More adventures in Mexico

One of my wedding gifts from Luke was a journal in which we took turns writing down our memories of our wedding day and our honeymoon adventures. I am so glad we wrote the memories down right away because it is so hard to remember everything just from the photos. I've never been good at keeping a journal, but I have always tried to keep a journal when I go on a trip so I can remember things better. Hopefully now with blogging, I will get better at recording memories.

Wednesday in Mexico, we went on The Coba Maya Adventure, which included hiking in the wilderness, a zip line, repelling into a cave to float on inner tubes in the pond inside the cave, canoeing and the Coba ruins which we hiked up. Coba has the only ruins you can climb right now. We have waited about a month to get photos from our tour guide of this day (so that is my excuse for my delay in updating my blog).





We looked like such dorks wearing harnesses and helmets for the zip line. Luke put his helmet on backwards at first, it was funny. They gave us a "Mayan brake" which was a wooden stick with a notch in it to pull on the zip line to brake before one of the Mayan men helped us gracefully land.

We also had a Mayan medicine man give us a blessing (and blew smoke in our faces).

The cave we repelled 50 feet into is referred to as the 7 skeletons. Mayans used to perform human sacrifices and 7 human remains from these sacrifices were found in this cave years ago. We repelled down the cave into a pond and got to float around in inner tubes. We had the option of being pulled back up on that same rope line or climbing a rope ladder. For some reason, we both decided to climb our way out and that was quite a workout. We were connected to a safety line and climbed sideways up the ladder. It was a little scary and I did not want to look down.


Then we went canoeing in a little lagoon which was fun and relaxing. The local Mayans cooked lunch for us which included soup, rice, beans, empanadas and spaghetti in case anyone wanted American food. The also had yummy apple juice for us.




We hopped back in the van to go to the see Mayan ruins. First we had a little tour with an archaeologist who told us the little they knew about the ruins. It's a shame they don't know what they were originally called because the conquerors destroyed all the Mayan records and gave new names to the places while destroying whatever else they wanted. It was cool that they had a ball court with a horizontal hoop and we were told that in the days of human sacrifices, it was the winner that was sacrificed and it was an honor to be sacrificed to the gods. Personally I would be happy to be the loser of that ball game.

We only had 30 minutes after our guided tour to get to the main pyramid to hike up. Our options were to walk, rent bikes or take a bicycle taxi. We opted for the taxi ride because I knew my thighs would be hurting from climbing all the steps and I would not want to be pedaling myself back. I wish we had taken a picture of the taxi. It actually had 3 wheels and the passengers sit in front of the driver and it was a fun ride.

at the bottom of the pyramid

at the top of the pyramid

climbing back down

We climbed Nohuch Muul the tallest pyramid in the Yucatan. It had such steep, narrow steps and there was a rope in the middle. We were so hot and thirsty when we got back down. There was a little drink stand for us tourists and we bought some Mexican soda for our bike taxi ride back. It was a really fun day.