CARIBBEAN CRUISE DAY 2- MAYAN RUINS

Well day two was my first ever view of the Caribbean sea in all it's multi-colored glory. I took so many pictures of the color of the water. Later in the blog series you should see some cool shots of it from the snorkeling ventures. You get a pretty good glimpse of it with the boat shot below.

I also decided that each day from here out- at least the port days- are going to require two collages per day. One for the shore activity of the day and one for the food events and such. We did eat a lot you know.... and it' should be documented- especially since every night we wore some "outfit" we took for the express purpose of eating dinner in it.

Anyway- we saw big Mayan ruins with our local guide, Diana. I got to use my first dose of Spanish and made my first purchase- a hand made wooden vase from a local artist named Servantes. He'd been making these vases for 3 generations. Very cool.

The Mayan ruins were nifty I suppose. Honestly, it was my least favorite day. I really want to say it was an impressive pile of rocks... but I actually was more impressed by the Jungle around them and of course- the color of the sea. I really badly wanted to get in the water this day, but our trip to the Mayan ruins took several hours and then they had signs all over on the shore near the boat that this stretch of beach was a "no swimming zone" for some ridiculous reason. Our only on shore swim option within reasonable walking distance was a HUGE wading pool in the center of this port side mall with a HUGE swim up bar... which makes the HUGE wading pool nothing more than a HUGE toilet for drunk people as far as I was concerned. So it was back to the boat to swim.

By the time we had returned to our boat, a Carnival Cruise Ship had also pulled up next to us.... here was a conversation I overheard from people heading to their boat:

"Hey John... oh man. It's so f'ing good to see you. We're so screwed. We ran out of money. (its the first day of their trip)"
"Oh... don't worry man. We got managed to get free drinks all day. We got your back."

2 lessons from this overheard conversation and others like it:

1. spend the extra money. unless you want a floating drunken party, skip Carnival. Even though Princess (which we were on) is owned by Carnival... the clientele were visibly more sober.

2. um... don't swim in the GIANT MEXICAN TOILET.

here's the picture set... as always, if you click it, it gets really big if you want more detail...