We recently got back from one week on the lovely Mexican Caribbean island of Isla Mujeres, a tiny little place that makes Cancún cab drivers look at you funny when you tell them you want to go there. Like most of the Yucatan peninsula, it’s a tourism-based place but it’s a little rougher, a lot smaller, and more full of fish than say Cancún. No high-rise resorts and huge casinos, just a few sorta larger hotels and a lot of tiny ones. And beaches. The island’s a half mile wide, so you pretty much always get a sea breeze and you’re never far from the western beach side. What did we do?
Drove around on a scooter - Mostly Erika did the driving since she has the motorcycle license, which made us an anomaly in macho Mexico, but oh well. Most people on the island get around on scooters, mopeds, and small Hondas, with larger groups of tourists puttering around in golf carts.
Snorkeled - Isla attracts divers and snorkelers from all over the place because of its amazing coral reef and super clear water. Next time we’re going to learn to dive, and visit some shipwrecks. But the snorkeling is great.
Swam in a Cenote - Cenotes are sinkholes that were sacred to the Mayans, because they were a great source of water for them. This one, at Ik-Kil, is 80 feet below the ground, with tree roots hanging from the surface down into it, and like 150 feet deep. Kind of scary, pretty cold (similar to Barton Springs temperature actually). The depth will weird you out even more once you find out the Mayans occasionally dumped human sacrifices into the cenotes.
Visited Chichen Itzá - One of the largest Mayan cities, which survived through multiple ages of the Empire, and man it’s impressive. In terms of scope, the city is massive, though the temple of Kukulkan (the largest building) is a lot smaller than say, the great pyramid at Giza. The crazy part about the Mayans is that we don’t know much of anything about them. The Spanish Conquistadors found their cities empty, the people dispersed and intermingled with everyone throughout this part of Mexico, and what they did find in terms of books and knowledge, they went ahead and destroyed (they weren’t called “exploradors,” were they?).
Listening to any given tour guide walking around there, you could hear multiple stories. Our own guide gave a fairly plausible theory about the Empire resembling medieval Europe: they’d keep the knowledge of astronomy, weather, etc in the hands of the powerful few in order to control the poor ignorant farmers who were the bulk of the population at bay, using human sacrifices to bolster that — but eventually, that repressive system had to break down, and without the support of the populace, the massive cities like Chichen Itzá were impossible to maintain. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know, but it feels more right to me than highly advanced scientists believing they actually needed to sacrifice humans to appease a rain god. There was a lot of debunking of wild speculations on the Mayans. When you think about how long their civilization was around, they had plenty of time to learn and build upon their knowledge of science. Perhaps the best part of the tour was the explanation of what happens after December 21, 2012 (short answer: December 22).
Ate a pile of fish - Fish is, as you might expect, fresh on the island. When you go somewhere, you just order fish — it could be snapper or barracuda or whatever — and you generally get it Tikin Xic style, from the Mayan word for “I don’t know how I keep eating this without getting tired of it.”
Got crabs - Har, har. I was deathly afraid of the world’s until I figured out they were the world’s largest spiders we had in our villa until they turned out to be the world’s smallest crabs. Kinda cute.
Practiced Spanish - On day one, after a long day of travel (plane to shuttle to ferry to taxi), I left my bag in the taxi. I had to bust out pretty much everything I knew, including the elusive Past Subjunctive tense, which I can’t even correctly use in English. It worked, though on a Mexican time scale, and by Wednesday I had everything back thanks to a buen samaritan. Last time, Isla ate my original 1st-gen iPhone when I accidentally bathed it in the ocean, and I was afraid my iPad was going to suffer a similar fate, but all’s well that ends well I guess.
