Chichen Itza y Tulum...

We left bright and early the next morning for our tour of Chichen Itza and Tulum. They are the two ruin sites that are the best restored and the biggest down in the Yucatan Peninsula. It was soooo amazing!! When we first found out about this trip, they had told us that they had booked an LDS tour guide through the ruins. We were a bit skeptical not knowing if we REALLY needed to pay for an LDS tour. We had heard that you didn't actually need a tour guide...yada yada yada. But...we were SOOO glad we did the tour. We did it through Helaman Tours. He is a member of the church down there who has been doing these tours for 30 years. His business has grown so much that he wasn't actually our tour guide, but his son-in-law, Jonathan. Johnathan was awesome.

Chichen Itza was our first stop. It was amazing and I wish I could remember every single little detail that Jonathan told us about it. It is where the biggest pyramid is, The temple of Kulkulkan is there. Kulkulkan is what the Mayan God is similar to the  Aztec's Quetzalcoatl. But here is the city wall around Chichen Itza:

You walk in and I think it's something like 80 square kilometers of ruins, the main and center one being the temple of Kulkulkan:

It was amazing! What's more amazing and what absolutely blew Ben's mind was that there are more than 20,000 ruin sites within the jungles of the Yukatan peninsula, but so little of them are actually uncovered and restored. Ben couldn't understand why they haven't restored more yet, but Jonathan told us that the funding isn't available, so they are little by little restoring them as they can.

Our first stop on our tour was the ball court. It is the largest ball court found so far.

All of us inside the ball court:

They glyph's depicting the winning team beheading the losing team. Although, it was an honor to be beheaded and sacrificed to the God's:

There were the cutest little Mayan ladies outside selling these little handkerchiefs. They were all so old and cute, but this little lady just won Ben's heart. She was soooo teeny tiny!! Ben had me sneak a picture with her! :)

Some more glyphs, and Jonathan showing us the Temple of the Skulls in Chichen Itza...

Another glyph of the 'descending God'. It was so cool to read scriptures throughout our tour, from the Book of Mormon, where it spoke of how they constructed buildings and cities. Because we believe that the Mayan's are descendants of the Lamanies and Nephites, there were many of these buildings built just like the way it's described in the Book of Mormon.

The Temple of the warriors, where they have over a thousand pillars carved for fallen warriors. It was pretty cool. The higher up warriors have square columns with a different pose carved on each side of that one warrior, and the not so high up guys just had round pillars with carvings. They actually aren't sure if the pillars were carved after that particular solider had fallen, or if they all just got one for being a soldier.

The rows of columns went on for a pretty long ways:

The observatory. You know how the Mayan calendar is so popular because it was amazingly prescise, well, this is the observatory where they observed the stars and rotation of the earth. It is pretty amazing to me that they were able to calculate so exact the hours and minutes in the day, and even in the year, knowing way back then that there was a leap day every four years.

A statue build to the Rain God. It totally looked like a totem pole. Amazing how all of the Native American people from the north and south are connected. Jonathan told us that if you get an Aztec person and a Navajo person from Arizona together, that their language is so similar that they can understand each other!

And finally the Temple of Kulkulcan. It was amazing. It is one of the seven wonders of the world. (This is my 3rd wonder of the world to be at!! The other two are Petra, in Jordan. --Indiana Jones Temple-- and the pyramids of Egypt)

It is amazing to me how precise and exact this temple is also. On the summer solstice and Winter solstice, as the sun is setting, the steps make serpent like shadows coming down from the top, and then there are those heads carved into the bottom on either side of the steps that you can see. This was their main temple, and every temple had two rooms at the top. It was pretty amazing to me how their temples have washing rooms, and anointing rooms.

The next stop Jonathan took us to was a cinote for a quick lunch and swim. It was so amazingly beautiful. The area is known for all of it's centoes. They are big underground cisterns, with plenty of water to swim in. It was really cool and totally beautiful! I didn't want to bring my camera down for fear of it getting wet and destoryed, so this is the only picture I got of it, from the top.

For those of you who know me, know that I am a huge wuss! They all jumped and dived off of the area that they have for you to jump and dive off. I chicken out every time I have to do something like this. It takes me forever to build up the courage! In this case, by the time I finally did it, we had to go!!!! :) But not without making sure everyone remembered who I was! :) I screamed SO dang loud that everyone down there was laughing at me, and when we got back to the top Jonathan said, 'did you hear that girl scream so loud!!??? Who was that???' Here is Emily doing a dive off in perfect form! :)

Our next stop was Tulum. It is the only Ruins on the ocean. We had to walk through the city wall to get there:

It was amazingly beautiful, and I was also amazed at how different of a city it was. Totally different that Chichen Itza. This definitely had more of the 'beach vibe' town. In Chichen Itza it was all about warriors, and battle and bloodshed. There is no depiction of wars or bloodshed in Tulum. It is built right on the cliff of the ocean, right at a break in the barrier reef. Probably as a point of reference for boats to come to shore without hitting the reef.

Beautiful!!!

The main Temple in Tulum. Again, with the two rooms on top, and a carving of the 'Descending God' above  the doors.

Two things we saw a lot of that day, besides ruins, of course, were; 

1--Old men in speedos just hanging out, without a worry!

And 2--these huge friends everywhere. They'd just be hanging out on the ruins like no big deal. My kids would have loved it! :)

The amazing beauty of Tulum from down the coast line. It truly was just absolutely gorgeous!

The backside of the Temple, from the beach:

Walking along the cliffs, right outside of the Temple:

Everyone with Jonathan. He was awesome. Except when he almost fell asleep at the wheel while driving from our lunch stop to Tulum. I didn't notice, but Kirt said he had to keep an eye on him, and was ready to jump in and take the wheel at any time. :) I brought it up as a joke with him when our day was done, and he laughed and said that that lunch stop usually makes him tired! :) Oh, and also just flipping through a magazine casually reading it while driving. That also happened. Another incident we poked fun at him for! :) He was fun though, and we really enjoyed our day with him!

Good bye, Tulum! I hope I get to see you again one day! :)

After our long day of awesomeness, the boys decided they deserved a drink and each got their respective drinks. Ben, of course, with his diet soda. And Cary with his water. Kirt was dying for some coconut water, so that's exactly what he got. I'm not too fond of the stuff myself, but it was a good end to a really cool day!