It’s hard to complain about 70-degree January days in Las Vegas—especially when the rest of the country is being pummeled with snow. But today I took a glance at my pictures from a recent trip to the Yucatan Peninsula and just kind of sighed.

This shot is from an earlyish morning in Playa del Carmen, a bustling beach town just south of Cancun. In a few hours this stretch of sand would be overrun by sunburnt tourists and pineapple-based cocktails, but during my stroll it was blissfully calm and quiet—a glimpse of what Playa might have looked like before it became a default tourist destination.