Chichen Itza!!!

Oh how I wish the internet were faster here!!!! I have so many awesome photos I´d like to post but each one takes about 30 minutes or so to put up! and then often times there´s an error and I´ve got to start all over again!! Chichen Itza was amazing and thought provoking. There were vendors along the paths and plazas selling goods which I liked and disliked. Their presence gave a sense of liveliness to the place with all the colors and details, and I also thought it might be kind of like the markets that used to take place in the plaza. The down side was that if you just wanted to sit and enjoy the atmosphere it was difficult because once in a while the vendors would fly in. They tend not to go away when you say things like "no" or "I´m not interested." Instead they say things like "I got better price than Walmart" : ) I thought that was the best, but it down played the experience a bit. I just wanted to look at the ruins. The stuff they are selling supports them but its just things/stuff/trinkets/dust collectors. All that going on when you just want to appreciate the magnificent place.

The other stop on our trip last friday was cenote (a huge, deep well used by the Mayans that is open to the air but set into the ground so that when you look up from inside you are looking up through the "well") called Ik-Kil. The experience was amazing! Beautiful blue water with the jungle plants growing along the walls and the roots from the trees (over 125 up) with their roots growing all the way down to reach the water. We had a platform from which we jumped in which was so much fun! It was a little scarry for me too because not only was the platfrom kinda high, but the bottom of the cenote was over 100 METERS below and if you swim down too far their is a current (because the cenotes are actually parts of underground rivers that are exposed to the surface). I kept going up to jump because I was scared. I was watching other people when I was at Uxmal go up and down the pyramids on their bottoms because they were scared of hights. I don´t have any fear that I´m going to fall of a pyramid so I practically run up the stairs. I was noting however that it was just an idea (a scarry one) that the others had in their head that made them do that. So, when I got to the cenote I kept jumping off the edge to show myself I was going to be alright.

I got better price than Walmart