our trip to Mexico

Just thought that I would do a little write up of our trip to Mexico (my conference in Mexico actually). Just for background, we went to the Yucatan Peninsula and stayed in a city called Merida. We were there for the week, the last two days of which I was attending a conference.

It is best if you read this description while looking at the photos.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/noirs/sets/1833119/

We stayed at the Holiday Inn in Merida. We were the only two people from the entire plane to NOT go to the all inclusive resort called The Reef Yucatan. It was pretty funny. When we arrived it was very hot and we were exhausted from getting up at 4 am to go to the airport. We ended up napping most of the afternoon, then we went to a street party. The people in Merida were celebrating the Festival de los Reyes (Three Kings Day), which is like Christmas in Mexico. It also happened to be the anniversary of the city of Merida while we were there, so everyone was partying a lot. We ate some cake and coke, just like the Meridans. It was interesting.

The next day we got on a bus to go to a Biosphere Reserve called Celustun. The big attraction there are the flamingos. It was really beautiful. We took a boat tour and also got to see an Mangrove swamp, a red crab and lots of neat birds. Finally, we went to see some freshwater springs. After the boat tour, we walked to the ocean and checked out the beach. It was a bit windy so we didn't go swimming.

The next day we decided to go to Chichen Itza, since it was really easy to get around by bus. Chichen Itza is one of the biggest Mayan ruins in the Yucatan. We spent the day there. We want to climb El Castillo but someone had fallen the day before so they closed it off. It was pretty interesting to see the ruins, especially to see the cenote. A cenote is a deep sinkhole in limestone with a pool at the bottom that is found especially in Yucatán Peninsula.

The next day we decided to take it easy and explore Merida. We had too many days in a row of long bus rides. Instead we walked downtown, checked out the zocalo (town square) and bought ourselves a really cool hammock. They also tried to sell us some hats but we declined.