the 2000 edition, no less. Now they cost $15 at a bare minimum, and quickly get up around $40 by Christmas.
That said, these are some pretty cool little cabins. Sofia, particularly, is a goofy hobbit construction of little cubbyholes scattered around a courtyard that leads directly out onto the beach (or into the air-conditioning of the Cafe, where internet access and fancy coffees await). They are a bit rough, but that's part of the picture here. If you want to be a bohemian, living in a rustic shack with dutch doors opening out to little tables where young people are talking about cool places around the world they just got tired of, this is the place for you.
Same goes across the street at Campamiento La Ruina. Since there are no historic ruins around, we could maybe assume that the name refers to the ruinous price increases, or perhaps a commentary on civilization in general. It's quieter at La Ruina (the office is over next door to Cafe Sofia, by the way) people eating at little tables in front of the dark, but cozy cabinettos surrounding the courtyard of raked dirt. Oh, wait, there IS a ruin there, but I think we can assume it's a cement fake of a Tulumesque structure. Probably doesn't even have a curse on it. Anyway, this place looks less bohemian than Sofia, so this is probably where the REAL painters and smugglers and nymphomaniacs hang out. They have a website, but are embarrassed because that's so bourgeois.
Bananas Cabanas
Calle 6 between 5 and 10
87-300-36
If they're full at the Sian Ka-an, don't give up on affordable Caribbean style. A couple of blocks north is another version of it, thatch topped cabins at the Banana Cabañas. They have rooms, per se, free-standing cabañas, and kitchenette villas which their advertising calls "villages". Well, sometimes it just takes a village, you know.
There is no view at the single-level cabañas, but they are pretty cute in their own way, with their mosquito bars hanging down from the ceiling like a road-company Mombasa. This is kind of "Caribbean as lived by black slaves", as opposed to the white planter house of Sian Ka-an. And at about the same price, $25 to 35 a night, unless you want to go $50 for air-conditioning.
Hotel Delfin
(52-987) 30176
delfin@playadelcarmen.com
I liked the looks of this place from the start. Turns out some of the rooms are kind of noisy, but that's because it's right on a corner of 5th Avenue, the most walked little row of restarants and bars and shops in town. The rooms are okay, pretty normal for the $23 a night you pay. What's cool is the penthouse, at $50 a night. It's air-conditioned, which seems silly in winter, with the breeze from the sea, just a block away. It's got a great king-sized bed, a mini-bar and, best of all a rooftop patio covered with a thatch palapa.
But the main cool thing about the Delfin is that it's covered with ivy. Well, actually not ivy--some tropical vine, maybe lime. It gives a very good look, almost Ivy League, yet definitely of southern climes. You'll love grabbing pics of the place so you can tell anyone who'll listen that you stayed there. Of course you don't actually have to stay there, you can sleep in the bus station and just take pictures of the Delfin and claim you stayed there. Who's going to know? In fact, I didn't stay there myself. I write these things in a basement in Brooklyn based on reports by people who hear about them in the deli up the street.
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