Not Quietly Adventurous. Just Quiet.

The following morning we went for an early walk around the resort and made it to the breakfast buffet early enough to get exactly the same table, this time with the ocean in front of us and no raccoon demanding a share of the food.

We had also decided to go to the TUI welcome talk.

We do not normally bother with these, partly because of an unfortunate experience in Egypt where what appeared to be a perfectly innocent welcome meeting somehow transformed itself into a timeshare presentation. Since then we have tended to regard hotel welcome talks with a degree of suspicion.

But we only have seven days here and wanted to hit the ground running.

The TUI rep, a very bubbly Scottish girl, gave a genuinely useful overview of the hotel before inevitably moving on to the excursion sales pitches.

This was where our decision to hire a car suddenly became rather more interesting.

We asked about parking in Playa del Carmen and she seemed genuinely astonished that we had rented one. Apparently we were the first guests she had come across who had done so since she started working there.

This seemed particularly surprising given that, a few minutes earlier, she had recommended taxis costing more than half the price of our entire week’s car hire for a single return journey to the same place.

For a moment we felt unexpectedly adventurous simply for possessing an Avis key.

That, however, was about as adventurous as the day became.

The rest of it was essentially spent on the beach.

Not quietly adventurous. Just quiet.

And actually rather nice.

Because the hotel is nowhere near full there were plenty of Bali beds available, which immediately removes one of the traditional stresses of a beach holiday: getting up at dawn to fight somebody from Düsseldorf for a sun lounger.

The beach itself was good, although the sargassum seaweed that has affected this part of Mexico so badly this year was very noticeable when we arrived.

A team of young men spent much of the day clearing it from the shoreline and by late afternoon they had removed an astonishing amount. It looked like relentless work, especially knowing that the next tide could simply bring another load in.

By the end of the day, though, the beach looked completely different.

Dinner provided the day's other memorable moment.

We had booked the Mediterranean restaurant and Linda ordered the lentil and chickpea dish. What eventually appeared was difficult to describe with any enthusiasm.

It was essentially a mound of cold green lentils that appeared to have come straight from a tin, accompanied by two chickpeas cut in half, two cherry tomatoes and a small sliver of avocado.

Nothing appeared to have been grilled, seasoned, dressed or, indeed, particularly troubled by the kitchen.

It may have been the worst vegan meal we have encountered since a hotel in the Lake District once served us an enormous slab of completely uncooked silken tofu.

There comes a point where food becomes so bad that annoyance gives way to amusement, and this definitely crossed that line.

The fact that it had emerged from a Mediterranean restaurant somehow made it even better.

We did mention it to the TUI rep afterwards. Not angrily, because by that stage we were still laughing about it, but mainly because somewhere, at some point, somebody had clearly looked at that plate and decided:

“Yes. That’s finished.”

So our supposedly quiet Mexican holiday has begun with a transatlantic flight, an off-airport car hire adventure, a raccoon joining us for dinner, a startled TUI representative and four chickpea halves.

Tomorrow, however, we are going to Xel-Há.

Which probably tells you everything you need to know about how successful the original plan for a week doing absolutely nothing has been.