At seven-thirty in the morning, I stood outside the lobby of the hotel, checking my camera, when Michel approached me.
"Hi, I'm your tour guide." I boarded a van with other passengers, otherwise known here as "pax-es," who seemed from the beginning like a jolly bunch. Michel had fourteen of us, every one from different hotels.
Our drive to our first stop, the Tres Rios cenote, took approximately one and a half hours. I felt mostly interested in photography, but became increasingly aware that I would rapell down the edge of the cenote. Without any contention, I stepped into the brace, then followed Michel and the group to the drop point. He gave us instruction on how to do rapelling, then reached over and clamped the clasp on my brace. "Oh, dang, well, I'll get it over with first."
The process of rapelling does not seem as frightful once you "sit down" and stretch your legs. The brace and the ropes gave me a sense of security that I kept all the way down to the bottom, where two men waited for me. I did not need any assistance steadying myself once my feet touched the ground. I moved to the side a few meters and took some photographs of the others in my our group, including Michel rapelling upside down.
We returned to the lip of the cenote by stairway. Not content with rapelling, we then zip-lined across the opening of the hole, about three hundred yards. Michel again clamped the clasp on my brace first, before anyone else, and gave us instruction on zipping down the line. More importantly, he told us how to break. He added that the heavier people will go down faster, and encouraged them to pull the break steadily enough to slow them down toward the end of the ride.
It feels odd to zip-line. I focussed like an eagle on my destination. I felt aware of my surroundings, but I dared not take my eyes off the end of my line, where several men waited for the rapellers. Next time, I will look down and all around me at the bottom and the walls of the cenote.
From there we boarded the van again and made our way to a mangrove. I sat in the same kayak with Michel, and left the dock the last ones. He paddled behind me while I took photographs.
Around the bend, we found Marianne and Steven. Steven is hopelessly and unabashedly urban. He's also a ham and a comic, a lot of fun to have in one's company. They had become stuck at a tight curve in the canal. "I was never a boy scout," said Steven, while Marianne tried with her paddle to extricate their kayak from their odd angle in the waterway. Michel paddle up to them a rope to the bow of their ship, then towed them all they way to our destination.
From there, we walked through the forest to reach a cave. The Mayans believe that the cave represents an entryway to the consciousness of Mother Earth. A man named Pedro blessed us and spread Frankincense incense all around us. The photograph below shows my attempt to record the inside of the cave. I managed to capture the Tyndall effect, though it looks a little blurry. We crouched to enter through the small opening at the top of the stairs (right).
Climbing back up through the opening, I became entangled with my camera strap. Thankfully I avoided injury, but sacrificed my sunglasses instead of my body. I watched them disappear into the darkness below me. I sat outside in the sun figuring that leaving something behind inside the consciousness of Mother Earth cannot seem too bad, when Michel popped out of the opening with my glasses in his hand. Oh, well, Mother Earth returned them knowing I would need them.
Visitors can swim inside the cave. The water looks beautiful in its crystal light green.
I'm pretty sure we had lunch right after the swim in the cave. By then I felt plumb tuckered out and antsy about seeing the Coba ruins. The food, I do remember, made by local women, tasted fresh and healthy.
Finally, though, we arrived in Coba. The larger pyramid stands two kilometers from the entrance. They provide bicycles and bicycles with large seats driven by men. I chose a single bike, and somehow made my way to the pyramid. They have many paths, and they all look similar. My bike fell over just before I opened the shutter to photograph the path.
I have heard on a number of occasions the question, "What was she thinking????" I started asking myself what in the world was I thinking when I began to set foot before foot, hand before hand, on the steps of this very steep, very tall pyramid. Only twenty steps up sparked an uncomfortable sense of vertigo that only felt worse as I climbed each step. From below, I heard Marianne saying, "Save your energy. You'll need it on your way down. It's worse coming down." Next to me, Steven grunted his way up the steep steps. "Keep going, Elizabeth," he'd say. The comments he made often, even under his own duress, seemed comical, and I laughed in spite of my vertigo, all the way up to the top.
Then he made me laugh as we crawled back down, me backwards on all four, and he on sitting down from step to step.
In the meantime, the two little girls in our group climbed the pyramid, passing us at least twice on their way.
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