We’ve spent the last couple of weeks travelling between three colonial cities and their surrounding Mayan ruins. The three colonial cities are: Valladolid (va-yah-doh-leed), Merida (May-ree-da), and Campeche (Cam-pay-chay). The Mayan ruins: Coba, Chichen Itza, Uxmal, Kabah, Edzna, and Palenque. We’ve hit the point where we’re starting to feel a little “ruined” out, and our desire to see more colonial cities has dissipated a bit from where it was 2 weeks ago. What we are really looking forward to now is a chance to slow down, stay in one place for a month or so, and learn Spanish.

As such, we’ve decided to cut short our time in Mexico, skipping previous “plans” of visiting San Cristobal (another colonial city), and the Mayan ruins Yaxchilan and Bonampak. We hopped on a bus, then a boat, then another bus with plans of reaching San Padro by Sunday.  Despite our better judgment, we decided to spend a couple of nights in Flores, Guatemala and visit one last set of Mayan ruins: Tikal, the supposed capital of the Mayan world.

Now getting back to those colonial cities – despite the fact that we feel we’ve had enough of bouncing around between them, that’s not to say we haven’t enjoyed them.  I think we’re just a little tired of bouncing around from hostel to hostel, and bus to bus.

The three subject cities were founded by Francisco de Montejo (there were actually 3 people with the same name, the father, son, and a cousin who each founded one of them) who had been given the rights to govern the Yucatan as Conquistadors. This meant conquering the existing Mayan people and extracting whatever wealth there was.

The cities were built atop of Mayan ruins that were still in use by the indigenous Mayans beginning with Campeche in 1540. Stone by stone, the existing structures were taken apart and the stones were used to construct houses, roads, and churches. A little later on, there was an inevitable revolt by the Mayans, called the caste war, an economic boom from the production of henequen, and pirate attacks at the port of Campeche.

All this adds up to a lot of history, and a lot of old buildings just waiting to be discovered. Here’s some of the highlights.

Architecture:

Most of the existing buildings were put up during the colonial period of the 18th and 19th centuries. It’s not just a few buildings, but the whole historic city centre. Street after street of colonial buildings, with bright paint, in various states of repair.

Campeche – Street View

Some of the most interesting buildings were the churches, built from the stones of ancient Mayan temples by Mayan slaves in the 1500’s.

Merida – Cathedral Knockers

Valladolid – Convento de San Bernardino de Siena

Campeche – Main Cathedral

My favourite building was Casa Montejo in Merida. This mansion showed very clearly the message the Spanish were trying to give to the Mayans by founding these cities on top of those previously occupied by the Mayans.

Merida – Casa Montejo

Note the screaming heads of the Mayans being stood upon by the Conquistador.   And is that someone who’s been tarred and feathered?

Museums:

More than a few of the more impressive historic buildings have been re-purposed into museums. The quality and quantity of English translations vary, but most were quite acceptable. I found the history of these cities fascinating, dating back over 1,000 years (Merida is suspected of being the oldest continually colonized city in the Americas). They covered everything from the ancient Mayans, through to the Conquistadors, the haciendas, pirate attacks and modern times. We spent several days wondering from museum to museum. If you’re interested in history, this is a must.

Merida – Mayan Carvings

Parks:

There are plenty of parks in these Colonial towns. It’s quite nice. These parks always had an adjoining church and often a market to buy your fresh fruit, meet, and eggs during the day. In the evening, you could find restaurants setup on the streets, vendors of all kinds, and plenty of free music.  There was also a free zoo at one in Merida, complete with giraffes and hippos.

Merida – Hippos at the Zoo

Valladolid – Lover’s Chairs, great for having a conversation

Culture:

We managed to watch a play that was a comedy in Spanish (we didn’t understand a thing) and watch some traditional Mayan dancing (looked like traditional Spanish dancing to me, but who am I to say?) for free. It was entertaining, and gave me a little better understanding of life in the Yucatan. I think there’s plenty of shows and festivals that go on throughout the year to keep yourself occupied if you were interested in setting up shop in one of these cities for the longer term.

Merida – Traditional Mayan Dancing

What’s up next?  We’ve got a few more Mexican inspired posts to come and a roundup of our time in Mexico.  For us, it’s time to enjoy Guatemala.

What’s a whale shark you ask?  It’s the world’s largest fish.  They’ve been known to grow to over 41 feet in length.  But keep in mind, it’s not a whale: it’s a fish.  And it’s big.  Despite being part of the shark family, they pose no danger to humans.  Mostly  because they don’t have sharp teeth being that their diet consists of algae, plankton, and krill.  They are also have a fairly docile demeanour making them great swimming companions.

Getting to these guys was fairly easy.  We booked a tour from Isla Holbox for $850Mx ($70 CAD) a person from the hostel we were staying at: Tribu.  You can also book tours from Isla Mujares, but I believe it will cost a bit more.

Once on the boat, it’s a 1 hour ride towards the Caribbean Sea to get to their favourite swimming hole.  When you find a whale shark, you won’t be alone for long.  All the tour companies leave at the same time, and are in constant radio communication.  Pretty soon, the poor whale shark will be surrounded by a half dozen boats or so, all with a half dozen swimmers.  The fish didn’t seem to mind though.

So here’s the deal, they give you a couple of fins, a snorkel, and mask.  At a maximum two people are allowed in the water at a time plus one guide (from all the tour boats).  So, you’ll have to wait your turn to swim.  There was time for us to swim twice, each time for about two minutes.  That’s it.

 

Getting Ready to Dive in!

When it’s your turn to go, the captain takes the boat out directly in front of the whale shark’s path.  When he gives the signal, you jump in and watch as the giant fish swims on a collision course towards you, then right past.  It’s amazing how insignificant us humans are to such a big animal.  The whale shark doesn’t bother to change its course, it expects you to get out of the way.

 

Swimming With the Whale Shark

Once the whale shark passes you by, you turn around and swim after it.  They can move pretty quick, but we had no trouble keeping up, and got an amazing up-close look at this animal.  In fact, both times we were swimming with the whale shark, we were so close that it would have been no trouble at all to reach out and touch it.  We didn’t, because our guide informed us that touching the whale shark was forbidden in the only English he probably knew.

Not my photo, but here’s a view pretty close to what we saw in the water.

Once the swimming fun has ended, you’re fed a sandwich and taken to a reef for some more snorkelling.  While we were there, the reef had poor visibility, so we were taken to a beautiful area between Isla Holbox and the mainland they called the mangroves.

 

Ashley at the Mangrove

The final stop on the tour is just outside the flamingo reserve where you can see pink flamingos in their natural habitat from the boat.

 

Flamingos!

Summary:

Was it worth it? Yes. It’s a lot of fun getting to swim with such large animals.  I’d do it again.

If you’re prone to seasickness, as we both are, pills can be had from the local pharmacy for $5 Mx each.  We took one just as we left on the tour and had no trouble keeping our lunch down the entire trip.  Okay,  Mike had no trouble.  Ashley was rather ill, but at least she didn’t actually upchuck.

One last tip… keep your life jacket on at all times while in the boat.  Near the end of our tour the wind began to pick up and there were some larger waves on the sea.  Our captain managed to hit a wave funny, and the boat came down on its side.  We had about 5″ of height left between the gunwale and the water.  We managed to right the boat by jumping to the other side just like you would when tacking a sail boat, and the disaster was diverted.

 

Mike’s Clothes

• 1 belt
• 2 technical t-shirt
• 1 collared shirt
• 1 pair cotton shorts
• 1 pairs of quick dry cargo/hiking pants
• 1 pair technical shorts
• 1 pair of swim shorts
• 5 pair underwear
• 5 pair liner socks
• 3 pairs wool socks
• 1 baseball hat
• 1 pair hiking shoes
• 1 wallet
• 1 Buff
• 1 long underwear top
• 1 long underwear bottom
• 1 sweater
• 1 fleece
• 1 rain jacket
• eye glasses
• prescription sunglasses
• 1 pair North Face hiking shoes

Ashley’s Clothes

• 5 pairs of liner socks
• 3 pairs wool socks
• 5 pairs non-cotton underwear
• 1 sports bra
• 2 regular bras
• 2 bathing suits (a one-piece and a bikini)
• 2 cotton t-shirts (red & black)
• 1 technical purple t-shirt
• 2 cotton tank tops (navy & turquoise)
• 1 dressier black tank top
• 1 long sleeve technical shirt
• 2 pairs shorts (black & brown)
• 1 pair beige cotton capris
• 1 pair black yoga capris
• 1 pair khaki-coloured “travel” technical pants
• 1 belt
• 1 pair of long underwear
• 1 wool sweater
• 1 micro-fleece
• 1 rain jacket
• buff
• 1 military-style hat
• prescription eye glasses
• sunglasses
• 1 pair North Face hiking shoes
• 1 pair Merrell sandals

Toiletry Bag

• 2 deodorants (1 each)
• camp soap (laundry detergent, shampoo, soap)
• 2 toothbrushes
• tooth paste
• dental floss
• lip gloss
• nail clippers
• shampoo
• hair elastics/elastic headbands
• small hairbrush
• 2 XL travel towels
• mosquito repellent
• 4 bottles of sunscreen, SPF 55 and higher (we stocked up because it’s expensive in Central America!)
• Clear Care contact lens solution (Ashley)
• contacts case (Ashley)
• 12 pairs of contacts
• Refresh contacts eye drops
• lotion
• face moisturizer with SPF
• small compact mirror
• disposable razor (Ashley)
• beard trimmer (Mike)
• Diva Cup (Ashley)
• Q-tips
• microfibre cloths for glasses

Luggage

• 2 Osprey Kestrel 38L backpacks
• Crumpler 5 Million Dollar Home camera bag (Mike)
• North Face Cadene messenger bag (Ashley)
• 6 Eagle Creek packing cubes (2 large for Mike, 2 large + 2 medium for Ashley)
• 1 Eagle Creek toiletry bag (Mike)
• 3 stuff sacks (2 for Mike, 1 for Ashley)
• 2 mesh bags (for dirty cloths)
• 1 dry bag
• 1 12L PacSafe

First Aid Kit

• 30 days each of Doxycycline (anti-malarial)
• gauze pads (various sizes)
• bandaids (various sizes)
• tape
• moleskin
• Benadryl Itch Relief Cream (for allergies, insect bites, poison ivy, sunburns)
• Gastrolyte (re-hydration salts)
• Immodium (anti-diarrhea meds)
• antihistamines
• emergency blanket
• tincture of iodine
• tweezers
• triangular bandage
• crazy glue
• Ibuprofen
• Extra-Strength Tylenol Ultra (for Ashley’s migraines)
• Extra-Strength Aspirin (for Ashley’s migraines)
• 12 months birth control pills

 Shared Electronics

• laptop – Lenovo X201 (12″ laptop)
• Canon Rebel xti dSLR
• Canon 430EX Speedlight flash
• lens – Canon 18-200 f3.5-5.6 IS
• lens – Sigma 10-20mm f4-5.6
• lens – Canon 50mm f1.8
• circular polarizer filter
• compact flash – 2-8GB, 1-4GB, 1-2GB
• Nikon Coolpix camera
• 3 SD cards – 4 GB, 2GB, 1GB
• spare batteries 1700mAH CANON NB-2L EQUIVALENT
• spare batteries AA & AAA
• memory card reader
• 2 micro USB cords (memory card reader and portable hard drives)
• headset (for skype calls)
• 1 mini USB cord (kindle)
• 1 iShuffle cord
• 1 iphone sync cable
• 1 AC to USB adapter
• canon camera battery charger
• 1 USB Flash Drive 16 GB
• 2 500GB Portable Hard Drive
• 2 ebook readers (Kindles)
• 2 mP3 players (Sandisc Sansa Clip and iShuffle)
• 1 iPhone 3Gs

Other Shared Items

• 2 money belts
• 2 headlamps
• swiss army knife
• sewing kit
• 2 cotton sleep sacks
• 2 pad locks
• 2 retractable wire locks
• portable water filter
• 2 1L water bottles
• 2 2L platypus
• compass
• harmonica (key of C)
• travel clothesline
• jump rope
• resistance band
• collapsible grocery bag
• spare shoelaces
• 2 notebooks with a pen & a pencil
• 1 watch
• 2 travel guides (Central America & South America)
• 1 paperback book (since Ashley wasn’t finished reading it before we left)

Documentation

• see our previous post about this

Total Weight

All combined, we are carrying 69 lb of weight.

We made it!  Ashley and I are writing this post from Alex’s house (our very kind couch surfing host) in Cancun!

First off, lets get the basics out of the way.  We had no trouble with any of the flights, everything was on time and turbulence free.  We had our first bit of fun leaving the Calgary Airport when the flight crew asked us to show hands indicating how long before our return flight to Calgary.

Who’s going to Cancun for a week? Two weeks? Three weeks?… a month?…… Five weeks?…… A year?…… …… …… Holy cow, are you going to live there?

Our hands were the only ones still up after they got to three weeks.

We caught a shuttle from the airport directly to our gracious couch surfing host’s place to find the door locked and nobody home.  Instantly I knew the problem.  I had forgotten to confirm our arrival time, how could we expect to be met at the door when I didn’t say when we were coming?

We set about waiting for about a half hour: looking up nearby hostels in our Lonely Planet guide as a backup plan.  Just as we were ready to leave and explore other options, the military showed up at the gate to the condo.  They dismounted and stood there staring at us.  The really scary part was the fact that they were all wearing full face masks, so nobody could be identified.  Not being terribly familiar with the current state of corruption in Mexico, we decided to wait a little longer before venturing back onto the street.

The military finally leaving the condo entrance

As luck would have it, the military pulled out just as our host walked in.  He opened the door, and we’ve been sleeping on this bed happily ever since.

Our Bed

Weather:

It’s hot, but not too hot.  Humid (my cloths haven’t dried and I washed them over 24 hours ago) but after a couple of days we are starting to get used to it.  Rainy, it’s been cloudy every day, and has ranged from no rain to fierce downpours.  It doesn’t really seem to bother us though.  We spent yesterday outside at the beach on Isla Mujeres during a constant rain and never had to put on a jacket.

Adjustment:

Please note that despite the following we are having a great time, and are not headed home anytime soon:

I’m not adjusted at all.  Neither of us can really fathom that this is going to be our life for the next year, or two, or more.  It still feels like a 2 week vacation.  To tell you the truth, the first night we had a small crisis moment.  There we were, sleeping on the floor, with absolutely no idea what we were going to do the next day.  We had just gone out for supper at a local park and were staunchly aware that there was going to be a language barrier.

We both thought of home… the comfort, security, family, friends.  Then we thought “Oops, what have we done!”  A part of us really wanted to know that we would be returning to that safe comfortable life we had just left.

But here we are on day three, and I haven’t had another crisis moment yet.  We’ve started to plan out what we are going to do in the next few days, and that’s got us really excited.

The Plan:

Still pretty vague.  So far we plan to leave Cancun tomorrow and go to Isla Holbox.  It’s supposed to be a natural beach resort island with an awesome hostel, flamingo reserve, and cheap tours to swim with whale sharks.  Unless the rain today changes our mind, that’s probably where we’ll head next.  That should give us plenty of downtime to figure out how to get to Chitchen Itza, Palenque, and eventually Guatemala.

We haven’t told too many people this, but the free wordpress theme we’ve been using at Traveled Earth was the very first theme that came up when we googled “free wordpress theme”.  We always thought it was okay, but never really loved it.

Slowly, but surely, it started to bother us more and more until we finally sat down and decided to make some changes.  Behold, the fruits of our labour… the new face of Traveled Earth!

In cliche fashion, here are the before and after screen-shots in case you forgot how we used to look.

So what do you think?  Pretty snazzy eh?

Aside from the good looks, this theme also has a ton of new features.

• New About Traveled Earth and About Mike & Ashley pages so you can actually learn who we are.
• Our photo and a brief description of us is prominently located on on the main page (we had lots of complaints about the lack of this feature in the old theme).
• A snappy random header.  We launched with only 3 images, there will be more to come as we take them.
• Easy to find icons for Twitter, Facebook, and our RSS feed
• A mini-map showing our location in the world
• A search bar
• The post author is now displayed on the main page
• A larger menu bar, allowing us to move our Planning the Trip articles off of our right hand sidebar

All in all, we’re much happier with our new look.

In other news, Ashley and I have only two working days left and one paycheck each.  We’re expecting to have a bit more time over this next week to finish off some of our planning the trip posts.  Unless we are way off base, expect to see an unusually large number of posts coming out over the next week leading up to ‘T’ minus 0.

This is the third and final post we’re going to make about our four day trip to Las Vegas. I know, I know, 3 posts for a four night trip to Las Vegas is a bit excessive. Please bear with me, this will be the last one… I think.

Anyways, I wanted to sum up our trip to Las Vegas by comparing some of the goals we set for ourselves to what we actually accomplished on our trip. I’m quite pleased with the results.

Las Vegas Strip as seen from the wedding suite

Budget:

I was surprised with how well we did sticking to a budget in Las Vegas. We used a website called BudgetYourTrip.com to track our expenses. For those that haven’t heard of BudgetYourTrip before, it’s more than just a website that allows you to track your travel expenses. It also allows you to estimate your future expenses based on the average expenditures of other people. By using it, your results are added to the mix making future estimates more accurate. I think it’s a neat idea.

As you can see from the above badge we averaged $92.41 per day excluding airfare. If you want to see what we spent our money on, click “Scott and Tamara’s Wedding”.

Our RTW budget is $100 per day including airfare. Obviously, we didn’t expect to hit that budget when our flights alone were more than double that. We also expected that Las Vegas would be considerably more expensive than many of the other places we intend to travel to. To make things easy we thought we’d shoot for the $100 a day mark excluding airfare on this trip.

We kept on budget! But, we could have done better if we:

• Shopped at a grocery store instead of eating out each meal
• Split up from the group to avoid cab fare and utilized our bus passes
• Stayed off-strip in budget hotels or couchsurfed

Seeing the results, we both agree that a budget of $100 a day is completely reasonable for our RTW.

Use Local Transportation:

Though we had our troubles, we managed to figure it out and in the end got by just fine with the local bus system. There’s no doubt that taking the bus can save a lot of money in Las Vegas, unless you have the time to walk everywhere.

Meet New People:

Both Ashley and I are very shy people, especially in crowds. It took some work to push ourselves out of our comfort zone to meet new people, but we very much enjoyed it. We talked at length with a local cartoonist and met a couple of freight train hoppers. Most of the wedding party were also new acquaintances for us.

Poste Restante:

We were able to try out Poste Restante (general delivery) while we were in Las Vegas. Sort of. We ordered a few items that are not readily available in Canada for our RTW and had them shipped to the Excalibur Hotel for pickup. We simply had the shipper put our date of arrival on our packages and mail them to the Excalibur Hotel directly. When we arrived we were asked to show ID, and were promptly handed our package. They were even so kind as to waive the $7 fee as we hadn’t checked in yet, so they couldn’t bill the room.

Exercise:

We did a lot of walking, and some swimming. Otherwise our workout program was non-existent. We had planned on working in some jump rope, push-ups, sit-ups, and maybe some jogging. None of that stuff happened, so we’ve got room for improvement.

Keep a Journal:

Yep. If Mike had better handwriting we might even have been able to read it one day.

Reading:

Aside from the airport and flights, we didn’t really spend any time reading. We did discover that one Kindle isn’t enough (we don’t share well) and are on the lookout for a second.

Blogging:

I think we did good here. We had our first post up on the website the very night we arrived. Turns out that writing while on the road is fun. I don’t think we’ll have any problem keeping up our erratic posting schedule once we start travelling.

Photos:

One thing I found interesting was our complete lack of photos. We managed a total of 5 photos on our own before hooking up with the wedding party. I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing or not. Given the amount of photo gear we are planning to carry around the world, I thought we’d be taking a few more pictures. Then again, both Ashley and I have been to Las Vegas before, so the need for us to photograph every casino was at a minimum.

Things changed on the photo front after we met up with the wedding party. I had agreed to be the official unofficial photographer for the wedding so I took plenty of photos. Some of them turned out rather well. So well that I’m starting to think I should try to turn my photography into a business while on the road.

I’ll leave you with some of my favourite photos from the wedding. If you want to see more, check out our photo gallery.

 

Unfortunately the band DayOne was not in Las Vegas (sorry for the misleading title). As you may recall, we recently had some practice booking flights for our friends wedding in Las Vegas. Last week we got to take those flights and spent 4 nights in Sin City.

With our big RTW trip coming up fast (24 days!) we went to Vegas with a bit of an agenda. Of course the wedding was a big part of that agenda, but we also wanted to do some last minute shopping, practice holidaying on a budget, and test out some of the stuff we plan on taking with us on our trip.

For some reason, I had a whole lot to say about our first day in Vegas, so I made it its own post.

Day 1:

We arrived in Las Vegas with a few things to get done before the wedding party showed up (we arrived a day earlier than everyone else).

First and foremost, we wanted to get to our off-strip hotel using public transit. We managed, but not without a fair bit of walking in the 30C heat. Our mistake was arriving without a map showing the location of our hotel. I thought an address would suffice, but it seems nobody in Las Vegas uses addresses. Although the bus driver and local patrons were very friendly and tried their best to tell us where to get off, we were unable to explain where we were going as we didn’t know what landmark casino it was near. In the end, we were only out by about seven (huge) blocks. I was kind enough to haul all of our luggage, while Ashley was kind enough to gather some photographic evidence so I could brag about it later.

Mike carrying all the luggage

The next, and last, item on our “to do” list for Day 1 was to take the bus to REI and shop for backpacks. As you can probably gather from the post we made on the road, it didn’t go so well. The Westcliff Airport Express bus leaves from Fremont Street roughly every hour on the weekends. Unfortunately for us, it was 1 hour and 20 minutes late.

We spent that hour and twenty minutes talking to a local cartoonist who made his living drawing caricatures on Fremont street during the summer. I imagined for a bit that our RTW had already started and we were trying to figure out how we could fill our time by asking the locals. Of course, we didn’t have the luxury of time to follow up on any of his recommendations, but we did learn a fair bit.

• Vegas’s busy season is the hot summer months (I always thought people went there to escape the winter). Apparently there are so few people in the winter that most street performers leave Vegas all together and don’t come back until the following summer.
• The university area was recommended as a place to shop and eat as it has both unique boutique shops and cheap food.
• There are a lot of things to do outside of Vegas. He recommended visiting the Red Rock Canyon, Mt. Charleston, The Grand Canyon, and Lake Mead.
• And last but not least, the bus drivers trade bus routes every 4 months to avoid chronic boredom. As luck would have it, today was the trade day and the undoubted cause of our late bus.

After our public transit friend gave up and hailed a cab, we decided to follow suit (giving up, not hailing a cab). That’s where we ran into Brian and Mike, two freight train hoppers who’ve been riding the rail for the last 6 weeks. They started in Massachusetts and are on their way to L.A. As I inquired, they explained that this super budget friendly mode of transportation is illegal, and one must be extra careful not to be caught. To cope with this, the internet has come to the rescue allowing the freight hopping community to share the best places to hop on and off trains while avoiding security.

Brian and Mike, two freight train hoppers

Moments later, our bus passed us by. Too late to catch the next one, we took a stroll down Fremont Street and eventually went back to our hotel for a swim, wrote our first blog post from the road, and settled into bed. All in all, one of my favourite days we spent in Las Vegas. It turns out I enjoy meeting new people, and the conversations more than made up for our troubles with the transit system.