More on our trip to Chichen Itza and other things

Excellent! We have a much better internet connection today. Isla Mujeres was a lovely little town with a great carribean flavor... very colorful buildings, tiny little streets, cute little shops... you get the picture. But, the internet connection was painfully slow.

A little more about our trip to Chichen Itza:

The bus picked us up at our hotel at 7 a.m. Yes... you read that right. 7 A.M.... that´s in the morning, yes. Anyway, we had an opportunity to sleep on the bus so it wasn´t that horrible. The drive out there was approximately 2 1/2 hours. We passed through a lot of jungle, then we saw an agave plantation -- TEQUILA! -- then we passed through several small Mayan villages. We stopped at one where there was a co-op and we shopped around and Rhonda bought a hammock that everyone will fight over when we put it up.

We then continued on to Chichen Itza. We were very lucky to have an excellent guide -- his Spanish name was Antonio, and he had a Mayan name that I have, sadly, forgotten. He is an Archeologist that works for the Mexican Government and does tours for a few months out of the year to make some money because, apparently, archaeology doesn´t pay all that well. But, LUCKY US! He had actually done a lot of the excavation on parts of Chichen Itza and knew ALL about it. We learned so much about the Mayan way of life at this stunning city. We have more pictures and many stories to tell when we get back ... tales of astronomy, acoustics and human sacrifice! The Mayans were an amazing people ... they still are.

We got to see the pyramid, the ball court, a temple and some other places that were not excavated yet... then we saw the observatory and, on our way back out... the rain came down in buckets!!!!!!!

We later asked Antonio, since he had left to go back to the bus to take care of ¨paperwork¨ if he knew it was going to rain... since he´s Mayan and all. He laughed and said, ¨Well, remember when I showed you the ant hill? (There was a HUGE ant hill near the trail) Did you see there were no ants? They knew and they were taking cover.¨ So, Antonio and the ants were the only ones who weren´t soaked through and through.

On the way back, we stopped at the Mayan co-op and had a late lunch. The food was really good and I´m going to learn how to make lemon soup when I return.

Today, we are exploring downtown Cancun and tomorrow we are off to Tulum and then to Chetumal, which is a city on the border of Belize. On Thursday morning, we plan to catch an early bus into Belize City, and from there it´s a boat to Caye Caulker where we will do some snorkeling.

Ciao for now! Hope everyone is doing great and remember -- our phones don´t really work down here so email us if you need to contact us... we will try to check email every 2 - 3 days.

Much love, Cathleen and Rhonda