Here is our motley crew of 10 people that made great friendships and thoroughly enjoyed learning about the Mayan people. This photo shows the incredible Mayan architecture and their famous Mayan arch.We saw some absolutely incredible sites together!!There were so many beautiful places to visit!!I thought this was an interesting photo they took of me as I was photographing the pyramids.This is proof that I got into the cenote!! It was quite fun to swim in the fresh water. Wearing a lifejacket was a wise requirement to get into the water.
I thought is was especially fun to swim under the waterfall!!Each morning we met together for breakfast! We stayed a beautiful hotels and the food was wonderful!!Riding in the tricycles was fun and a little bumpy!!It was amazing to see so many different Mayan ruins!!Soon after this photo was taken, the dark clouds opened up and it started to rain!The aqua-colored water of the Caribbean Sea was amazing!!
Sadly, today is our last day to see the sites in Yucatan. Our goal was to see the amazing ruins in Tulum, but we first visited the local market in Valladolid.I absolutely love all the bright colors of vegetables available in Yucatan. I do not think I have ever seen radishes so huge!!Everywhere you look in the Valladolid market, there a beautiful foods to eat!!This trip has taught me that habanero chilis are extremely hot!! I can only use a small amount on my foods.These friendly people were proud of the high quality of their produce!I liked all the bottles of items from vanilla to honey!!These small bananas were extremely flavorful!! We bought enough for everyone to have one while we drove to Tulum!!I absolutely loved all these bottles of miel (honey)!!I wanted to sample all these items!! From garlic to rice to beans!!This cacao is where chocolate is made. Our guide knew the owner and she gave us samples to try!!It is not every day that you see a beef head!! You can buy anything at this market!!I loved all the cheerful colors on the shoes for sale!!Next, we drove for quite a while to get to the Caribbean coast to the famous city of Tulum!!The Tulum ruins are an entire city of Mayan ruins. We walked through various sites to see all kinds of buildings. It was also fun to see the tropical setting of Tulum!!There were many Mayan structures that our guide showed to us!!This building was used to demonstrate the unique door jamb and lintel framework the Mayans used in Tulum.The beach is part of Tulum and the water is the Caribbean Sea!! There is a break in the large reef that would allow ships to come to this beach.I was amazed at the complexity of all the different buildings in Tulum!!The presence of all the palm trees was so different from the other Mayan ruin sites we have visited!!This is the highest structure in Tulum and the Spaniards were able to see this building when they were sailing in the Caribbean Sea. The building is called “the castle.”I especially liked this house!! Someone wealthy must have lived here.We just kept walking from one impressive building to another! Tulum is huge!!As we walked through the ruins, we kept encountering many iguanas! This male was massive!! He carefully watched us as we walked by.I thought this was absolutely hilarious! I never expected to see the tail of an iguana sticking out of a hole in a Mayan wall!!This is another view of “the castle.” I thought is was absolutely amazing!!The corner view of this mask took up the whole corner and is one of the best preserved masks in the Mayan ruins. You can see the person’s chin and mouth on the bottom. Above it is the nose and eyes.Tulum has an absolutely spectacular view of the beautiful color of the Caribbean Sea!!This iguana seemed especially interested in watching us!!I loved seeing the combination of the palm trees, some of the Tulum structures, and the gorgeous color of the Caribbean Sea!!
We started our day by driving to the Coba ruins. These are the tallest ruins in Yucatan!! We all thought about climbing these stairs, but common sense prevailed and we instead, enjoyed watching other people climb to the top.There was a ballcourt at Coba, but it was much smaller than the one at Chichen Itza. The ring hole was much larger here too.Another characteristic of Coba is that the limestone is softer here, so the stones needed to be make overall smaller to make it easier to stack them.I saw this spider web while we were looking at the ruins and I thought it was intricate and amazing!!This wild turkey was walking among the ruins and I thought he was beautiful!! I have never seen a turkey with so many colors!!This is a view of the main Mayan pyramid at Coba. There are many other pyramids in the area that have not been excavated.To make it easier to get around among all the Coba ruins, we were chauffeured around the grounds in sexy tricycles!!We next drove to the Spider Monkey Reserve and started walking through the jungle looking for monkeys. Our guide discovered a family moving through the canopy above us. I learned that it is very difficult to photograph monkeys in the wild because they move around very quickly!!Here is a baby spider monkey looking at me with big eyes!!This guy was moving quickly through the branches!!They were busy eating and you can see food all around this guy’s mouth!!This is the mom spider monkey with her baby nearby!!
For me, the highlight of this trip has been to see Chichen Itza!! It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site!! It is absolutely amazing too see the Mayan engineering and mathematical applications as they built such an incredible structure!! Two sides have been repaired and two sides have been left in rustic conditions. This angle of Chichen Itza shows a fully refurbished side of the pyramid.The ballcourt at Chichen Itza is the largest ballcourt in the entire Mayan region!! It is absolutely huge!! The ring can be seen in the middle of the wall.This is the ring in the middle of the ballcourt! I have absolutely no idea how the players manage to hit the rubber ball through that hole!!This Mayan carving shows incredible detail of a ballcourt player. One foot is wearing and sandal the other foot is wearing a “boot” to kick the rubber ball. He has an amazing headress!! The players wore elaborate dress when playing.This player has the same shoes (sandal and boot), and is in elaborate dress as well with his helmet and body armor.This structure was built at the end of the ballcourt. It is one of the many different viewing areas.This snake head was near the ballcourt and ran along the edge of the wall.This warrior has all of his war materials, including spears and blow darts!!This guy is holding the head of someone in his left hand!! Maybe it is the head of the loser in the rubber ball game? I like this guy’s headdress!! You can see he is wearing knee pads.This is the cenote at Chichen Itza!! It is notorious for having been used for sacrificing people. They would throw live people over the edge and into the cenote. If they lived after two days, they were considered a semi-God.All kinds of venders were along the causeway. I loved the colors of this pottery. I bought a t-shirt!This building is called the “observatory.” It was built to study hundreds of heavenly bodies. The Mayan understanding of math and astronomy was amazing!!These are building are behind the king’s palace and may have been built by a son to honor his father the king after his father had died.After leaving Chichen Itza, we drove to Selva Maya to eat lunch and swim in their cenote!! The water was a bit chilly, but not bad once you were in the water. It was so much fun to swim in this cenote!! I is continually refreshed by underground rivers!! We swam under the waterfall and it was fun when the water came down on our heads!!
This afternoon we traveled from the hacienda to Valladolid. We made a stop at a cemetery and our group leader described the current Mayan way to bury people is to put them in the ground for 5 years (to decompose), and then the family claims the body and places them in a mausoleum. Over time, a family may add additional family members to the mausoleum.Some mausoleums are well cared for and others are more rustic. A skull from a family member may be seen in this mausoleum.This beautiful plant as growing wild in the cemetery and we all thought it was beautiful!When we arrived in Valladolid, we first went to the church and adjacent monastery. The church grounds covered the city’s water supply at the cenote.
We stayed 3 nights in this beautiful, but rustic, hacienda!! It was quite isolated and a great place to make as base camp for daily visits to different sites. Our room was in this building. It formerly was a working farm to make rope from the henequen plant. This was a major export for the entire Yucatan and made it a wealthy state in Mexico.It was beautiful to see the grounds as the hacienda was converted into a boutique hotel.The patron room was where the hacienda owner used to live.These are other guest rooms. They do not look fancy from the outside, but they are quite nice inside. The air conditioning works great!!In the tops of the trees, several green white breasted parrots can be seen!! These are native birds to Yucatan.These are several plants placed near the entrance. I liked seeing the culture in Yucatan.I enjoyed seeing all the flowers around the hacienda!!This is the henequen plant that was formerly used to make rope. It is in the agave plant family.The flowers were beautiful!!This outdoor bar was situated near the pool.This is some of the farm equipment on the hacienda that reminds guests that it used to be a working farm.The large pool was spectacular and thoroughly enjoyed after a hot day seeing the sites of Yucatan!!These cement chairs were great to use when you want to relax in the pool on a hot day.The hacienda has its own private cenote!! This is an underground cave system that fresh water continually flowing through a network of tunnels and limestone. It was an amazing aqua color!The hacienda’s cenote was amazing to see!! We needed to climb down a series of steep steps to get to the water.
Our first stop of the day was to see the massive number of Mayan ruins at Kabah. These buildings were very dramatic and in amazing shape!!This Mayan structure was the palace for the king.This photo shows the intricate detail in the buildings at Kabah.This detail shows how the wall was made before the facing stones in front of it to decorate the wall.This was one of my favorite sections at Kabah!! The Mayans carved statues of two kings, one male and one female. The females are also called kings. This shows half of a Mayan arch holding up the stairs used to climb to a higher section.This Mayan carving shows three warring men. One is Mayan and the other is possibly an outside group. In the lower section, you can see the guy on the right about to cut off the head of the man on the ground.This shows the series of masks used to depict people. The circles are eyes and the square boxes with holes are the overlapping ears. They have very scarry looking teeth.Next we drove to Labna. This is the famous Labna arch. It is the best preserved Mayan arch from the entire Yucatan region.This shows an alligator mouth with a man’s head inside.We drove to Mani and had lunch. I loved the colors in this storefront.This depicts the Spanish colonization on the Mayan people. This is book burning in the lower left, and rape in the middle of the left and murder of many Mayan people.I loved the colors in this fun Yucatan sign!!This Mani town sign was clever and colorful!!This church was in the Mani main square!!I loved seeing people riding in these motorized cycles. This lady was very friendly and enjoyed having her photo taken!!
Today we drove into a Yucatan jungle and learned all about archeology!!Dr. Tomas was a superb instructor for our group ant taught us all about how they have been working on Mayan sites for more than 25 years at this site. He has also worked on a number of other Mayan locations. It was very fascinating how they approach a ruin and ways to identify what occurred at the site. I could have listed to him for many, many hours.
He described this Mayan site as a “palace” and the number of features within different levels of the ruin.They also have worked extensively at this Mayan pyramid. He described how they carefully tunneled into the doorway seen on the left and that the passage ran deeply into the pyramid.We learned about repair work at a ruin. The researchers were concerned that the whole roof my collapse and inserted the four stones that are whiter to support the roof.This is the current Mayan pyramid where they are working. You can see stakes in the ground and identified artifacts that are now placed on the steps. It was amazing how carefully they are examining the site and learning about the Mayan people!!We showed us a bowl that he found at another Mayan site. Construction workers were building a road and when they located some items, he was contacted and he found this bowl. It was an amazing story to hear how he found such a pristine piece of pottery!!
We started the day driving out of Merida. On the way out of town, we drove through a cemetery and our guide described how the community cares for their dead. He said that today it is becoming more popular to cremate someone when they die because it is much less expensive than burial.Some of the plots in the cemetery are quite elaborate and carefully groomed by family members.This is the famous Uxmal ruins!! This is the backside of the pyramid. It has been restored and now is in much better shape than the ruins we have seen the previous few days. It was incredibly impressive to look at this massive pyramid!!This photo shows the number of steps that the Mayans needed to climb to get to the top of the pyramid!!It is unique to have pillars in a Mayan structure. Some researchers hypothesize that the pillars may have been added at a later time.This is the front side of Uxmal that faces a courtyard. It is an amazingly impressive ruin!!This side of the courtyard had quite a few pillars!!This is an adjacent building within the Uxmal ruins. There were buildings on all 4 sides of this courtyard!!This is the north side of the courtyard buildings and it was the tallest of the 4 buildings.This is an original Mayan sculpture that is an owl. It is amazing to see the detail in all the buildings!!This sculpture is designed to look like lattice work. The red color behind the lattice is original Mayan colors of paint.The snake is a recent addition of Mayan history of a “cult.” This sculpture shows two different snakes that are intertwined. There is a face of a man coming out of the mouth of the snake which had “mystical” meaning. The rattlesnakes tail and rattle are shown above the head. This is the third day in a row that we have seen an iguana crawling along a ridge of Mayan ruins!! This guy is much smaller and has a black coloring under his mouth.This is the Mayan arch. The Mayans are famous for their capstones seen in the top of the arch.The corner of this building shows many Mayan glyphs. This are original to the Mayan architecture. They represent mouths and eyes of creatures depicted by the Mayans.This another Mayan ball court. This is larger than the one we saw a few days ago in another Mayan ruin. This court shows the large ring on the right panel that was used in the games.This shows a house of a wealthy person (usually royalty) living on the compound of the Mayan king.This is the massive house of the Mayan king. It is enormous!! We can climb these steps today, but the large pyramid is now off limits for tourists to climb.This is an original Mayan drawing on the ceiling of a Mayan house on the Uxmal compound. A parrot can be seen in the lower right section of the drawing. This is one of the capstones of the building.After a fantastic time exploring the Uxmal ruins, we next drove to the nearby Mayan chocolate factory!!A woman provided a demonstration how they went from the raw cacao plant to make the final product. Here, she is mixing the the chocolate to make a drink that we were able to sample. I thought it tasted much better after adding sugar and cinnamon!! John added everything, including chili powder and allspice.I bought two chocolate bars made at the facility after testing some of their samples. One was dark chocolate and another was milk chocolate. I passed on the coffee and chili flavors.
After eating dinner, John and I walked down to the center square in Merida. I really like this town. It is clean and quite different from most other Mexican cities I have visited. It was fun to see some of their Christmas decorations!The population here loves their city!! It has about 1.4 million people.I thought this 3 dimensional star was quite beautiful!!I loved all of these lights!!It seems to be common in Mexico for many towns to have a colorful sign with the city’s name!! I enjoy seeing them!
Fiesta on Wheels 