Snorkeling

Early morning at the Hotel Dolores Alba, about five kilometres from Chichen Itza.

The sun has been up since six, and night sounds have been replaced by bird noise. The birds are not so easy to spot, however: the dense vegetation provides good cover.

We have spent the last day and a half here, and visited Chichen Itza three times. The first afternoon we drove over to find out if we needed to pre-book a guide for the next morning, and were told that we could go in for free since there was only an hour left. This was nice; it gave us an opportunity to walk through most of the site and get a feel for it.

The guided tour yesterday morning was very worth while, and we learned a lot. More about that at a later time, hopefully.

A special experience was the light show we watched at the site the first night. It was very well done, and we heard about things like the creation myth of the Maya and the history of Chichen Itza.

We were seated right across from the biggest temple, the castillio, many of the other buildings in our field of view, arranged around a huge open field. The light lifted each building out of the darkness in turn, but as much as this human-created splendour I was struck by the beauty of the star-filled sky that stretched above. Little remained of the artificial light that dimmed the sky around the hotel. The triangular face of Taurus appeared over the horizon, the Perseids a smudge above, and suddenly a big meteor streaked along the southern sky.

This was a moving experience for me, just like the one I had three days ago when we were still at the Posada los Mapaches:

We went to Akumal, a lagoon about 25 km north of Tulum, where snorkeling is supposed to be great.

I had never done this before, and while I really wanted to try it out was a bit apprehensive if I'd be able to. I was quite glad to hear that I wouldn't need the fins, and once I had figured out that the mouth piece goes all the way into the mouth, once I had practiced breathing deeply through my mouth only and to forget all about my nose, I was okay. The lagoon with its quite clear, very calm warm water was a perfect place to do this for the first time.

As soon as I put my head down I suddenly was in a different world, a world I knew nothing about. The landscape above the water had no consequence for what I saw now. Why is it that, although I knew about it in theory, I couldn't have imagined that rocks jutting out of the water, densely overgrown with vegetation, would continue under water, would be part of a landscape that was like nothing I had ever seen before?

Fish, big and small, swam by me unconcerned about my presence. The biggest, about half a meter in length, were of a deep marine blue, edged with silver, sometimes a bit of yellow; others, only slightly smaller, had the opposite colour composition. Swarms of smaller, black-and-white or yellow-and-black striped fish parted when I slowly made my way through them, only to close again behind me. Sunlight painted changing patterns on the rocks that sometimes were quite close to the surface so that I had to watch not to scrape my knees, with a rich growth of algae which the fish were grazing, intent on what they were doing, seemingly not interfering with each other at all.

I made my way along the side of the lagoon, gazed into deep crevices and caves without feeling the slightest desire to enter them: the dim twilight at their entrance would soon fade into ever growing darkness. No, their mysteries were there to be explored by more adventurous souls than me! I didn't see the famous sea turtles that were supposed to be feeding here, too, but even without them my life was enriched by this glimpse into a life I would never be part of.