After a short but terrible ride on the good ship Pukey McFerry, we arrived in Tulum on the Yucatan (Mayan for "I can't understand you") Penisula, the site of our Mayan ruins excursion today.



The ruins of Tulum (Mayan for 'fortress') are remarkably well-preserved -- built in 967 C.E., the temples on the site have survived almost entirely without upkeep. This was a small Mayan city; at its height only about a thousand people lived here, as opposed to 40,000 at a midsize city like Tikal. But it's the most popular Mayan ruins site, with almost two million visitors a year -- probably because it's the only Mayan city to be built on the ocean. The Mayans didn't sail; they only found out about boats after being conquered by the Aztecs, which is also when the culture started undertaking human sacrifice.

Mayan culture was extremely stratified, and our tour guide was pushing the belief that the Mayan civilization's collapse happened when the agricultural peasantry (which comprised about 80% of the population due to inefficient farming techniques and poor land quality) finally revolted against the upper classes.



The Mayans lived in wooden bungalows, which have all been destroyed. Only the temples remain. Back in the day, Tulum wasn't stone-colored; these buildings were once bright blue and orange, but the paint has worn away.

Mayan ruins are among the best for archeologists because much of their territory was never resettled; after the collapse, the area was just abandoned. When the site was rediscovered in 1842, trees were growing through the rooves of the buildings, spider monkeys were the majority population, and a pair of jaguars were making their home in the high temple.



Another interesting thing about Mayan culture is its cyclical calendar; one "life" (or one "era") ends every 52 years, when the solar and lunar calendars coincided. The temple pictured above actually has a smaller temple inside it, and in other locations you could have four or five temples stuck inside each other like
Russian dolls; one way the Mayans symbolized the birth of a new sun was to destroy, bury, or obscure the previous era's temple. For what it's worth, the next new sun begins on December 22, 2012.

The entire site, like many Mayan sites (or the Pyramids, or Stongehenge), acts as a little astronomical calendar -- the temple becomes illuminated by the sun for 15 minutes every March 17.

We also got to watch a reenactment of a Mayan ritual in which four men thrown themselves off a fifteen-foot pole to symbolize the journey of the sun's beams to Earth.





This Incan statue bears more than a passing resemblance to images of Buddha and Kali, which some amount of sense, because the Mayans originally came from Northern Asia. (One of the most popular last names among the indiginous Mayan population still around today is "Chang.") This is probably the goddess of the honeybees. With no domesticated animals, honeybees were incredibly important to the Mayans. (It may also be a diver, representing the plunge of the setting sun into the ocean.)

Their number one god was the rain god, however, and that's who'd you be sacrified to if you were a "volunteer" from the lower classes.

Here's a picture of the ocean nearby:



(The water is that color because Tulum is sitting on the second-largest coral reef in the world. All the waves are breaking way out at sea.)

This man had a monkey on his shoulder:



After we were done at Tulum, we hit the lagoon at Xel-Ha, which are also pretty excellent.



Xel-Ha was formed when part of a semester of underground rivers collapsed. The rocks now at the bottom of the lagoon were the top of the cave. This was a pretty wonderful place to spend a few hours.

But the day's best photographs weren't of old buildings; they just sort of happened.