Viva Mexico

Saturday, March 5, 2011

What, you may ask, has had us so busy that we’ve been unable to post a blog for well over a week? Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. We’ve been baking in the sun, getting tossed in the waves and eating shrimp fajitas. We’ve gone from the chill of Guatemala’s Western Highlands to the heat of the Maya Riviera, and I’m loving it. We’ve been incredibly lazy; although, we’ve done a bit of snorkeling and walking up and down the beach.

This morning we visited the ruins of Tulum, an archeological site of little significance but nearby. What makes Tulum special is its spectacular location directly on the ocean’s edge. Most Mayan ruins are back in the jungle, but Tulum was a trading center for the various cities up and down the coast. It’s a small site and we managed to see it pretty thoroughly in 2 hours. We headed to Tulum early and got there just as it opened. There were only a few other people there, so we had it nearly to ourselves. Right about the time we were leaving, the tour buses began rolling in. I felt like a fish swimming upstream. We must have passed close to 500 people walking in as we were walking out. Ugh.

There has been a lot of wind on the coast for the past week and a half. The entire time we were on Caye Caulker in Belize, the wind was strong. The one calm day we had, we got out SCUBA diving, which was just dumb luck on our part. We attempted snorkeling, but it was pretty disappointing – low visibility, nothing much of any interest, etc, so we only did that one day.

We spent four nights on Caye Caulker and two nights on Ambergris Caye, which is considerably bigger and more developed than Caulker. I like low-key and relaxed, but Caye Caulker was a little too low-key for me. The island is very small – it’s quite easy to walk from one end to the other and is only about 3 blocks wide, so it’s easy to catch the sunrise and the sunset without investing too much effort. My impression is that the locals are happy to let you come and share the island with them, but they aren’t interested in turning their island into a destination. So you get what you get… take it or leave it. We did have two really good meals on the island – both in the same day – but other than that, the food was nothing to write home about. Even the diving was disappointing. Jeff and I both felt the dive shop was not very helpful or hospitable, and even borders on dangerous for the inexperienced diver. Reviews on line tend to bear that out. New divers may rave about it, but experienced divers have a lot more to compare against and tend to be more critical.

Our time on Ambergris Caye was very enjoyable. It’s quite developed; although, there is still a lot of small-town charm. Jeff got us a great deal on a hotel room that had a balcony overlooking the ocean. Sweet. Within a few minutes of getting settled in, we were back on the street ready to explore and bumped into a woman who was apparently the city booster club. She gave us some great suggestions of places to eat and things to see, and she did not steer us wrong. We only had about a day and a half there, but we managed to really enjoy that time. We got lucky with the wind and had two calm days in a row – just a light breeze to help keep things cool. We rented a little Hobie sailboat and sailed up and down the coast for several hours. The entire coastline of Belize and the Eastern Yucatan is bordered by the second largest barrier reef in the world (Australia’s being the largest). We were able to sail right out to the reef and skim along the inside edge the entire time, safely within the calm waters beyond the break. There are several locations along that stretch where snorkel tours bring groups to putter around, so we just tied ourselves up to one of the buoys and went snorkeling along the reef. That was a lot of fun. At one point I heard Jeff call my name and when I looked up, he was excitedly pointing to a spot just in front of him and calling out “shark.” I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to swim toward it or away from it, but figured it was probably just a nurse shark, so headed over to take a look. The poor thing was so scared of us it found a rock and hid under it.

We’ve been in Mexico since Thursday, and I’m convinced more than ever that this is one of my favorite places on earth. There is something about the people, the culture, the food that really appeals to me. Especially now that we can both speak a little Spanish. I’m finding it quite enjoyable to have conversations with people in the stores and on the bus and at the restaurant. I’m still at my best in the first-person singular, present tense, but I’m doing better at conjugating my verbs to include the second and third-person. Past tense is still a bit tricky, and I just haven’t gotten to the future tense at all. That’s for another trip!

We are actually staying at a resort here. That’s unusual for us, but I whined about wanting a swimming pool, so here we are. The place we’re at caters to divers, but not just any kind … they specialize in cave diving. The jungle in this area is riddled with caves and underground rivers and it’s possible to dive them. We did dive a cenote a few years back when we were staying just north of here, and it was a new experience for both of us. Not for the claustrophobic, for sure. Jeff enjoyed it more than I did. There is a lot of structure in the cenotes – stalactites and stalagmites and crystal formations in the ceilings. But there are no pretty fishies and no coral.

Anyway, this resort really does the cave diving thing in a big way. Yesterday morning they were getting a group ready to go out, and they left with one van of people and one van of equipment. Folks had flashlights and double tanks and little reels of rope so they could find their way back out, and who knows what else. You have to be cave certified to dive with them, so these were some serious divers. Jeff talked with one woman who said she has never even done any open-water diving here – only cave diving. Hmmm… I just don’t see the attraction.

Anyway, after they got that group off to the jungle, we got ourselves out for some open water diving. Jeff and I were the only two, so we had our dive-master to ourselves. We didn’t have to go far – just a 15 minute boat ride up the coastline – to a place called the Canyon. It was a drift dive, which meant we dropped down to about 70 feet then just let the current take us to the end of the reef. Talk about easy. We saw tons of cool stuff including a small school of barracuda, a couple of really big spiny lobsters, a huge manta ray, a spotted eel and a small sea turtle. There were also lots of fish swimming in large schools that went right around us. I felt like I was in the movie Nemo and half expected one school of fish to start forming themselves into arrows and directional signs. There were large schools of tiny bright blue fishies all over the place. They were so fun to watch. One group of them had a tiny bright yellow fish with them – I’m not sure if he was the adopted one or if he just got mixed in by accident and hadn’t found his group yet. He sure stood out in the crowd.

So, that’s what we’ve been up to. Your basic vacation stuff. Not as interesting to read about as going to Spanish school in Guatemala, but we’re enjoying it. Now that the end is in sight, it’s all about soaking up as much sun as we can before coming back to the snow of Minneapolis. I’ve got about a million freckles. You’ll have to see me soon if you want to catch them… they’ll all be faded in about a week’s time.

That’s it for now. Hasta luego…