When I was last here I visited Tulum, Coba and Chichen Itza. We couldn't go diving one day when we were in Tulum so we decided to go to Coba.

We caught a bus from Tulum, which was late and overcrowded, but only took an hour or so to get to Coba. We were lucky to get seats, although you get seat numbers on your ticket, they don't mean anything because seats on second class busses aren't reserved.

When I was here last there were only a few stalls at the entrance, and the site was almost empty. Now there is a ticket office, lots of shops at the entrance, guides and cycle chauffeurs! Despite this the site is big, and the ruins spread out enough that it didn't feel crowded. It was nice to wander through the forest to the ruins. We saw lots of butterflies, but didn't get any pictures because they wouldn't stay still enough.

Some of the ruins had been rebuilt, but a lot were unrestored, and often we'd see an overgrown pile of rocks and wonder what it had been. One big change from my last visit was that you aren't allowed to climb some of the ruins, including one temple that I remembered had some original painting inside. This was disappointing, but we found the same at the other popular sites we visited. I suppose the remains are too fragile to cope with the number of visitors now.

We were still able to climb Nohoch Mul, at 72m one of the highest Mayan pyramids.

When we left the ruins we had lunch at one of the restaurants near the entrance. It was a "Mexican buffet lunch" full of coach parties so we were a bit dubious but it was pretty good.