Travelogue: "Santa is the Nanny"

Jan. 15 2003
by Basil

Well, I finally figured out a great mystery that has been troubling me and has no doubt plagued many a traveller who finds themselves in Mexico around Christmas time. Nativity scenes are very popular here, and they can be very very extravegent and quite impressive. None-the-less there were a couple that I saw in Izamal that confused me at first... how can Santa be hanging out with Joseph, Mary and Jesus? It just didn't seem right. Well, I finally figured it out. Santa is the nanny! Coca-cola would be proud.

We just finished our first tour in the Yucatan, possibly the friendliest, safest place in the world. Besides the people of the Yucatan making it so, our groups was composed of 4 doctors from Canada. Well, I've never felt so justified in not wearing my helmet while cycling. And best of all, no one was ever late for any of our meeting times.

An interesting fact that I've discovered recently is that pork rinds are ACTUALLY good for you! On a delicious bag of them that I recently emptied it had the seemingly impossible claim "low fat, low colesterol". Well! How can this be, I thought. Sure enough, upon close inspection of the nutritional information on the back, one serving contains 17 grams of protien, and ONLY 7 grams of fat! Typo shmypo! I'm sold! Do you think I can sue the company if they make me fat?

Alright, here's a little about our last tour. Haciendas, cenotes, Mayan ruins, haciendas, cenotes and Mayan ruins.

The haciendas are old massive estates which produced sisal fibre from heneken plants, which the Yucatan is full of. They are all in disuse and disrepair now as the sisal industry took a dive when nylon came into the scene, but in their day, they must have been glorious. Even though the people working there were paid meager wages, they were taken care of as if they were all part of a big family, and speaking to people in the area revealed to me that they looked back to those days as "the good old days". Some haciendas have been fixed up and turned into beautiful, fancy hotels.

Now, cenotes... what are cenotes? Well, definitions abound: sink-hole, water well, abyss... but really they're none of those, they're simply cenotes. I can try to describe them, but you can't fully appreciate them unless you see some. The Yucatan is a massive limestone shelf, porous, so there are no rivers or lakes. At least not above the ground. There's PLENTY of water, but it's all underground in fantastic caves and tunnels that are absolutely everywhere. A cenote appears when there is some access to this water from above ground. Sometimes they're like lakes in caves, sometimes they're like perfectly round lakes with steep 20 metre high cliffs. They're usually very deep, like 50 to 100 metres, and are always interconnected in some way, usually by tunnels very deep down. And they are always beautiful and different from one another.

We stopped in a little town called "Tunkas" and asked about cenotes in the area. Many are well known, have big signs on the highway directing you to them, and charge admission, but MOST are hardly known about. There's always someone in every town who knows all the cenotes in the area, and we were lucky enough to find Daniel (or "Teacher" - he's the English teacher in town though he hardly speaks it) who fit the bill. He took us to 3 different cenotes, the most beautiful of which is called Mumondzinot. You have crouch down through a hole to get to it. The water in the 15 metre diameter cenote is perfectly clear and a spectacular colour that only a woman could possibly come up with a name for. The roof almost completely covers it except for a small 4 metre hole where a tree sits at the surface dangling its braided roots about 15 metres down to drink from the water. Diving down a bit you can see the walls of the cenote drop straight down and then go out to mysterious tunnels in all directions. Absolutely amazing!

"How many cenotes are around Tunkas?" I ask Daniel. "About 100".

Now we're in Cancun and looking forward to enjoying the Caribbean ocean for the next few days.