Vacation

Our final port, and seeing MANY other cruise ships we decided to skip our planned trip to a “private island” (which clearly will be very crowded); here’s some of the ships already in port at sunrise. Cozumel, unlike yesterday, is a more typical cruise port – full of hotels, jewelry stores and other tourist trappings; we’ll stay on the ship instead:

A much bigger Norwegian Cruises ship now joins us, the Epic; it’s taller, longer and carries 4,100 guests, compared to the 1,936 of our Sun … It gets quite close (even closer than this)! From the port you get a good idea of the size difference (we did go ashore for a short while, just to confirm that we didn’t need to go ashore!):

 

 

In the evening we went to our only onboard show, a surprisingly entertaining rock music tribute that ended with some of the crew up onstage:

In contrast to yesterday, todays port had only our “small” cruise ship – and really not anything else, not even a port town! We learned that some serious hurricanes had destroyed much of the area in the last ten years, even destroying the massive concrete dock – clearly most businesses have not returned, even at maximum zoom on my Sony camera, there’s nothing but trees!

Our trip today was some 50 miles, an hours coach ride, to Chaccoben mayan ruins, though we did stop at a very strange area for a few minutes; it seemed nothing more than the tour guides family garden, but I don’t know what it really was! Anyway, on to Chaccoben – these ruins are not as huge or spectacular as those you’ve seen on TV, but for being smaller they were perhaps easier to comprehend – it was quite clear how much work had been needed to create the level areas and the massive constructions!

All the structures are built on top of a huge raised area that itself is maybe 50ft above the floor of the jungle – all that area had to be built, an enormous amount of work; and then the “pyramids” built on top!

The last pictures show a small amount of the original colored plaster finish – the original constructions, in their smooth colored finish standing so high above the surrounding jungle, would have been truly awesome, I’m sure!

Waking this morning we found that we were no longer alone, with three other cruise ships joining us for this “tendered” day (no dock, so land is accessible via a fast 50 passenger boat which during it’s 15 minute journey was the only time I felt less than fine with the ocean!) …

What should be obvious is that the port now has about 10,000 visitors instead of the 2,000 or so on our ship; it made the day much more crowded and busy than we’d expected and rather spoiled things. But as we headed off for “cave tubing” we didn’t yet know that …

I’d imagined riding a tube down some underground river and seeing amazing rock formations, but the cave tubing experience was more of a “float in an underground lake” event; we first hooked up 16 people in their tubes, to travel as a single group through the pitch dark caves (hope you don’t mind some random persons feet tucked under your shoulders!)

There were some spectacular rock formations in the caves, and happily some of my waterproof camera photos came out ok: