The Setup: When Google Maps Fails You
I arrived in Mexico City on a Tuesday with one working thong—lost the left one somewhere over Denver, naturally—and a half-baked plan to "just vibe and see where the road takes me." Spoiler: the road took me to a lot of confusion.
But here's the thing about slow travel through Mexico that nobody warns you about: you'll spend three-quarters of the time standing in the wrong queue, eating incredible food you didn't ask for, and laughing at yourself in Spanish you barely speak. The other quarter? That's where the actual magic happens.
I'd given myself five days to work my way through the Riviera Maya and back to Mexico City, no flights, no rushing. Just overland: vans, buses, the occasional very-stressed colectivo driver who tolerated my existence. I had bookmarks for a few things, loose ideas about swimming with turtles, and a visceral need to not look at my phone for a week.
What I didn't expect was how those scattered bookmarks would stitch together into something that actually felt like a journey instead of a checkbox holiday.
Day One: Breakfast in the Clouds
My first morning in Mexico City started stupid-early. I'm talking pre-dawn, still-dark-outside stupid. The kind of stupid that makes sense only when you're about to take a Balloon Flight with Breakfast in Cave and Round Trip CDMX Balloon Flight with Breakfast in Cave and Round Trip CDMX.
I won't lie: I nearly bailed. The guy who picked me up was quiet and professional in a way that made me paranoid. What if the balloon had a slow leak? What if I got altitude sickness and barfed on a stranger?
Then we were lifting off over Teotihuacán at dawn, and every stupid anxious thought evaporated.
The pyramids looked like they were emerging from a dream—this bruise-coloured landscape, frost on everything, the Pyramid of the Sun just... there. Massive. Unreal. You float for maybe 45 minutes, and it's mostly silent except for the occasional roar of the burner, and you're genuinely floating—your stomach doesn't know what to do with it, and you're grinning like an idiot.
The breakfast part (cave breakfast, which is exactly as weird and wonderful as it sounds) happened after landing. Some bloke with a thermos and fresh pastries waiting in an actual cave. We ate sitting on stones that have probably been there longer than nations, watching the sun finish waking up. The other tourists were Germans. Nobody spoke for a while. It was perfect.
I thought about trying to visit the Teotihuacán: Private Tour from Mexico City Teotihuacán: Private Tour from Mexico City later to do the full ruins experience properly, but honestly? I'd already seen them from the gods' perspective. Ground level felt redundant.
Day Two: The Wrong Cenote (and Other Lessons)
I took a bus south toward Tulum. Six hours, terrible air conditioning, a woman next to me eating what I think was fish for lunch. Very authentic. Very unpleasant.
Tulum is the kind of place that wants desperately to be unspoiled but has given up and now just charges premium prices for tacos. Still, there's real magic in the town if you ignore the tourist vein running through it.
I'd booked the Bestseller! Tulum Private Tour with Turtles and Cenote Snorkeling Bestseller! Tulum Private Tour with Turtles and Cenote Snorkeling for the following morning, and I spent that evening just walking, eating things, getting spectacularly lost in colonial streets that all look similar at dusk.
The next day, my guide was called Miguel, and he had the energy of someone who's explained Mayan history to thousands of confused tourists but still genuinely enjoys it. We started at Tulum's ruins at sunrise—and yes, okay, it's crowded, but Miguel got us through before the real crowds arrived, and there's something about standing above a cenote at 6 a.m. that makes you feel like you've outsmarted the whole tourism industry.
Then the cenote swim. I'd chosen the one Miguel recommended without asking questions. Mistake.
It was the kind of cenote where the water is so clear and so cold it rewires your nervous system. I jumped in fully clothed like an idiot—only my left flip-flop made it in with me—and by the time I was oriented, I was about eight metres from where I'd started, the shoe was a distant memory, and Miguel was laughing very hard from the shore.
"Don't worry," he said. "Happens every week."
But here's what I wasn't expecting: the Akumal snorkelling. We drove to a natural lagoon where the water is so technicolour blue it looks photoshopped, and immediately—and I mean immediately—we're swimming next to sea turtles. Three of them. Actual living ancient creatures, unbothered, just grazing on seagrass like they're in some underwater park. You're told not to touch them, and your instinct is to obey because they seem important. Prehistoric. More real than the resort tourists taking selfies five metres away.
Lunch was fresh ceviche and cold beer. Miguel told me his daughter wanted to be a marine biologist. I told him about losing my shoe. We laughed.
That's when I realised: this is what slow travel actually is. It's not the dramatic moments—though sure, hot air balloons and sea turtles are dramatic—it's the space between them where you're just present enough to see someone else's real life and they're kind enough to let you.
Day Three: The Catamaran Incident
I didn't plan to take the Lagoon 39ft Private Catamaran 5hr - El Cielo Full Experience Lagoon 39ft Private Catamaran 5hr - El Cielo Full Experience until I was in Cozumel and hungover and someone at my hostel said, "You could just rent a whole boat," and apparently my brain went "yes, brilliant, no downsides."
I absolutely can't sail. I get seasick on large puddles. But somehow we'd chartered a proper 39-footer with a captain and crew, and it was just me and this Australian couple called Ruth and Mark who'd decided to extend their honeymoon, and I was apparently their entertainment.
"Don't worry," Mark said. "You won't die."
He was right, technically. I felt like I might, but I didn't.
The captain let me help navigate (terrifying) and we hit El Cielo—this shallow sandbank in the middle of nowhere with water so impossibly transparent you feel like you're floating. We snorkelled. The fish were absurd: colours that shouldn't exist in nature. Ruth and Mark held hands underwater. I tried not to think about my remaining flip-flop (still missing its partner) and instead thought about how many times you get to stand on a boat in the middle of the Caribbean with nobody within earshot except two people you'll never see again.
We drank beer. The captain made ceviche. I stopped feeling like I was dying and started just existing, which is underrated.
Day Four: Cabos, Waterfalls, and the Canyon Lesson
By day four, I'd worked my way south to Los Cabos, partially because the road pointed that way and partially because I wanted to see if I could find something that didn't smell like tourism marketing.
I'd booked the Hidden Waterfalls Hiking Adventure Hidden Waterfalls Hiking Adventure as a last-minute thing, expecting it to be crowded and corporate.
Instead, I got a guide called Javier, a pickup truck, and about four hours of driving through actual Baja landscape—the kind where you see maybe one other car, and the desert looks like it has opinions about your existence.
The hike was proper—not strenuous, but real. A canyon descent through scrub and rock, then suddenly you're in this hidden alcove where there's a waterfall that shouldn't exist in the middle of the desert, and the water is cold and everything is quiet.
Javier sat on a rock and smoked while I swam and tried to take mental photographs instead of phone photographs, which sounds pretentious but actually worked. There were maybe six other people scattered across the larger basin, mostly silent, all of us understanding we'd found something the algorithm hadn't ruined yet.
On the drive back, Javier asked what I was running from. I told him I wasn't running. He looked at me like he didn't believe me, which was probably accurate. Maybe I was. But I'd run slowly enough to actually see things.
The Way Back: What Slow Travel Actually Teaches You
I took a bus back north, then flew out of Mexico City, which felt like cheating but also my feet were tired and I still had one flip-flop so the universe owed me.
What I realised, somewhere over the Gulf, was that slow travel through Mexico isn't about ticking off experience boxes. It's about moving slowly enough that you stop performing for yourself. You lose a shoe. You get seasick on a fancy catamaran. You meet a guide whose daughter wants to save marine ecosystems. You float over pyramids at dawn and eat breakfast in a cave and nobody's taking drone footage of it.
The tours, the bookings, the planned moments—they only work if you actually slow down in between. If you let the bus ride be boring. If you get lost in colonial streets. If you talk to Miguel about his daughter instead of rushing to the next photo opportunity.
That's not a revelation. That's just how it works. But you've got to be moving slowly enough to notice.
I bought a new pair of flip-flops in the Mexico City airport. Lost one three weeks later in Guatemala. Some things never change.
