My best travel experience, sola, are always the ones where I meet someone randomly. We chat, one offered me dried cranberries and just like that we had made friend in Puerto Escondido, or a chat with a restaurant owner was the door to meeting my beloved Güerito. This trip is offering me yet again, wonderful interactions with interesting and amazing people and an opportunity to experience life through their eyes. A profound pride of being Mexican. I would be too!

In Tulum, we met a friend of John’s named Gio.

Gio belongs to a particular breed of Tulum human. They have a name for them here: the Tuluminati.

The term is usually used with a wink to describe the spiritually inclined, alternative-lifestyle crowd that has made Tulum famous: people drawn to yoga, meditation, plant medicine, energy work, astrology, numerology, metaphysics and the idea that certain places carry portals or energies we might not necessarily see, but can certainly feel.

And Gio was very much at home in that world.

He spoke with a quiet conviction about learning to care for his vessel: the whole package of body, mind and soul. He talked about learning to look at food before eating it, to pause and ask whether his body actually needed it.

This concept fascinated me.

Mostly because I have never once looked at something savoury and thought, Do I really need this?

I generally skip directly to, How much of it can I have? 😂

Naturally, I invited him over for dinner.

I made ceviche with pineapple salsa, with a very enthusiastic wink in the direction of my bestie Jennifer. The salsa featured half a honey pineapple and five habaneros, seeds and all.

Yes. Five.

I was excited. John was excited. Gio was excited.

Perhaps Gio was slightly less excited once the habaneros had made their acquaintance with his mouth.

The heat lingered. And lingered. And lingered.

I suspect poor Gio spent a good portion of the evening wondering whether this was some kind of spiritual lesson about caring for his vessel.

Still, he went back for seconds.

I took that as a pretty solid review.

The following day, I wanted to float in cenotes.

So we hit the road.

Somewhere along the way, we kept passing the same guy on a motorcycle. He caught my attention because of a tattoo on his calf: an Eye of Providence, or all-seeing eye, set within a hand.

The symbol is often associated with protection, divine awareness and spiritual insight. When represented as a hand containing an eye, it can also be known as the Hamsa, or Hand of Fatima, although the exact symbolism varies across traditions. The eye is commonly understood as a symbol of watchfulness, protection and awareness.

And here we were, in the middle of the Tulum jungle, repeatedly crossing paths with a man carrying an eye in the palm of his hand.

Naturally, I paid attention.

Then we saw it.

A blue arrow pointing down a dirt road disappearing into the bush.

Cenote Tapir.

“John! Espera! Regresa!”

We turned around and headed back.

The man on the motorcycle passed us again, then stopped at an intersection to refresh himself with a cold beer before continuing.

We rolled down the window.

“Do you know how far Tapir is?”

He looked at us.

“You’re going to that cenote?”

Apparently, we had asked the wrong man about the wrong cenote.

“I know a whole bunch,” he told us. “Private. Quiet. All natural. There’s one called Isla Alamo.”

Then came the invitation that could only happen in Mexico.

“Come to my home. I’ll show you around. And then I’ll show you something out of this world.”

Well.

Obviously.

We followed him.

And that is how we met Oscar.

His property was a little paradise tucked away from the road, the kind of place that makes you wonder how many other hidden worlds are sitting behind those seemingly anonymous dirt tracks.

Oscar was a chemist from Mexico City. He had invested well and reached a point in life where he no longer needed to work for a living.

But that didn’t mean he stopped working.

He simply changed the definition of work.

Now he worked on his property.

And there was plenty to do.

The afternoon was scorching, the kind of heat that seems to wrap itself around your skin. Our mouths were dry and our bodies were begging for something cold.

Oscar looked at us, glanced up at one of the many varieties of coconut palms growing on his property, and climbed.

Agile as a cat, he made his way up the tree and dropped several coconuts to the ground.

Then came the machete.

With a few practiced strokes, he carved a perfect opening into one of the coconuts and handed it to us.

Cold, fresh coconut water.

No bottle. No refrigerator. No convenience store.

Just a tree, a machete and a man who knew exactly what his little piece of paradise could provide.

We drank deeply.

And for a few minutes, standing there beneath the palms, sweat cooling on our skin, it felt as though we had stumbled into another world entirely.

Which, as it turned out, was exactly what Oscar had promised us.

Well refreshed, we hopped back into the car, with Oscar happily taking over as our guide from the back seat.

And what a guide he turned out to be.

He took us to three cenotes, including Isla Alamo, each one tucked deep into the jungle and seemingly determined to remain a secret.

The water was mineral-rich and wonderfully cool, a welcome contrast to the furnace of the afternoon. At one of the cenotes, bats flew low overhead, swooping close enough to make us instinctively duck, yet somehow never quite close enough to make contact.

They were enormous. At least, enormous compared with any bats I had ever seen.

I watched one hanging upside down, completely unbothered by our presence, performing its daily grooming ritual with its tiny little hands. There was something strangely adorable about watching this creature meticulously clean itself while suspended upside down in the darkness.

Then there was the jungle.

Dense. Green. Almost impenetrable.

The vegetation grew so thick around the cenotes that I couldn’t help wondering what was moving through it when we weren’t looking.

Oscar confirmed that plenty was.

Pumas. Cougars. Reptiles. Vipers. Scorpions.

And then there were the tiny red ants.

Do not underestimate the tiny red ants.

These little carnivorous hooligans apparently require no invitation whatsoever. They climb onto your feet and start biting before you’ve even realized they’ve arrived.

The golden rule?

Do not stand still.

Especially not in chanclas.

Because apparently, even paradise has a few terms and conditions.

We decided to end the day at Tapir, a more commercial cenote attraction with two cenotes on the property.

And yet, like so many of the public and tourist attractions along this stretch of coast, it was practically deserted.

No crowds. No lineups. No soundtrack of tourists calling to one another.

Just us, the jungle and the water.

One of the employees offered to run to the store for some beers and munchies.

Why not?

We settled in and spent the next few hours letting the heat drain from our bodies, beers in hand, surrounded by that particular silence that only seems to exist when the jungle has swallowed up the rest of the world.

But Isla Alamo stayed with me.

There was something different about that cenote.

The water had a deep mineral quality to it, almost palpable. The kind of water you feel rather than simply swim in. There was a weight to it, a stillness, and a strange magnetic pull that made me want to linger.

The cenote itself felt almost sculpted by the landscape. A natural opening shaped into the mountain above, encircling a small island of dense tropical jungle in its centre. Water, rock, vegetation and sky all folding into one another.

And tucked within that little island was an ofrenda, a small altar carrying offerings.

It stopped me.

After all the talk of portals, energy, vessels and the invisible things that supposedly inhabit these ancient places, finding an altar there felt almost perfectly placed.

Whether you believe in the energy of a place or simply in the power of our imagination, some places have a presence.

Isla Alamo had one.

Perhaps it was the mineral-rich water. Perhaps it was the jungle pressing in from every direction. Perhaps it was the little island sitting quietly in the middle of the cenote, holding its secrets.

Or perhaps it was simply the feeling of being somewhere that had not yet been completely explained, packaged and sold to us.

Whatever it was, I felt it.

Eventually, we dragged ourselves away and headed home.

Another day of Mexico tucked into the memory bank.

And another reminder that sometimes the best places are the ones you weren’t actually looking for.