Another day, another day trip! We love our day trips.
They’re always a chance for us to break out from our local lives and become tourists on top of being tourists, even though we live as locals in all of the base-camp cities we call home every three to six months. Still, we suppose many locals would consider us tourists anyway.
We decided to take a jaunt down to Playa del Carmen for the day, which is about an hour south of Cancun. I visited this city with a good friend several years back, and it has grown in spades since my last day trip to the area.
Playa – as it’s known locally – is about a quarter of the size of our current city, but is probably just as popular in terms of being overwhelmed by tourists from far and wide.
The main difference in Cancun is that the hotel zone and the city are distinctly separate. It takes at least 30-45 minutes for us to get to the beach in Cancun, as that entire area is on a peninsula and is home to most of the hotels, resorts, and tourists. All beaches in Cancun are in the hotel zone. All of them.
That kind of makes for a hard line of segregation from the rest of the city, with locals and tourists occasionally mingling along the ‘border’ between the two.
Playa is completely different. Sure, there are masses of tourist hotels and plenty of tourists. Probably just as many as Cancun.
Everything sort of blends in, and there’s no traveling a great distance to get to the center of town or the beaches. Therefore, this provides much easier access to everything in the city.
Unless you’re a beach bum, club aficionado, or need to go on a shopping spree, Playa doesn’t have much as far as sights go. But we did run into these Three Kings…one of whom seems to have lost his head a bit.
What it does have are amazing white-sand beaches and an amount of cafés that makes our current home in Cancun give off an air of major sad-face. (You know how much we love our cafés.)
We headed to the beach and walked around quite a bit, with Ang dipping into the warm waters of the Mexican Caribbean. We spent most of our time strolling, and made it a priority to find a café where we could sit down and chill for a while. Beers, coffee, fried cheese, the usual.
Playa also has a great number of Asian restaurants, something that’s certainly lacking in Cancun. We had to find one and get our fix, and stopped by Po Thai Kai Yang in a residential part of town to sample some tasty curries.
If you’re into the beach life but want more access to where the locals hang out, we think you’ll find Playa del Carmen gives you everything you want and need.
It will not segregate you in a plush hotel area where the only locals you’ll see are workers, as is often the case in Cancun.
The cities are quite different from one another, both with their advantages and disadvantages. But that’s how it always is, isn’t it?
Just watch out for the masses on the pedestrian-only 5th Avenue (La Quinta)…the crowds can become overwhelming, especially near the end of the afternoon when it cools off and people start leaving the beaches.
And that’s it!
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Have you ever been to Playa del Carmen? Any thoughts about it? We’d love to hear from you in the comments!
Wow! I can’t get over the water color down there. It looks much more like a city you would enjoy.
Yeah it has more of a café culture, which you know we appreciate. And indeed, the water color in this part of the world is bonkers. Thanks for stopping by!
You had me at beer and fried cheese.
Easy enough!
Loved the sand sculptures :) The water colour is amazing too!
Yeah those were pretty cool and we liked how one of them was sort of wind-blown. The color down here is insane, for sure. Thanks for stopping by, Jodi!
Love playa ! It’s so groovy even with the tourists .. We stayed at a great little place right by the beach in the centre of town and I have to say I loved every minute .. From buzzing around on scooters over on Cozumel to sipping beer and eating guacamole on the beach in the day.. The vibe is chilled and nothing like most tourist places, they have managed to keep it small and cool
I agree. The tourists in Playa are a different breed than the ones in the Zona Hotelera in Cancun. I still don’t like to be mobbed by tourists, but they didn’t particularly bother us when we were there. It also could have been the sea of happiness we were in to actually have cafés around, which don’t exist in Cancun. I’ve actually been to Playa twice and have never gone across to Cozumel. Can’t see it all, I guess. Thanks for stopping by!