Heslop Heaven: Western Caribbean: Cozumel, Mexico

The morning we ported in Cozumel was a bit rainy and windy, but it didn't last long and ended up being a beautiful day. Alex and I opted to do a tour of the Mayan city of Tulum which is on the main land. So we had about a fourty-five minute ferry ride to the mainland which turned out to be quite an adventure. We laugh about it now, but we were very glad to say goodbye to that ferry. The waves were pretty big that morning and that ferry just rolled with each one, instead of cutting through them. Right after starting off, a worker came by handing out little pastic bags to everyone. It took us a minute to figure out that they were barf bags. We declind thinking there was no way we needed one; Alex never gets sick, and I had my sea sick patch on. Well, long story short, I have never seen so many people throwing up in one place in my life. No joke; half of the entire ferry (about 200 people) got sick, including poor Alex. Workers were just going around handing out paper towels to people and cleaning up vomit. We agreed that that job would be the absolute worst in the world. I am sure that had we been in the U.S., they would have made us wear seatbelts. But there were no seat belts and people were actually being thrown out of their seats. Some people tried to get up and use the restroom and were thrown off their feet into the wall. Anyway, we were very glad to walk off that ferry and onto dry land.

Our ship in back and the dreaded ferry of doom (yellow).

This is me and Alex making sick faces on the ferry. It wasn't too
much later that the sick faces were real.

We found this guy on our walk into Tulum.

Tulum was a fortified city with a wall running around three sides, and
the ocean protecting the fourth. Here is Alex going though the small tunnel which leads into the city.

Our guide Juan. A body was found in this building, who was one of the important
people of the city. Archiologists found that the body had no osteoporosis at all
which told that the Mayans had a very healthy diet.

This is the largest building at the site. The ocean is at the bottom of the cliff just behind this temple. Tulum
is the only known Mayan city that was right up against the ocean. People still come to study this temple from all over the world. They discovered that it is actually a calender and a clock. There are holes built into the wall that the sun shines though the same time everyday and this helped them tell time. There are larger holes that the sun only made it all the way through on inportant calender days, like the summer and winter solstices. We saw pics of these evenets and it really looked like something from Indiana Jones. The sun didn't just show through, but is very blinding and and beautiful. There are also still murals and inscripions on the walls inside that tell stories of the people. We couldn't go inside, but they discribed some to us and they sound an awful lot like things from the scriptures:) It is amazing to think that these are the lands and people from the Book of Mormon.

These are some of the holes in the back of the temple that the sun shines through on sertain days of the year. (I circled them to make them easier to see).

You can see a little of the ocean in the back. Some years back, the government asked the famous diver and marine biologist, Jacques Cousteau to come find out what was happening to the reef surrounding the walled city. There was a place where the reef was missing and nobody knew what to think. These divers found that the reef wan't dying, but it had been chiseled away a very long time ago. The Mayans had chiseled out a small section of reef to allow their boats to come in and out, but not big enough to allow enemies to get in. Enemy boats would just end up hitting the reef.

A head carved into the corner of a building.

It was amazing to see how small the doorways were. The Mayans were actually very short people. Now when I hear from the Book of Mormon the term "large in stature", it makes me think how really tall those men were? He He. Being a very tall Mayan probably meant you weren't really that tall in today's terms.

Side view of the big temple

One of the corner towers of the wall. This was the most beautiful beach we saw on our cruise. You can go down there and swim, but we hadn't brought our swimming suits. We really wished we had.