USA     Galapagos Islands

Mexico

8/22/09 - 9/1/09

With the threat of Steve's impending employment looming over us, we made a final dash to Playa del Carmen just south of Cancun on Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. Although less than an hour from Cancun, Playa manages to fit hotels and local food in between the oversized resorts.
There's plenty to see and do around the Yucatan. There are Mayan ruins all over the place, ocean Scuba diving The area is known for good ocean diving around the island of Cozumel, but it was hard to get excited about it after all the great diving we've had the last few years. It was the underground rivers and cave systems, known as cenotes, that captured more of our scuba related imagination. And it turns out that the cave diving is a truly unique and exciting experience. The ocean diving was, well, mostly just an opportunity to get wet. Although there were two big firsts for Steve.

The Mayan ruins were pretty interesting. Claiming that this was simply a 'vacation', we made very little attempt to get into the history of the Mayan culture and just enjoyed the ruins on their visual and scenic merits. Tulum takes the cake on this count. Tulum was a small walled city that I consider the Mayan equivalent of a castle. What makes Tulum a destination is its setting perched on a jungle bluff overlooking the wonderful blues of the Caribbean.

We rented a car one day to visit the inland ruins of Coba and Chichen Itza. The roads down here are largely good, which was good news since it's a good 3 hour drive from Playa del Carmen to Chichen Itza. All was going well in our littly Hyundai until we stopped to look at a pottery shop in between Tulum and Coba. Trying to lock the door, the key just melted in the lock, leaving us stranded. The family at the shop were helpful, lending us their cell phone. To our surprise, the rental company had a replacement car out to us in time to still see Coba.

The ruins at Coba are surrounded by jungle, which made for 360 degrees of green from the top of the big pyramid. Coba also has a couple of small Mesoamerican "ballgame" courts where teams tried to hit a rubber ball through a small overhead hoop without using their hands. Coba seems to be largely overlooked by people heading to the more popular sites of Tulum and Chichen Itza, but is different enough that it deserves a stop. It also has the only pyramid of the three sites that can still be climbed!

Chichen Itza hides well off in the middle of the Yucatan peninsula, but the site is more open than Coba and the ruins are largely restored. The main pyramid is striking, but sadly is no longer a jungle gym for clumsy tourists to climb. There's also a giant ballgame court here. The hoop is so high and small that it's hard to imagine how they ever got the ball through without using hands. Although that explains why apparently a single goal was usually the end to a game. And yes, this is the game where the losing team's captain would be sacrificed.

The town of Playa del Carmen itself is nothing to write home about, but it has enough variety to make for a pleasant vacation. The beach is nice and the water warm, but hotels and resorts make it hard to get a quiet piece of sand to yourself. The main tourist strip is one block off the sand and has enough junk stores, tourist food and discos to handle high season in good economic times. We spent most of our time further inland where we found plenty of more local foods. We found good ceviche at a restaurant that looks like it copied itself directly from an El Torrito back home. They also had a great beer cocktail called michelada. The style served here was a salted mug filled about a quarter up with a mixture of lime juice, tabasco, soy sauce, pepper and who knows what else. Pour your beer (Bohemia for me) in and drink together. Super refreshing and adds a great bite.

Playa del Carmen

When in town, we spent most of our time either on the beach or eating. It's a little hot and humid here this time of year, so town and beach were pretty quiet. Interestingly, quite a few of the other tourists actually seemed to be from around Mexico. We like a lot of quiet, so we pulled our usual trick and bought a pair of floaties so we could hide from the hawkers and enjoy our naps out on the waves. There usually was a bit of current pushing us towards Belize so we'd tie our toe up to a little buoy out front of our favorite section of beach.


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Mayan ruins of Tulum

The walled ruins of Tulum sit on a 40' bluff overlooking the Caribbean. The combination of jungle, sea and ruins make for a really beautiful site. Even better, there's a nice beach right below the ruins that is accessible via a long staircase. There's a tremendous population of healthy lizards, a few up to 3 or 4 feet, that wait patiently for tourists to drop a snack... or small children... One end of the beach is isolated for turtles to nest in. Protective net enclosures are built quickly to protect the eggs from the voracious lizards.


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More Pyramids to Climb

The ruins at Coba aren't terribly spectacular, but they are a nice mix of rubble and restoration. Most fun is that the big pyramid towering over the jungle can be climbed for a great view. The three sets of ruins are each about a half mile apart, so it was a good walk for us. The less motivated have a gaggle of bicycle rikshaw drivers at their disposal to save legs for the pyramid.


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Chichen Itza

The big Mayan draw in the Yucatan is the vast ruin of Chichen Itza. The beautiful restored pyramid: that's here. The gigantic ballgame court: that's here. The observatory: it's around the corner. These popular sites definitely draw the crowds going by the size of the tourbus parking area and the fancy welcome area. We were actually grateful for all the tourist services as we hadn't found a good place to stop for lunch on the long drive out. The ruins here are generally nicely restored and the site is very impressive. It was nice to be there late in the day and enjoy the colors coming out as the sun started to sink and the tourbus crowds headed back to Cancun.


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Cave Diving

The Yucatan peninsula is a big chunk of limestone Swiss cheese. Over time, rainwater has carved and filled caverns, passages and underground rivers in the jungle. These caves and sinkholes were important to the Mayans, who worshipped them as passages to the underworld. In the early 1990s, SCUBA divers started jumping in and there are now a few dozen that have been explored. We had time for 5 dives into 4 different cenotes: Dos Ojos, Chikin Ha, Tajma Ha and Angelita. We had a great guide who took us beyond the cavern limits and through some of the deeper caves. We even did a little exploring of areas he hadn't been through before.
We did 'caverns', where the entrance is visible and no more than about 200 feet away. But we also did a fair amount of 'cave' diving, where the entrance is not visible or necessarily very close and there is no external lightsource. The caves are generally shallow; we never went below about 50 feet. Because they're filled by rainwater, most of the water is fresh. However, salt water does creep in sink to the bottom, because it's denser than fresh. At some level, the two meet in blurry mixture called a halocline. In one of the caves, the water very near the bottom was much warmer than the higher water. But the halocline was so strong and blurry, that even with my flashlight pointed straight down, I could not tell how close I was to hitting the silty bottom, so I could not enjoy the warmth just inches away from me!
One of the cenotes is quite different than the others. Angelita (little angel) is a sinkhole that drops straight down to about 160 feet. There is a halocline where the fresh and saltwater meet at just about 100 feet. Trapped in the halocline is an opaque cloud of hydrogen sulfate. The fresh water is invisibly clear about the cloud, and the salt water is pitch black below the cloud. The feeling above the cloud is like flying through a misty swamp in Pirates of the Caribbean. It is absolutely incredible. Some dive shops won't go to it because it is so far away... and maybe there have been car thefts and driver beatings in the past. But if you are ever here, find a shop that goes. It is one of the most amazing dives I've ever done. And there's a small crocodile living on the surface. So cool.


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Ocean Diving

For our first ocean dives, we took a morning ferry to Cozumel and hopped a dive boat down to the southern end of the island. We met with a bit of rain and a group of really poor divers. Between the two, I'll say that the Cozumel reef is nice, but we really didn't get a lot out of it. Back on the mainland, we had a somewhat better time diving off Playa del Carmen. The dive shop was close enough to the shore that we just walked through town in our gear to the beach. On the first dive, I saw my first bull sharks and then sunk to a depth that sent my head spinning. A few days later, we did a decent wreck and then a nice drift through a wavy reef full of fish.


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