Akumal is a great beach on the Yucatan Peninsula, just a 30km drive north of Tulum. This incredible bay offers snorkelers guaranteed swimming with turtles as well as plentiful sightings of stingray and pufferfish.
I visited Akumal twice during my time in Tulum, the second time rising early to watch the sun come up from the beach. This is a good option because it allows you to miss all the locals furiously selling things on your walk from the car park to the beach, as it is so early they haven’t set up shop yet. We grabbed a nice breakfast from one of the hotel restaurants after sunrise and waited for things to heat up.
If you have a snorkel kit then perfect, otherwise I’d recommend renting or buying one from the dive shop. And with that you can literally walk into the water and join the turtles swimming around. We saw turtles, sting rays, puffer fish, balihu, suckerfish and bull fish but there is a sign by the dive shop that lists all the sea life going down here.
If you want it easy, rock up to the front of the beach and rent a snorkel, a life jacket and a guide for about 250 pesos (£10) per person. But you can just go it alone for free if you have all the kit.
The exact rules and regulations of Akumal bay appear to be quite hard to pin down. Effectively the locals have cracked down on tourists damaging corals and sea life by setting up designated zones on the left side of the beach where you must have a life jacket to swim in. This is enforced by a water authority man who paddles around telling people off. He may try and tell you to follow him back to shore to meet the real police if you do something he doesn’t like, but basically get your head down and swim away. Don’t stand on the coral reef, be respectful of the sea bed and definitely don’t touch any sea life. Look sure, but no touching.
We went out with snorkels past the guided lanes and saw a stingray lurking below. Sharing the water with a sting ray was a wild experience for me, these scary dudes move like vacuum cleaners, eating up food from the sea bed. That tail can do some damage, you can’t see from the vid but my feet were basically above my head.
We saw schools of fish and a yellow puffer fish before stumbling across turtles. We found these guys hard to track down without a guide but as we were getting ready to give up a fellow snorkeler motioned at me to join him underwater. I did and were treated to two turtles sitting together, then following one as it went for a swim. GoPros swarm around the turtles quickly so if you’re finding it hard to see them just look out for cameras.
On my first visit here with friends on holiday from London we were looked after by a lovely guide called Chiyo, who won us all over instantly by saying his name means ‘beautiful man’ in Mayan. Having entered the beach feeling like walking money, we negotiated our guided hour tour with snorkel rental for 250 pesos (£10). Chiyo was awesome, picking out some huge turtles for us to see. I kept pace with one towards the end and felt like a younger, underwater David Attenborough. It’s his line and I’m a thief for using it but they really are majestic creatures. It’s almost like they are floating without gravity rather than swimming.
