I'm back in the budget world. After a week at a beach-front resort hotel in Cancun, I'm back at the $10 a night hostel for one more evening. It's quite a change. We spent Christmas in and around the hotel, enjoying a lovely dinner by the beach and trying to remind ourselves it actually was Christmas.

Christmas eve was pretty unusual. We took a bus the 100 miles or so to Chichen Itza. It's one of the trademark Mayan ruins... huge and extenisvely restored. On the way we stopped by a cenote I've forgotten the name of. It's essentially an underground lake with a hole in the top that allows sunlight in... so there's this shaft of light falling into the pools of water. Very beautiful. There were fish.

"The lovely view of the jungle from the top."
There's the one huge pyramid you're allowed to climb at Chichen Itza. 91 steep, narrow steps to the vertigo-inducing top.

Beginning the Climb

If you slip coming up or down, you might very well do yourself in. But everyone got up and down without incident and enjoyed the lovely view of the jungle from the top. There's this very cool thing with the pyramid that it's constructed so that at the Spring and Autumn equinoxes, the sun creates a snake-like shadow across the stairs that connects carvings of a snake head at the bottom to the snake tail at the top. Very bright, those Mayans.

So tomorrow morning I finally leave Cancun. I think that'll be a good thing. The hostel here is pretty full of beach-going partiers and people who seem to hiding from the law in the US. I imagine going inland takes one a bit further away from that and finds more people who are in it for the traveling.

"I was sad to see them go."
But the week on the beach in Cancun was fantastic. The hotel was very nice... even if there was a bit of a musty kinda thing going on in the room. It was great hanging out with Mom and Vera... and I was sad to see them go. It left me a little nervous about now having to find may way around on my own. But I made it here... so I oughtta be ok moving on. Who knows.

So tomorrow it's on to Valladoid, a small city near Chichen Itza. Our bus actually went straight through the town on the way to the ruins on Christmas eve. There's a church

The Trademark of Chichen Itza

there that's supposedly the oldest in North America. Or is it *one of* the oldest. I decided I wanted to go back to Chichen Itza one more day. We didn't really get there till early afternoon on Christmas Eve and only had a couple of hours. I didn't get to climb the smaller pyramid *inside* the big pyramid.

"What have we done."
So I'll go spend a day or two in Valladoid and do all you can do at Chichen Itza before moving on to Merida on the Gulf coast by way of a small town called Izamal that Stephanie at WLWT told me I have to go to.

OH... I almost forgot... I went to Wal-Mart today. Yeah... Wal-Mart. Not only is there one in every populated American town... there's apparantly one in Cancun. I bought a little battery-powered alarm clock because my watch just isn't loud enough. It was pretty bizarre watching these Mexican families pushing their carts through the parking lot just like at home. There's also a Sam's Club. What have we done.