Pitch black

Today dawned clear and warm and we awoke in our gorgeous bed and hopped right up. Robert started making coffee with the little Nespresso machine, which was amazing by the way, and I took a shower.

One of the issues with the Yucatan is the plumbing. This whole area was underwater 12 million years ago. (The shell fossils we found in the cenotes later, prove this.) When the peninsula became dry land, it left the base of the Yucatan as nothing but limestone. That means the only potable water is found in the thousands of cenotes that are reservoirs of pure, earth-filtered water, dotted all over the area.

There's literally nothing here but limestone and the broken down limestone that creates the gorgeous white sand we see on the sacred sacbe' roads, on the reef in the Caribbean that's up against the Yucatan peninsula on the south-east side, and on the roads and beaches everywhere.  It also means every single hotel or business with a public restroom must insist we do not throw our toilet paper down the toilet. We have to throw it in the garbage can we find in every single restroom. It's weird, but it's a thing.

Our bathroom is amazing. I know that sounds weird but it is so gorgeous. The shower head is one of those great big rainwater affairs but with a lot of pressure. There's two sinks made of marble and amenities like soft white robes and big fat beach towels. So my shower was nice and when I was done, Robert got in.

We went to breakfast in the hotel. We had lattes and fresh pineapple juice. The waiter brought us two small shot glasses with lime in them and said it was Mescal, to start our day. Robert and I were aghast for like 15 seconds. Then the waiter burst out laughing and said it was just hot water to wake us up. Robert and I laughed at that because our faces must have been priceless when he said Mescal. Note to self, Benito has a sense of humor.

I've been studying the Mayan Language, and I swear this helped with our staff at the Alea hotel on the Caribbean coastline. They are all Mayan. So being able to ask ¿Bix A Beel? really caught them off guard. We talked with them about Mayan phrases and pronunciation. And they talked to us about places to go and what to avoid. It was charming. We asked about where each person hailed from, and how they came to be here. The stories were fascinating.

After breakfast, which consisted of bizarre egg/red sauce dishes and amazing juices and lattes, we walked to the meeting place for our tour. I guess the tour buses can't drive down our road, so the meeting spot was back about a half mile on our road, which was easy enough to walk.
  
The bus was right on time. When it stopped by us, out popped Pepe, our guide for the day. Pepe is from Mexico City but he was a smaller man, like the Maya. He looks like a tiny Brazilian man, all dark brown with a rash guard on and an ankle bracelet. He was wearing a plastic gold crown over his hat. He checked us in and put our wristbands on, then explained he was wearing a crown because it was his birthday. He was 32.

We were second to last on the bus so we ducked and climbed aboard, picking two seats in the very back. We were next to a couple that looked slightly older than us: a strawberry blonde with eighties hair, massive eyeliner, and mascara, and one of those larger men with a heavy-set face and a square haircut.

There was also a mother and father from Germany with their daughter and her girl friend, a young couple, and two more people I can't remember, for the life of me.

Our first stop was the Tulum Ruins. It's part of a Federal park, so it's regulated pretty heavily. Robert and I took a bag with our phones, water, a Kodac sport underwater camera, and a few odds and ends.

The tour guide and the driver, Mike, offered us a large umbrella for the tour, but it was very heavy. We declined it. It is the only mistake we made on this trip.

We also had a professional photographer with us. His name was Diego. He was sweet. He tried very hard to stay in the background and not be in our faces, but to get pictures of each couple or family.

 We hit the restrooms as a group and then started the climb. Pepe said he is a Federal Guide and is educated so well he could give the tour we were taking around the Tulum Ruins. However. He had set us up with a guide on site, and he followed along with us.

The first thing we noticed were the animals. There were very big iguanas everywhere. All I could think about was my oldest child and my grand-lizard. Axel would love the wild iguanas.

There were also beautiful birds everywhere and they made loud but very sweet sounds. Some of the birds were bright yellow or deep blue, but many of them were apparently some sort of Yucatecan Starling that makes 7 distinct sounds but is known for eating the eggs of all the other birds.

The Coati's (Coati Mundi, pronounced "quat-ee moondee") were also present in abundance, looking like raccoons but with ant-eater snouts. We were told they are quite aggressive. They looked like racoons!

We also came across a squirrel eating something in a tree. It looked exactly like the innards of a cattail, but Pepe called it bread. A random female tourist was questioning in another language what it was eating, and I thought she was speaking French. I called to Robert to speak to her, since he knows French, but it turns out she was speaking Italian. That worked out fine since Robert is able to at least eek out a conversation in Italian, enough to explain it to her.

We rounded a corner and came across the first limestone arches that signified the ruins were starting. Because of all the things I've read about the Yucatan, much of the dialogue from the guide was stuff I already knew nearly by heart. The only thing that truly surprised me was his explanation that the Mayans originated in Guatemala. Looking for a better life, he said, and settled here.

The second thing I didn't know is how *tiny* the Mayans were. The archways and tunnels into the site were so small, it caught me off guard. I had no idea the Mwayans were such tiny people, but we saw direct evidence of this all over the Yucatan.

The paths leading into the main city ruins were all pale, dusty limestone sand. The trees actually grew right up in the middle of the pathways, too, and the limestone stairs were worn down to shiny golden stones. The effects of both things together made everything sort of glow. It was awesome.

There's so much about the ruins on the internet, written by those more qualified than I, that I hesitate to describe them in great detail. What I will do is describe the parts I loved.

The site is huge, and it's built on the cliffs at the edge of the sea, but it also borders the jungle in the interior. There's a huge central area the size of two football fields where they housed the central marketplace. It had short green grass and a hundred poodle-sized iguanas. Beyond that are large buildings with carvings and rooms and towers. It's all made from limestone blocks, which were white and now have some black lichen on them.

One of the gods looks like the splayed out frog you see in marine towns, but facing downward. They call him the Diving God or descending God. He looks just like he's diving into the water, but in a square design. It's cool.

There are also doorways into rooms here and there. And they're so *small*. The designs of the buildings are also odd, including the hundreds of stairs up to the main temple. What's the point of that? Maybe short people like to feel tall.

The earth is brown and dusty, and the heat was a shock even though we knew it would be hot.  The humidity was stifling. Nearly everyone had bottles of water, and many people congregated under big trees to take advantage of the shade.

One huge bush near the government house was bright saturated pink and it was huge. I'm sure it's a bougainvillea and it was awesome. There were also orange flowers, purple trumpet type flowers, and red flowers. Not positive on what any of those were but they were gorgeous.

At any rate, we wandered the whole site, which was huge. We had some free time but only about 30 minutes. This was the leg of the journey on which I got sunburned to the color of a lobster. Literally.

Next, we all piled back in the van and drove down the coast a small ways to the bay where we would be snorkeling. We changed and showered on the path to the beach, where an older couple waited to take 10 pesos for those who weren't part of the tour. We were given snorkeling gear and instructions. I wasn't sure I could do it but I was damn well going to try.

So we took photos and let Diego the photographer take photos and then climbed in the boats. Now, by way of explanation, the Tulum side of the Caribbean is part of the Great Mayan Barrier Reef. It also has like a mile of super shallow water until you get out to where the waves break. That makes the water really warm, up close to the beach and makes for gorgeous snorkeling at the breakwater amidst the coral reef.

So the guides anchored the boats (we went in two) and told us to put on our flippers and fall backwards into the water. Robert did this like a pro. I slid onto the boat edge and slid in facing forward, because I'll be damned if I was going to belly flop on my back! Once I figured out how to snorkel, I was a snorkeling badass! We saw a stingray and a ton of gorgeous, colored fish as well as black sea urchins and live coral. We saw fan coral, brain coral, finger coral and labyrinth coral, alive and floating on the currents with their bodies attached to the reef. It was incredible. Robert and I held hands during some of it.

Our time was up way too fast, but hours go by like minutes here. We swam over to the boats and pulled off the flippers, climbed the ladder, and said goodbye to the snorkeling. All of us noted the salt in our hair from the Caribbean. We piled back in the van and chewed down on the snacks we were given, which included real cheetos (you have no idea how hard it was to find real cheetos for Robert) and granola bars and sodas and an empanada thing with spinach and corn mash that was insanely good.

Next, we drove to our cenote', called Cenote' Caracol. We learned a lot about the ecology of the Mexican jungle and the Yucatan and the cenotes in particular. The ride was a bit long and uber bumpy, but Pepe kept us laughing the whole way. When we got to the cenote', it was in the middle of the Yucatecan jungle. We were the last tour there for the day, so we had it all to ourselves.

We sprayed ourselves with bug spray, and then had a very nice buffet lunch at the picnic shelter. Pulled pork, rice, fresh fruit, tortillas, salad, hibiscus tea. It was good considering it was in the middle of the damn jungle. Next, we hiked down to the "dry" caves and walked through a system of pitch black caves full of stalagmites and stalactites that would give Carlsbad Caverns a run for their money. I've been there, so I know.

The water from the rain drains down through the earth and drips through the limestone, carrying with it some of the calcium carbonate. So over an 80 year span, a stalactite forms. When the water drops off the stalactite and starts forming a pillar directly underneath, a stalagmite forms. The two meet in the middle eventually. Most of us know this. What we don't  know is that in the Yucatan, the tree roots spiral downward until they find water. That means many stalagmites and stalactites have long tree roots in and around them. It was amazing to see, and to realize the trees above, and different ones at that, were all reaching into the cenotes for life-giving water. Cool.

The next thing we did was shower. Pepe said the water would be hot, but he was kidding. It was cold cenote' water. Robert squealed when it was his turn. Then we finally walked down the ladder and into the deep, dark cave, bats and all. We climbed nearly vertically down until we were all standing on a 15 foot square dock, in zero natural light. Diego told us each to jump backwards into the cenote' so he could take pictures. When it was Robert's turn, he counted his own 3 and jumped so there's no mid-jump pictures. I did not jump. Because I am afraid to death of pitch black AND of bottomless pit waters AND of bats AND of eels and fishies eating my toes and WHAT IF A MONSTER COMES UP AND EATS ME?

After 5 minutes of saying there was no way I'd go in, and being furious with meself because I really wanted to go in, Robert and Pepe came over and said they'd help me in. So I walked down the stairs, took their hands, and started to swim. We swam for a long time, past caves and through caves and past a couple eerie green lights placed for guidance. Robert was given a flashlight because he's a responsible person, and I was never so glad in my life that he had a light.

We stopped as a group twice. First, we stopped on a white limestone shelf and Pepe told us fun facts about how the fish swim past the heliocline to get into the cenotes and how they survive on bat guano! That first stop is where the German mom realized the fishies were toe nibblers. One fish bit a woman's hip. Some of the catfish looked huge.

The second stop was where Pepe had us all take off our snorkeling gear because the caves ceilings were so low, the tubes would scrape the limestone as we swam through. Pepe also insisted on turning off all the lights and explaining how the ancient Maya (he pronounced it Mahjah!) believed the cenotes were the entrance to the underworld, or Xibalba. He wanted us to experience Xibalba as the Mayans would have. We left our lights off for like 4 hours, but Robert said it was only 5 minutes. Longest 5 minutes of my life.

We swam and wriggled back through a tight space and were right back where we started from. It was awesome. We got to swim for a while in the purest water in the peninsula. What I didn't know was the icy cold water was doing wonders for cooling my FRIED ASS SUNBURN. Oy. So that was the end of the Ocean Tours, tour.

It was a grand experience and I'm so thankful I swam in the cenote'. After we got home to the hotel, Robert drove me into Tulum to the Super Aki grocery store to get aloe. Apparently the Yucatecans don't burn like us Irish so we found nothing but baby lotion. I slathered it on and used nearly half the bottle by the time we got back to the Alea again.

When we got changed and freshened up, we ate dinner at the hotel restaurant. Once again we had the filet mignon, but also a lamb dish mixed with gravy and a mashed corn that tasted like mashed potatoes only better. Plus we had crab stuffed chicken. Robert has been a chef and a caterer and he says the Alea Chef could give the Cordon Bleu a run for its money! We ended the night with Mexican television and the chocolates on our pillows.