hubby and me

although we have had a great time talking with two of the crew members – inyoman from indonesia and siriya from thailand.  we exchanged emails with them and, hopefully, will be able to keep in touch a bit.  tonight’s show was “shout”, which we didn’t see last week because they tricked us by moving it to before dinner.  i really liked it.  typical las vegas review kind of stuff but i got into it.  much better than the “xtreme country” show. 

aj and carolyn

i don’t know why these turned out so blurry

inyoman, aldrin, and gener (the one who remembered our names from last week)

we also had the adult comedy from last night’s comedian.  i laughed quite a bit but was appalled by the mother next to us who insisted that her kids were staying for the show when the crew members tried to boot them.  we’re pretty much done packing so we’ll be ready to go after a quick breakfast in the morning.  i’m not at all looking forward to what i know is going to be four hours of torturous noise and shaking starting at the crack of oh-my-God-it’s-early.  all in all, it has been a good cruise experience but i don’t think we’ll do another ship this old and small again.  i guess the stabilizer technology just wasn’t available when it was built.  i liked the glory because i never felt any motion and there was plenty to do.  the holiday just felt limited.  maybe it was just the type of people that were on the ship but the nightlife was dull or dead. 

towel animal du jour:  turkey!

destroyer squadron 14

don't tread on me

there were a lot of guns

instead of booking anything, we decided to just hang out and walk around a bit. really, it’s a good thing that we did because it rained like crazy and visibility for snorkeling would have been shot, i’m sure. we mostly walked around the little shops (“come see my shop” “it costs $0 to look” “you want these”). we’ve been talking a lot with one of our dinner waiters, inyoman from indonesia, who was very excited about having the afternoon off to hang out in port. we had talked about meeting up with him at señor frogs but we didn’t see him while we were there.  i think he said tonight that he had actually gone to the one in town whereas we had stayed around the dock.  on our way back to the ship, we got a thorough soaking from the rain that was truly refreshing.  we ate some lunch and hung out admiring the sailors. 

holiday and destroyer

we stuck around on deck to watch as we set sail for our last time this trip.  it was a nice place to do so because the water was absolutely amazing. 

blue, blue, blue

the after dinner show was a juggling/comedy combo again.  the juggler, of course, was manuel zuniga (our third time seeing him).  same show, still entertaining.  the comedian was brad tassell.  i enjoyed his show, even if he was pushing it for the family show – his adult show should be interesting.  he had a frantic delivery to his act which made it all seem much more spontaneous.  the only flaw was that he kept doing infomercials to p!mp out the children’s books that he’s written.  we went from there up to the big deck party where i partook of a few bites from the midnight mexican buffet and hubby joined the conga line. 

towel animal du jour:  turtle!

hubby on the bus

when we got there, the guide toured us around for about an hour, showing us some of the highlights of the ruins and giving us some great information. i wish i had our camcorder because i can’t remember half of the cool facts he gave us.

for my cousin

the central temple (temple of kulkulkan or “el castillo”) is beautiful and impressive. it is where the really cool light trick occurs on the spring and fall equinox each year – the sun shines down the shadowed side one triangle at a time until it gets to the bottom and lights up the limestone snake head and the sun triangles form it’s body. i’d love to see that.

el castillo

the light tricks are always cool but we knew the mayans were smart like that. what we didn’t know is how they had also mastered accoustics too. when you stand in front of any of the four sides of the temple and make a loud noise, such as a clap, the echo that comes back is the sound of the quetzal bird. how cool that they figured out how to bend the sound waves to manipulate the echo like that! there was another example of this accoustical genious in the great ball court where each noise was echoed seven times (seven players on each side). while i’m at it, the other really interesting thing about the great ball court was that each game ended in sacrifice – the captain of the losing team decapitated the captain of the winning team. talk about throwing the game, eh?

the great ball court

some other fun structures were the jaguar temple, the eagle temple, the skull platform, platform of venus, and the warriors temple of a thousand collumns. there was also a path that led to a big sink hole called the centote sagrado where they sacrificed children by weighting them down and throwing them in. clearly, the mayans were a peaceful people. we went to tulum on our first cruise two years ago and thought it was really cool. chichen itza was so much better. not to mention shadier – tulum had no shade and was miserably hot, today was hot but there were plenty of shady areas to make it tolerable. the clouds helped too. and the fact that we were smart enough to bring our camelpack this time. after the guide had imparted all of the knowledge he wanted to impart, we were left with about an hour to wander around on our own.

back at the bus, we were given a bagged ham-n-cheese sammich lunch and it was a sleepy two hour ride back to the ship.

hubby and the holiday

onboard, we dropped our stuff in the room and went to grab a snack (the bagged lunch was only partially edible) and watched a guy repeatedly kick some kid’s butt in giant-chess. back at the room, we were pleased to discover invitations to the past-guess reception again and we were finally on time to it. the after dinner show was the guest talent show which i thought was better than last week (not more talented, just more amusing).

towel animal du jour:  hanging monkey!!!

all dressed up

look at that shine

we skipped the show (xtreme country) and the adult comedy act in favor of getting a good night’s sleep since we have to be on the dock at 07:00 for a long excursion tomorrow.

towel animal du jour:  froggy!

from this side of the ship, it looks like an inviting place

fortunately, we did have an excursion booked that we were really looking forward to. we went to the chaak tun cenote (cavern) for some underground snorkeling.

folks, the whole time we were in there, i kept saying “this is so cool!”. and not just because the water was 72° either. we’ve been to caverns before like mammoth cave and diamond caverns but there’s just something about seeing the stalactites and stalagmites and all that jazz underwater. add in some bats and cool fossils and it was just a good time. most of the time we had to wear life vests which i found annoying and nasty (i’m pretty sure they’ve never been cleaned and it kept scooting up into my face) but at the end, there was a thirty-something foot pool that we were allowed to take our vests off, at our own risk of course, and do some free swimming/diving.

when we were through, our guide led us out to a refreshment area where we were offered bottles of water, sodas, and cerveza. being in mexico, i figured they’d be giving out some coronas but it was some generic looking stuff called sol which the imbibers didn’t seem to care for much – most switched to water or soda after the first. it was a relatively short excursion and, on the way back to the ship, the bus driver was kind enough to stop in play del carmen to drop off those that wanted to do some shopping in town. saved them one of the $13 taxi fares, right?

apparently mexico is too poor for barbed wire

as for us, we went back to the ship, got showered and changed, had lunch, walked around a bit, ran into anastasia and talked with her a while, played putt-putt (i won!), hung out by the pool and relaxed.

windy hair

fore!

when we went back to our room to get ready for dinner we were surprised to see invitations for a past-guest reception (whoohooo! i love the receptions!!!) and a couple of holiday pins. we headed to the reception, then dinner, and the show of the night was the guest talent show. there were six singers and while they weren’t all *ahem* talented, it was entertaining.

towel animal du jour: bunny rabbit!

anyhow, the excursion we booked today was more of a beach break deal. it was an all day snorkeling pass at the el cid resort which included all-you-want food and drinks. we laughed a bit because it ended up being right at the end of the pier so we had a view of our ship all day (until we came up from snorkeling one time and realized that our ship had grown and changed it’s name to imagination).

we lounged for a bit when we first got there before finally testing out the waters.

the snorkeling wasn’t the best because the small reef that was there was very bleached. they said that wilma destroyed a lot of their reefs, which is a shame. however, there were patches of nice coral and some colorful fish, anemones, and urchins.

we snorkeled for a bit, got out to rest and enjoy refreshments, and snorkeled some more.

i think we went in about four times and snorkeled for probably an hour or so each time. i took a few dunks in the fresh water pool which was a welcome change from the salt water (i haven’t even tried the pools on the ship because i remember not much caring for the salty pools). all in all, it was a great way to spend the day. after all, this trip is all about relaxing and we got to do plenty of that. the sun and swimming took its toll and we ended up taking a short nap when we got back on the ship – our wake up call being the engines as we were leaving port. our after-dinner entertainment was a juggling show followed by another comedian. the juggler was manuel zuniga who we had seen on the glory two years ago. he’s good at what he does and puts on a funny show. the comedian was tim harkleroad who wasn’t as funny as the other guy. i’m not sure if it was part of his act or what but he just seemed nervous and ill-prepared. tonight was also the night of the big deck party and midnight buffet (at 23:30) which was mexican food. unfortunately, i absolutely stuffed myself at dinner and had no room for midnight mexican (i’m sure my tummy thanks me for that) but we walked around a bit before coming to bed.