Tulum

 May 8th I think? I woke up early to get started on what ended up being a full day bike ride. In the background you may see the second sign, Chelupa hostel, where I stayed in Tulum. They rented bicycles for 5 bucks so I couldn't pass up the oppurtunity

 The bike was a little different then mine at home, and I was pleasantly surprised it went the whole day without breaking. Tulum is a really bicycle orientated tourist destination with more bikes then I've seen in the bigger cities. My hostel was right at the start of a 4 Km bike path to the beach 

 The first place to go was the Tulum ruins, a coastal merchant city that in its late-classic period created a walled elite centre

 This was the main palace. You can't tell anymore but it would have been a nice place to live

 The ruins were literally crawling with iguanas, they are wondrous lizards. I later saw two fighting a took a video of it.

 This raised platform would have been the foundations of a larger mayan house, complete with vegetable gardens around it. Beside it, around where the palm tree are would have been a public market. The mayans had a long history of the type of free market trade that came so late in the old world. The mayan kings were religious leaders rather then economic leaders

 In case people got hot while exploring the ruins they put in some beach access. As you can see the water is bright blue or torques around here, I was amazed when I first saw this.

 This is the temple which also functioned as the castle of Tulum. It consist of 9 religious buildings surrounded by an inner layer of walls. The architecture struck me as very medieval and the time period in which it was built has many parallels to the dark ages 

INAH is the Mexican anthropological and historical society that manages all the ruins and museums throughout the country. I wanted to put this in here because I am now considering, perhaps later in my education, applying for work with INAH. It seems to me to be much more powerful within its own country then the Canadian or American national anthropological societies  

This is me right before I went snorkeling in the barrier reefs off the coast. They were just outside the ruins to I was taking the same route the mayan traders once took up and down this coast. The corral reefs were other worldly and made all the salt water swallowed and sunburns worthwhile.