Reflections of My Travel

it was an early, early morning. we had a quick breakfast before exiting the ship to catch our bus to chichen itza, which was basically be the center of the ancient mayan world. it was a two hour ride so we were thankful that it was a very nice, new coach-bus.

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!!!