travels, races, and other musings

I actually don't have much to report about Monday because we didn't really do much of anything. After breakfast we hung out on the beach a bit. Unfortunately, the flags were a mixture of red and yellow (again!) and so we only went into the water for a short time. We spent a little bit of time wave jumping and I tried in vain to build some sand castles. Finally, after I was hit by a giant wave, went under, and swallowed way too much sea water, I had enough of the beach for the day so we headed in to the pool area. We waded over to the swim up bar to give that a try for awhile. We ordered lunch and some frou frou drinks from the totally crazy mexican bartenders at the swim up bar. I tried out a bit of my really rusty spanish with them. My favorite part of the swim up bar (other than the crazy bartenders that made us laugh all afternoon) was the big sign that said "Drinks under 18 years old not allowed in bar area." After we turned into prunes, we headed back over ...

I started the day by calling around some rental agencies to see about the best rate for a rental car. We found the best rate at the Omni hotel right next door to our hotel so we made our way over there and rented the cheapest car we could. This itty-bitty thing was seriously no frills - power nothing, no radio (what are we going to listen to in Mexico anyway), but it did have A/C which was nice. So we jumped in our silly little car (I drove on the way down, Roger drove on the way back) with a map and headed for Aktun Chen. It took us a couple of hours to drive there. Driving in Mexico wasn't a huge deal. The weirdest part was that the speed limit changes constantly. One moment it is 80 km/h and then 500 km down the road it is suddenly 40 km/h and then inexplicably, another km later, it is 100 km/h. The other drivers ignored the speed limit completely and pretty much drove about 110 km/h. It was so hard to stick with the speed limit because you would almost not even have enough ti...

We spent all of Saturday morning trying to figure out what we wanted to do that day. We really wanted to go visit a really cool cave site called Aktun Chen. We had read about them in our travel book (where they were listed as a must-see) and visited their website. We visited the travel agency in our hotel, but the only tours to Aktun Chen depart on Wednesday, so we had already missed it. Besides that, we really wanted to go see the ruins at Tulum but the only tours there were combined with a visit to Xel-Ha, another eco-park like Xcaret, which we already had our fill of. We investigated renting a car, which intimidated us a bit in a foreign country and tried to find another travel agency with a tour to one of these two places. After searching all morning, we gave up and realized we didn't have enough time to get down there any longer anyway so we went back to the travel agent in our hotel to see if there were any activities to do that afternoon. We had been curious about the ho...

We spent the morning hanging out on the beach. We lounged about in beach chairs for awhile and when that got boring (about 15 minutes later) we dove into the ocean. The beach has a flag system that tells you about the condition of the sea at that moment. Red means really rough, don't go in the water, yellow is moderate, swim at your own risk and green means calm. The whole time we were in Cancun we never saw green flags, only red and yellow ones. The confusing part is that they will have red and yellow ones out at the same time. So on Friday some portions of the beach were yellow and some were red, presumably the undertow and waves were less strong in the yellow areas? I don't know, at any rate, there were some pretty big waves. So we did some wave jumping and swimming until we were all tired out and then went back to our beach chairs. After we had a light lunch, we headed across the street to the lagoon side to the marina that belongs to the resort we were staying at. At the...

On Thursday we headed to Xcaret for the day. We climbed aboard another tour bus for the hour and a half drive south of Cancun. Xcaret (the x is pronounced like a combination of ch and ish) is sort of a hard place to explain, but basically it is like a zoo, aquarium, water park, theme park type thing that also happens to be built on an archaeological site. We decided to spend the morning doing the dry activities, then change and do the water stuff in the afternoon. We walked around the aquarium first, then headed on to see all the sea turtles they are breeding for reintroduction. They had a ton of little turtles and then a huge enclosure where some really big turtles were. After the turtles, we moved on to the animals. They had some big cats, macaws, pink flamingos, and spider monkeys. We also checked out the Xcaret Mayan ruins which were really fairly small and, after Chichen-Itza, not that impressive. We also wandered around their butterfly enclosure which was really impressive, a...

The tour left at 7 AM for Chichen-Itza so we climbed sleepily onto a nice tour bus and headed out. The bus was about 3/4 full so it wasn't too bad, probably about 35-40 people total. They gave us juice and some breakfast danishes to eat on the way. Chichen-Itza is about 3-4 hours from Cancun, so it was a long trip. On the way there, we took some side trips through a small colonial style Mexican village and a contemporary Mayan village. We also stopped at a little artisan market for some shopping. At the market we bought a little terra-cotta sun/moon sculpture thing to hang on the house outside and a Mayan astrological calendar. It is pretty cool. You choose the date and they print up the star alignment for that day in Mayan glyphs. We finally arrived at Chichen-Itza around noon. Our tour guide was really super great. He used to be a professor of history at the local university but realized he could make more money as a tour guide. Jaime was half Mayan, half British and spoke Maya...

Our flight to Cancun was fairly uneventful. We were prepared with our passports and got to the airport plenty early, changed planes in Dallas and arrived in Cancun on time. We got off the plane and were ushered through passport control (immigration) and got our passports stamped and from there we headed to pick up our baggage and get in the ever-growing line for customs. Customs in Cancun basically worked with a random red-light green-light system. You press a button and you randomly get a red light or green light on this little stop light thing. If the light is green, you pass through. If it is red, you get searched and questions about all the junk you are bringing into the country. After waiting for thirty minutes in the really really long line, we pressed the button...green! We paid $18 to take a shuttle to the hotel and arrived and checked into the hotel. The hotel we were staying at was actually not a hotel, but a time share resort. Roger's mom owns a time share there and ...