In the better-late-than-never category, at the end of last year Wendy and I went on a Caribbean cruise with her family. A few of the highlights for me include:
- Eating late-night jumbo chocolate chip cookies from the cafe in the ship's library.
- Remembering our passports. Actually, we forgot our passports, but a couple of minutes after we left the house to go to the airport, we remembered them!
- Mayan ruins!
Allow me to elaborate.
Ever since we both took a class in college called "Maya, Aztec, and Inca", we've thought it would be cool to visit some of the ruins we learned about. So we were both looking forward to a shore excursion on our cruise that visited the Mayan ruins in Coba, Mexico. There were several other Mayan-ruin excursions we could have picked, but Coba sounded the most interesting because you're allowed to climb to the top of one of the ruins! More on that shortly.
Truth be told, I had another reason I was excited about the excursion. You may recall that long ago I wrote a blog post about the book Encounters with Star People by Ardy Sixkiller Clarke. Shortly after writing that, I read her next book, Sky People: Untold Stories of Alien Encounters in Mesoamerica, wherein she travels through Central America, interviewing indigenous people about the sky people from their legends. One of her stops included Coba, where she interviewed a bicycle-taxi driver who has seen many UFOs over the Coba ruins, especially over a nearby lake.
Spoiler alert: I did not see a UFO on our excursion. I don't even think I saw an IFO.
But, back to our cruise. The day of the excursion arrived. Our cruise ship docked at Cozumel Island, where we promptly got onto another ship, this one much smaller, which took us on a very fast and very choppy ride to the mainland. There we met a tour guide who walked us through a shopping district until we arrived at a parking lot full of buses. We rode a bus nearly two hours to the Coba site, where we traded one tour guide for another, and we got to stretch our legs by walking over a mile through a humid Mexican jungle.
At the end of our hot and sweaty hike, we were greeted by the tallest pyramid on the Yucatan peninsula:
My first thought when I saw it was "Wow, that's huge!"
My second thought was "I have to climb it!"
I'm not sure the picture does justice to how tall the thing is. Or how steep! But, my mind was set, so I started the climb. And very quickly had to stop to take a break. The steps were really steep! It was exhausting work. My heart was pounding. And I'd only climbed at most a third of the way. But, my mind was still set, so I kept at it, taking frequent breaks.
I didn't give any thought to getting back down. I'd deal with that later. But I did notice it was so steep that some people were descending by sitting on a step and scooting down one at a time!
Eventually, I made it to the top. If you look closely, you can see me at the top, in the brown shirt, holding my camera:
Here's the view from the top, looking down:
Another view from the top, looking over the jungle. You can just make out two lakes in the distance. UFO hotspots?
And here's a video I recorded at the top:
After taking lots of pictures and recording the video, I started back down. The funny thing is that it really didn't bother me; I wasn't that nervous. I got into a good rhythm going down: firmly planting my right leg, stepping down with my left leg, bringing my right leg down, and repeating. Going down was so much easier than going up! About halfway down, my right leg got tired from always being the anchor. I thought about switching sides and planting with my left leg, but I decided against it. Why mess with success? So I just let my right leg be tired, and eventually I made it down.
See if you can spot me during my descent:
As a reward for my exhausting climb, I got to walk another mile through the humid Mexican jungle to get back to the bus. And the next day I discovered yet another reward: my right leg was excruciatingly sore! And it lasted for days! I don't think I've ever had a muscle be that sore. Maybe I should have switched sides, after all.
Anyway, it was a great experience. I'm glad I got to climb a Mayan pyramid.