As a gift to ourselves to celebrate our 15th anniversary, Jess and I decided to go to Mexico for a week. We wanted to see the ancient Mayan ruins, and try snorkeling so that narrowed it down to the Riviera Maya area, on the Yucatan peninsula, on the south east coast of Mexico. We found a quiet little hotel just outside of Playa del Carmen that came highly recommended, the Petit Lafitte.
And thanks to the generous help of our mothers and my sister, who all agreed to help take care of our kids while we were gone, we were able to leave for a week and we had a really fun trip.
The first few days, we spent mostly at the beach. There were plenty of lounge chairs and hammocks in front of our hotel on the beach and this is where we spent most of our time.
The restaurant was open air and the food was pretty good.
They had an aviary out back with parrots, toucans, peacocks and lots of other tropical birds.
This bird was really friendly, whenever I stopped petting its neck, it cooed really pretty to convince me to keep petting it.
The sand was soft and white, the surf and salt air were relaxing and the air was warm and balmy. We learned some basic Spanish, and ordered way too many virgin lime daquiris. Jess actually ended up bringing his laptop and whenever I was lying on the lounge chair reading, he got out the computer and worked on a chapter for a book that he wanted to get done. I wanted him to relax but he claimed it was a fun way for him to spend his time. He did have a hard time seeing the screen in the sunshine but he managed, I guess. I think I ended up married to a workaholic.
But he did take lots of breaks from the computer and we did lots of fun stuff.
One day, we decided to take a long walk on the beach, south to Playa del Carmen.
It took almost 2 hours to get there and just as we arrived, a big rain storm blew in off the ocean.
But the storm didn't last long and we found a little taco restaurant to duck into for supper. Then we wandered the streets doing some shopping. The store clerks were super pushy - as soon as you glanced at an item, they were practically shoving it in your face, trying to convince you that you needed it and that for you, instead of 300 pesos, they would sell it special for only 200 hundred pesos. And as you're walking by the store, they stand there, trying to say anything they can think of to get you to come in.
We did manage to find one store where the store clerks left us alone and we bought quite a few souvenirs there. We also happened across this wonderful little jewelry store called Yulunga, owned by a charming woman named Veronica, who wasn't one bit pushy and was selling silver and semi-precious stone jewelry she had made herself. It was all very beautiful, it was hard to show restraint and not buy a whole pile of her stuff, we spent a long time in her store.
Another day, we went on a tour with Mormon Encounter. Carlos (the guy in the orange shirt) took us to Coba, an ancient Mayan city.
It used to be walled and there are now 3 large buildings left to look at, including a temple and an observatory, plus 2 ball courts. The tour of Coba was absolutely fascinating, I loved learning so many new things about the Mayan civilization. Carlos was great, we really enjoyed our time with him.
This is one of the many many iguanas we saw on our trip, hiding out in the ruins:
This is inside one of the hallways of the first temple. It shows how they didn't know how to make Roman type arches so they were limited in how wide their rooms could be before the roof would collapse.
Most of the ancient Mayan temples have ball courts nearby, this is a shot of one of the Coba ball courts:
One ball court was for the noble families, one was for the commoners. The Mayans had a legend about the creator having 2 sons and asking for one of them to sacrifice himself by throwing himself into a giant fire. They both wanted to make the sacrifice for their father but one of them threw himself into the fire without his father's permission and so he was thrown out of his father's presence and became a lesser light to rule over the dark: the moon. The other one made the sacrifice properly and became the sun. So, this legend, involving the honour in being sacrificed, came into play in their ball game - the winner won the right to be sacrificed. For the nobles (the families of the players sat at the top, on the platform behind the hoop to watch the game and the players ran around the bottom, hitting the ball with their hips, knees and elbows), the winner would offer a blood sacrifice by piercing his body. But for the commoners, it was the real thing - the winner would have his head chopped off. Here's a carving in the floor of the commoners' ball court, showing a monkey with his head chopped off:
Interestingly, the ball court is shaped like an upside down pyramid, and for the Mayans, anything upside down represented the afterlife. The ball court was situated right next to the pyramid shaped temple, pointing upwards towards heaven. So, the two buildings right next to each other were meant to remind the people of life here and the afterlife soon to come.
This is Carlos showing us a picture of one of the a 100km+ long highways built by the Mayans to connect their cities.
The remains of this highway are everywhere in the jungle, here we are standing on a piece of it.
They built their highways up high, about 3 or 4 feet off the ground so they wouldn't get flooded and they plastered them with limestone/chalk so they were white and reflected the moonlight so they could be easily travelled at night.
Of course, the Mayans are well known for their astronomy. Here is one of their celestial observatories which had a bowl at the top for holding water. The astronomers would watch the reflection of the stars and planets in the bowl and measure how long it took the stars to move across the bowl, and they used those measurements in their calendar calculations. The calendar ending at 2012 is actually here at Coba but we weren't allowed to see it, that section of Coba is currently closed to tourists.
Next we biked to the Coba temple where human sacrifices were made.
There was an altar at the top and the layout was the same as the temple of Solomon and other ancient Jewish temples. But here, they literally pulled out the heart of the sacrifice victims to offer their heart as a sacrifice to God, and then threw the body down the stairs at the front and then the priests at the bottom drank the blood of the sacrifice victim - a twisted version of the sacrament practised by the Mayans sometime between 200 and 1000 AD.
It didnt' seem like this could be good for helping preserve the temple, but tourists are welcome to climb to the top, which was really cool. The weather was hot and very muggy but luckily it was cloudy because we were literally dripping with sweat by the time we climbed to the top and if it had been sunny, I think I might have died of heat stroke. But the climb was definitely worth it, the view was amazing, just like being on a mountain, we were up above the jungle trees.
The climb down was actually pretty scary because it's such a steep set of stairs and you're so high up.
The tour was very well put together though because after exhausting ourselves climbing up the Coba temple, Carlos took us to an out of the way little cenote called Tamcach-Ha where we were able to cool off with a refreshing swim.
This cenote is basically an underground hole/cave, filled with crystal clear water. This is me climbing down, down, down into the hole:
You can just see the water down at the bottom.
The ceiling is dripping with stalactites.
And the water (like all the water we saw in Mexico) was a beautiful, inviting turquoise.
Here's me, imagining I'm a mermaid:
After the cenote, we stopped by a little Mayan village where we met some young women who make and sell hammocks and jewelry. Even though we couldn't understand each other, they were so sweet and charming, it was a pleasure to meet them. This is their house:
This is where they cook their meals:
And here's one of them showing us how they sew a hammock, one stitch at a time:
They had a pet spider monkey named Natasha who ran in and out of the houses the whole time we were there. It's hard to tell because she wouldn't stay still for the camera, but that furry blur is her perched on the left side of the hammock.
We also stopped by a lake with crocodiles in it. For a few pesos, you can walk out on the dock and a man throws raw chicken into the water to attract the crocodiles. This one didn't even care about the chicken, he seemed really well fed, he was just floating around, totally relaxed.
After that, we went on a guided walk through the jungle with a naturalist who showed us where to find spider monkeys in the trees.
There were ruins everywhere in the jungle. Here is an altar we came across, as well as a piece of Mayan pottery Carlos found in the dirt.
Then we went to a lake (which Carlos promised me didn't have any crocodiles in it) and we canoed across to a zip line.
At the top of the zip line, we saw a family of howler monkeys and the father howler monkey started yelling his head off at another male howler monkey across the lake - that's not a sound I'll ever forget!
It was such a fun day, we'd love to go back and tour more ruins with Carlos another time.
The next day, we decided to check out a park called Xel Ha.
It's a lagoon fed by fresh water that empties into the Caribbean and it's been turned into an ecological reserve for snorkeling.
Admission gets you snorkel gear to use for the day, as well as all the food you want at the different restaurants. We had a great time and spent most of the day in the water. Jess had bought a new underwater camera just for this trip so he had a great time taking pictures of all the fish.
I'll start off with a short movie - sorry about the wobbly camera, it's pretty hard to take video and swim at the same time.
It's hard to see but that's a sting ray in the sand:
At one end of the lagoon, you swim through a mangrove swamp:
They even have little posts with fish food in them so you can attract the fish to you (Jess even went swimming with his pockets full of fish food). Here, some coatis have found a fish food post and are having a great time scooping the food out and having a feast.
We loved Mexico and hopefully we'll be able to go back again someday.
