Belize City

 This is the hostel I stayed at in Belize city, it had a great view of the water. I met lots of interesting people, including a guy who was motor biking from Europe to Africa to South America and ending in Alaska. On the Bus ride over I met a retired army officer who worked with the Canadian military fighting the drug trade.

 This is the Belize national museum made from the old prison, there is even a room where they used to hang people

 This is Frank, he was very aggressively friendly which I should have realized was a bad sign, but he assured me he was well known and wouldent charge to show me around, and so many police officers knew him (he was also a retired police man). He took me out for a beer and then very forcebly asked for 25$ to get a cake for his children. I ended up giving him the money but felt bad about not avoiding the situation. I felt better after I won 20$ in a poker game later that night. Now I have learned to be wary of friendly people in tourist centres

 This is a famous burial containing a large jade skull. It is controversial because the British originally took the skull and many other artifacts back to the British Museum without informing Belize. The museum claims it was returned but some Belizians I talked to think it is a fake. I learned later that the same British expedition used dynamite to clear some of the pyramids near where I am working   

 This is the Governor Generals house of Belize. Unilke in Victoria the GG no longer lives there

This is the best part about Belize; a large chinese population immigrated to many cities in the country and brought with them the best tasting and cheapest food in my opinion

Coba and Chetumal

 May 10th, I set off to Coba. It is a large mayan city a short bus ride from Tulum. I sat beside an old man  from Tel Aviv (pictured here) and we ended up joining up to see the ruins.

Coba was enormous and overgrown. They had a bicycle service to get to the different areas. Like the Romans the Maya had been able to manage such large distances by a long term and well engineered road system stretching throughout the Yucatan before the collapse

 A real life Mayan stella covered in hieroglyphs. This is like a thousand year old book

 It may be hard to see just how big this pyramid is in the picture. It is the tallest building in the northern Yucatan. There is no equivalent to this in any of the modern Mexican cities surrounding it, and it was built with basically the same technology of the Egyptian pyramids, with maybe better mathematics

 a better view of its size

 all you can see from the top is the green tree line and one other temple that rises above it. How amazing would it be if modern cities could exist within a forest? I think we have a lot to learn from the Mayan, at least those of us who live in the north west temperate rain forest regions

This temple, used to observe Venus, reminded my a beehive or a humbler creation of Gaudi. Its a same pyramid shaped architectural designs haven't made a comeback yet

 We are jumping ahead to Chetumal now, a large city on the boarder of Mexico and Belize. I didn't spend much time there as I am starting to get excited about arriving at the field school. It did have a great museum which was a welcome change to the enigmatic sites which I neglected professional guides in. In this picture are models of all the most spectacular temples and pyramids of the Maya world

This is right near the exit to the museum. It is god who guards Xibalba, the underworld. The underworld is one of the most opposite Mayan mythological concepts to Judea-Christian mythology because your place corresponds not with your deeds in life but in the mode in which you die

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.

 This is the entrance to the mayapan hotel, it was not so bad, but wait till you see the next one

This is the public bus I took downtown. It seemed like every bus was made different, but so far they have all costed less then a dollar and gone too frequently to worry about; I could definitely get used to this 

 Its hard to see but in the distance is the entrance to Quatzal hostel

 The graffiti found on one side the hostel, one maya plays ball well the other holds a beating heart (more on that later)

 more graffiti. This place was a little more expensive (26$) but ended up being cheaper overall because it includes the most excellent home made dinner

 Jumping ahead to the next day, this is the entrance to the Cenote: one of the many underground caves in the Yucatan. They think the Yucatan might be the crater site of the asteroid that took out our beloved dinosours 

 Check out these stalactites!

 must have taken thousands maybe millions of years for this one to forms

 They put on a mock maya ritual. After it was done I went and swam in the water which was amazing and somehow supported a whole population of fishes

 The great pyramid of Itza! recently voted (I forget who) one of the 7 wonders of the world. If you clap in the right place it sounds like a bird flew by (great acoustics!)

 The biggest ballcourt in the Americas. Must have been a great game to play and watch. They used a ball made out of gum and used every part of the body except the hands and feet. They might have had a racket; we don't know.

 Its hard to see but in the middle is a skull representing the god of the underworld who invented this game; its the same theme as the devil playing chess for a mans soul. On the right is a man with seven snakes for a head and on the left is a man holding a head

 I really liked this wall; every brick had a number for the order archeologist had found them in the jungle after they found this key wall destroyed. That would have been a tough job

The lady in the umbrella was a expat who told me a bunch of good places to go, her ex-husband who was visiting was a ex-jew who teachers online computer science after a failed attempt to make it big with electronic music. Neat people

 The market of a thousand columns

 The observatory from where they mapped Venus

 This guy was a true prodigy. Either still in high school or just out he had been doing archeological work on the enigmatic tombs of his home state. I lectured me the entire time on all precolumbian mexican history in a conversation that passed between english and spanish. I really want to go to central Mexico now, turns out the Aztecs were the overrated ones.

 nothing new here, just a cool building which may have an iguana in it if you look closely

Just because I was not in any other pictures, it may be noted that I got a haircut and a straw fedora so I can fit in with the archeologists

First night

Here are some of the first photos I took When I arrived, the hostel I stayed at today, Mayapan, is made out of the semi-abandoned shell of a 1990's hotel and mall complex. Of what I wondered yesterday it appears that there is a crazy hotel boom all along the highway to rival Las Vegas, but when I went beyond that is became small and empty. Turns out you only have to walk a block outside of the main road to get offered blow!