Bryan & I went to Cancun, Mexico and had so much fun! Here we are on the balcony of our hotel room. We stayed at an all-inclusive resort. (And, yes indeed, we actually did order room service in the middle of the night! Just cuz we could!)
Here is the view from our room, with the decorative fountains going down to the swimming pools and the ocean beyond. Beautiful!
At night these little animals would come out and look for food. They kind of looked like a cross between a raccoon and a monkey. They were called Coatis and they were pretty cute. We didn't get close but it was fun to see them.
Another friendly creature we kept seeing at the hotel were iguanas. And they were not afraid to come right up and steal the food off your plate if you left it for a minute!
One night at dinner Bryan decided to order octopus, which he had had before on his mission but which I had never tried. I actually really hate seafood so I did not have high hopes, but I figured it's something that I should at least try, right?
Honestly, it did not taste bad. The flavor was definitely better than fish, but the texture was tough to swallow. (Literally!) It was like chewing on one of those big pink erasers for 20 minutes.
We went to Chichen Itza and it was awesome. I loved hearing all about the history from our tour guide. The Maya people (ps, I just Googled it and the word
Mayan refers to the language while
Maya refers to the people and their culture. I noticed our tour guide kept saying "Maya people" and I wondered.... so now I know!) were sooo fascinated with numerology and the calendar. (We all know that the Maya calendar said the world would end a few years ago....so I guess they didn't get everything correct! Ha!) Anyway....Chichen Itza has symbolism all over it. For example there are 91 steps up each side, times 4 sides, equals 364, plus the room on top makes 365 for the days of the year, and then they found another smaller pyramid inside the big pyramid with 70 steps on each side, for the 280-day cycle of the moon, etc. etc. etc. They had 7s everywhere and 13s everywhere because they were considered lucky and it was just really interesting for a nerd like me.
It's amazing to see the restoration of the pyramid...when archaeologists discovered it a lot of the rocks were in rubble at the base and they have just literally been trying to put it back together like a puzzle, looking at the shape of the broken rocks and trying to figure out where they go.
One really interesting piece of history that our tour guide told us about was about this ball court... apparently it was a great honor to play on the teams and the young men would train for years. There were 7 on each team, 6 on the ground with club-like paddles, trying to hit the ball up to their captain, who was standing on a raised platform by this wall. On the wall you'll see a high vertical hoop which the captain would try to hit the ball through. It was a one-point-and-the-game-is-over game. Once one captain made the ball through, the game was done and since 14 players on the teams is not lucky, they needed to bring it back to lucky number 13 by sacrificing the captain of the winning team! Yikes! They thought that it was such an honor to go back to heaven and return to their gods that the winner was the one sacrificed.
This picture below shows the whole story...there were 7 warriors/players on each side of this circular part of the picture in the bottom center (representing the Sun God). In the photo maybe you'll be able to see the player on the left has a knife in his right hand and in his left hand he is holding a decapitated head with blood coming from its neck. On the right you'll see the winning captain on his knees, with no head, with 7 blood serpents coming out of his neck. Crazy! It was really neat to see the detail in person...I wish the picture could show it better. (If you click on the picture it should get bigger.) Anyway it was really fascinating to me.
This side has been restored. On the right you can see the 7 bumps on the corner of the pyramid. At the Spring and Fall Equinoxes the sun hits just right and it looks like a serpent crawling down the edge of the pyramid (there are huge serpents' heads at the bottom--you can barely see one on the bottom right of this picture.) Ok...enough of Chichen Itza...
We got to go deep sea fishing. I worried that I would get seasick so I had my eyeballs
glued to the horizon the whole time we were sailing out to the deep sea. After we stopped, I went down below and with the rocking, the stinky fish smell (and fish blood and guts--blech), and the smell of exhaust from the trolling boat, I got pretty sick. Luckily I did not barf, but another guy on the boat did. Poor guy. However, the fishing was lots of fun! Here's Bryan with his fish called a Bonita (related to a Tuna fish).
For my turn they had me stand up and strapped a thing around my waist to put the fishing pole into. I was reeling and reeling and really struggling to bring in my fish, the whole time thinking "man, I am a giant weakling! This is so dang hard to reel this fish in! I will be so embarrassed if the fish is tiny and I'm struggling so much to bring it in..." Well, I needn't have worried because my fish was a whopper! It was the biggest fish of the day! Yay! It was pretty ugly--a Grouper--but I was really excited anyway!
Another day I went on an excursion with some of the other ladies while our poor husbands all had to work. First we went swimming with turtles! Awesome! We were able to see several turtles and sting rays. We couldn't actually swim
with them...the guide told us to hold very still, horizontally on top of the water whenever we saw one, so as not to disturb them as they ate the sea grasses. I loved it.
 |
| Liz, Shauna, Michelle, me, Cynthia, and LauraKay |
We had a guide with us and we had a photographer with us too, which was great because he went under and took tons of wonderful pics for us to buy. So these were some of the animals we saw that day. We saw small turtles (about the size of a basket) and big turtles (maybe a little longer than a wheelbarrow?). Super cool.
After that we went down into a cenote, which is an underground source of clean water. Some cenotes have a connection to the sea so they are salty, but most are filled with freshwater. The rain water comes down and as it absorbs into the limestone on the ground, the limestone helps to purify the water. So the ancient cities were all built near cenotes. We went down into a cenote and snorkeled around. It was really cool. Kind of like being inside Timpanogos Cave, but with snorkeling!
This poor guy must've had too much tequila!
While I was gone, Bryan got done with work and was able to go scuba diving for his very first time! He said it was awesome! We are not certified to scuba dive, but they gave Bryan an introductory course and then he was able to do a one-tank dive after that. He said it was really neat and he'd like to do it again someday.
One other thing that we loved doing on this trip was taking the kayaks out to the ocean. There were kayaks at the resort that we could just take to go explore. There was a reef pretty far out and we kayaked out to check it out. The resort also had a few small catamarans that we could take out. We went with our friends Dale & Cynthia. The resort staff asked us if we knew what we were doing and if not, they would have to accompany us. Well, of course we did
not know what we were doing, but of course the 2 guys said "Yes! We know exactly what we're doing!" Typical. Well, Dale and Bryan are very good friends and get along great, but they are both guys, and both engineers, and they both think they know everything so it was pretty funny for Cynthia and me to watch them try to navigate and figure out how to steer this catamaran. We almost got ran over by a catamaran that was about 50 feet long and full of laughing tourists...but in the end we were ok and we all survived to tell the tale.
Everything was amazing. Here are my only two complaints: I have experienced humid cold in Denmark and man--it sure makes things feel a lot colder, and of course I've heard people talk about humid heat being miserable but I haven't really experienced it too much. Woooeee, it's HOT! Almost unbearably hot! The high temperature only got to about 87 degrees in Mexico (while it was over 100 degrees here in Utah) but it was actually really nice to get back to the dry heat here. And the mosquitoes were pretty ravenous (during one night at dinner I got forty mosquito bites! We counted!)
I would love to go back someday. It was a great trip.
