Tours, tours and more tours!!!

We scheduled our tours for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and hoped that the rain really would be gone by then. We lucked out and had great weather the rest of the week. We started on Tuesday with a visit to Tulum, the walled city built on a cliff. We were picked up at our hotel and had a bilingual tour guide for the day. They put a little sticker on your shirt with your bus number on it, one guy called it Mexican GPS, so you don't get lost. The tour guide had a lot of great information that he shared on the drive there and then spent about 30 minutes at the ruins telling us more about it. He was very passionate about this location and had been giving tours there for over twenty years.

It was a little overcast when we got there and we actually got rained on a bit. Not enough to pull out our ponchos that we had purchased just in case, but enough to get us wet. But it passed over us and then the weather was beautiful the rest of the day! The whole area around there is flat jungle of medium sized vegetation because there is only about 20 inches of soil before you hit limestone. They used the limestone and made their mortar of all kinds of stuff. The acoustics were really good too, so they could speak to the people and be heard. They also think this city was used as a trading post along the coast.
We had fun wandering around the ruins. The views were just beautiful with blue, blue water and green jungle and white sand. There were also iguanas everywhere. Like squirrels in the park, iguanas on the ruins. They just wandered slowly around the complex.

After the tour, we drove to a different hotel owned by the same company where we ate lunch and then had time to swim. After swimming, laying out to dry, and then getting soaked in a five minute thunder/shower, Jim beat me quickly at a large sized game of chess. We got home around 5pm or so. We were pretty hot and tired. After a quick shower, we went downstairs for dinner and ended up eating at the outside restaurant which quickly became our favorite. Again, we were right on the ocean, the food was excellent, it wasn't crowded and felt small and personal. And it was just cool.