Downtown Charlotte, as the plane is heading for the runway. Much to my delight, I had the whole row to myself on the plane.
My first glimpse of Cancun. I recall thinking, The water's just regular blue. Maybe it only looks turquoise from the ground. And not ten seconds later, I saw this.
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In case the picture from the air didn't give you an idea how narrow the island is: From the main lobby of the Royal Sands resort, if you walk out the east doors, you see this -- a series of swimming pools, cleverly designed so that they look like they flow into the ocean. They don't, obviously. There's a deck and then some stairs you have to go down to get to the beach. But it isn't that far away.
But if you go out the west doors, you see this -- a fountain/pool, and then the main highway, and then the lagoon. Also not terribly far away.
The view from my room at the Royal Sands resort. It faces the ocean, obviously. It looks different from the one you see from the lobby because the resort is shaped sort of like a letter m. The lobby is in the southern curve of the m, and my parents' timeshare is in the northern curve. So you're seeing a different set of pools.
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The view from the living room/common area.
The view from the balcony. The nearer pool is a kiddie pool; the other a general-use pool. Yes, the hut-looking thing is a pool-side bar. They also serve nachos and surprisingly good hamburgers. Behind the bar is a terrace of tables, and behind that are the stairs that go down to the beach. There are two dead palm trees -- remnants of Hurricane Wilma.
Naturally, one of the first things we did after I arrived was get some margaritas from the bar. They were very, very strong. The plate and bowl, by the way, are what's stocked in the timeshare's kitchen.
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We're sitting on the balcony. The slightly recessed balcony you can see in the background is the one that belongs to my room. We spent a lot of time sitting on the balcony, actually, drinking margaritas and people-watching.
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I was in Cancun for 8 days, and the latest I managed to sleep was 6:30am. At least there were pretty sunrises. The first one I saw was especially neat, because a cruise ship, with its myriad of lights, sailed across the horizon just as the sun came up.
You can see the cruise ship a little better here.
Of course for my first day, I had to jump in the pool.
Dad got in the pool, too. Mom cracked some joke, and then took the picture just as I was pretending to splash water at her for it.
Mom eventually got in the water, too.
And of course we wandered down to the beach for a while. The thatch umbrellas were not only bigger than the cloth ones, but weirdly, somewhat cooler, too.
Plus, they made better props.
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I'm not a big ocean swimmer, and the undertow was pretty strong, but how could you look at that water and not want to get in it, at least once?
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I think I was jumping up and down and shouting, 'I'm here, I'm here!'
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This wave broke much further back than most of them. I was facing away from it, and it caught me by surprise, and nearly knocked me clean over. I'm delighted that Mom snapped this picture - it's one of my top-ten favorites from the trip.
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Me on the beach in Cancun. Royal Sands is more or less halfway along the 7km strip of the Hotel Zone; behind me is the southern half of the island.
And there's the northern half of the island. The flags, by the way, are positioned about every fifty feet, and indicate the danger level for swimming (because of the undercurrent).
I'm sad this picture of Mom turned out so fuzzy, because I think the sailboat in the background really makes the composition.
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There's Dad, standing on the terrace by the pool bar, waving. The hotels are elevated quite a bit above sea level, both due to safety concerns, and because of some peculiar Mexican laws about how many floors a building can have. (Levels that are partially underground don't count, you see.)
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We had dinner at La Dolce Vita, an Italian restaurant. The hotels dominate the ocean side of the strip, to the east; the lagoon side (on the west) is where all the restaurants are. Which means that you can see sunsets like this while you're eating dinner.
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Mom and Dad and I ate bread and watched for shapes in the clouds as the sun went down. I don't think we ever ate a meal that took less than an hour and a half.
Thursday morning I thought I'd go down to the beach so I could actually see the sun as it comes up (from the resort, the side of the building blocked the sun until about 9am). I got down there, took this one picture, and then my camera battery died. But the rest of the sunset was very pretty. And I kind of like that this one captured a couple of stars (or, more likely, Mars and Venus).
Thursday afternoon, we went to Xcaret, which is a nature preserve theme park. In the entryway, they had several of these little incubators with hatching quail eggs in them. Aren't the baby quails adorable? Just as a grace note? Our dinner during the Xcaret show included hardboiled quail eggs.
Wild boar
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There was no explanation for this, so I have no idea what it was used for. The little stubby things all around it are candles.
Xcaret had a mockup of a Mayan village with maybe a dozen little huts with scenes like this in them. All the food is fake, in case you were wondering.
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Mmm, tortillas!
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Did the ancient Mayans really have spinning wheels? I'm not sure, but they sure do now. The balls of yarn on display here are in baskets with the materials used to dye them.
Another hut. I'm pretty sure the flowers on the wall were not dyed naturally, alas.
I'm not sure why Mom and Dad decided I needed a picture of the hammock spread out, but they did, so here it is.
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I'm not sure what's up with the light in this picture. What I'm looking at is the whole ceiling covered with cut-paper flags. I was hoping they would be in the picture, but the doorway was too low.
Xcaret also had a butterfly house. I took a bajillion pictures, and some of them even turned out pretty good. This is probably my favorite.
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No butterflies, just some pretty flowers, and you can see the netting they use to keep the butterflies in the area, since it isn't really indoors, by any stretch of the imagination.
Close runner-up for favorite butterfly picture.
Two butterflies in one shot! But they're not quite as colorful with their wings folded. The most beautiful butterfly I saw was the size of my outstretched hands, lavender-blue with black edging. But it wouldn't stay still long enough for a picture.
Mom on the path in the butterfly house. Lots of dense growth and a narrow path -- it never got wider than you see it here. Also, lots of stone stairways that ambled all over.
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A nice close-up.
Both of these lotuses were the same beautiful shade of lavender, but the sun bleached the one in the foreground when I took the picture.
The Mayans like snakes. (Cancun means 'Nest of Snakes' in Mayan, you know.) These little statue-carving things were all over the park.
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The Jungle Cats exhibit had nothing more exciting than a pregnant (or possibly just fat) mountain lion, until this gorgeous panther padded out of the trees.
She looks like she's stalking something, but honestly, I think she was just hot.
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A tapir. Isn't it weird looking? It came almost close enough for me to touch.
This is the stage where we watched a show. Behind it, you can see an underground river emerging, and people floating by. This was something you could do at Xcaret -- float/swim the length of a mile and a half of underground river. This stage was one of the pull-out points, which is what the two staff members are doing -- they're waiting in case someone wants to give up.
The show -- a brief show of some historical/regional costumes and dances of Mexico.
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It had to be cool for the people floating by on the river to catch a few minutes of the show.
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There were lots of costumes and dances. Here's a closeup of stage left...
...and stage right.
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A rodeo show, yeehaw! But the poor bull looked so hot and exhausted, there didn't look like it was much sport to rope him.
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The path to the auditorium for the evening show at Xcaret was lined with these performers, playing music and posing with the tourists.
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He looks fierce, don't you think?
More posing, this time on a bridge/arch over the pathway. There were actually more alcoves across the path, but I decided to zoom in for more detail.
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Part of the evening show -- the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors.
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The Spanish are about to freak out and start killing Mayans. But I'm pleased the camera managed to capture some of the gorgeous chieftan's costume.
The enormous parade octopus made me laugh.
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Friday morning, we went to Tulum, an archaeological site. This is Nicolaus, our tour guide, talking about Mayan culture.
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The corners of the temple were shaped into faces. You can see an eye and the nose between the two bands, and the lips and chin just below the bottom band.
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Fertility temple. You can just see a few red handprints on the upper level -- once, they covered the whole upper structure. The recessed bas-relief carvings show a woman giving birth, the sun god, and a couple having sex. Nicolas made the 11-year-old in the group turn around when he pointed out the couple having sex. The two surface carvings show infants with their umbilical cords still attached.
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Did I mention Tulum is on a cliff overlooking the sea? (Yep, that's me.)
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You can go down the cliff and go swimming/snorkeling, if you want -- some of the biggest coral reefs in the world are just off the coast here. But when you're done, you have to climb back up the cliff. It wasn't an appetizing prospect, even with the stairs.
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A wide shot of Tulum.
Tulum means 'wall' -- it's a walled town, with very narrow gates in it. This is a simple and obvious defense measure. You can see one of the gates just behind us, here -- too narrow for more than one person to pass, and the lintel was low enough that anyone over about 5'6" had to duck.
After Tulum, we went to Xel Ha, which is another nature preserve theme park. Xel Ha was diversified than Xcaret, though -- its main attraction was a huge T-shaped lagoon, about a mile in each direction. This picture is pointing downstream, toward the ocean. Our primary purpose there was to go snorkeling. We sat down just about here, and then Dad and I snorkeled down to the floating bridge that you can see. Mom had planned to go with us, but forgot her bathing suit. Oops.
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This shot is pointing back upstream, toward the crossbar of the T. The water looks a little murky, mostly because the number of people in it disturbed the sand a lot. If you could find a spot a little bit away from all the people, it was fairly clear. But there were less fish in those areas. (The fish are fed near the piers. Therefore, the fish stay near the piers.)
The fish ranged from thousands of inch-long silvery minnows to huge things nearly the size of people, to every size in between. Under the floating bridge, where it was cool, there was a huge concentration of the big fish. In this shot you can see a fish about a foot long, a bunch of the little guys, and a pretty blue and yellow fish about the length of my hand.
A closer shot of the blue and yellow guy.
There was a small school of them lingering near the pier. We also some some black and yellow striped angelfish, and a beautiful black fish with neon blue fins, but I couldn't get pictures of those.
Iguanas and geckos in Mexico were everywhere, and very bold, like the squirrels in Williamsburg. I'm sure the locals were rolling their eyes everything they saw a stupid tourist like me taking pictures of them.
We went into Downtown Cancun for dinner Saturday, at La Habichuela ('little bean'), a fantastic restaurant featuring Carribean-inspired cuisine.
And of course, Mom had their Mayan coffee. If you look closely, you can see the flames clinging to the liquid as he's pouring it, here. There's a couple of movies below that show it much more spectacularly, if you're willing to wait for the download.
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More sitting around the pool relaxing, margarita in hand.
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Dinner Sunday was at one of the other Royal Resorts, the Royal Mayan, at my mom's favorite restaurant, El Conquistador. They had lots of flaming dishes cooked tableside. I'm beginning to suspect the owner of being a bit of a pyromaniac. But the artwork at the resort was wonderful.
A group shot, the day before I left, just to prove I was really there.
Mom and Dad have decreed that it is required to make at least one item at the ceramics-painting table. I did three -- a picture frame for myself, a little pig as a gift for a friend, and then another little pig when they accidently lost the first one.
See, you do most of the painting, and then leave it for 4 or 5 hours (or overnight, or for a few days) with them, and they do the outlines and some decorative touches for you, and then put a glaze coat on it to keep the paint from chipping.
This is all the ceramics my folks and I had done before we left. (Mom is into the pumpkins this year.)
Here's my two. The picture in the frame is the family picture I took with me in case I got a little homesick for Matt and Penny (which I did), but my eventual goal is to get a print of one of my favorite pictures from Cancun to go in it, and take it to work, where it can give me a mini-vacation when work is bogging me down.
Parasailing boats flying their parachutes empty, as an advertisement. They were pretty parachutes. Maybe the next time I go, I'll try parasailing.
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It was windy enough on Monday that Mom and Dad got to break out their kites.
They forgot to bring two spools of line, though, so they had to take turns.
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Mom's kite is a goldfish. I rather like the composition of this shot.
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Dad's kit is a lizard. It was harder to make out than the goldfish.
The morning I was due to leave, the weather was rainy and very windy. I worried that my flight would be delayed or cancelled... As much as I'd enjoyed the trip, I was anxious to get home and see Matt and Penny!
But the wind died down and we left in plenty of time. My last glimpse of the Riviera Maya was not actually of Cancun, but of Playa Carmen, about twenty miles down the coast.
Shortly after we crossed back into the US (well, over US land -- I don't know where the water border is) a series of rainbows welcomed me home.