Tulum And More Dumbass Americans

Still cruisin’, but we only have one more full day at sea. We dock at Galveston on Sunday.

This will be a relatively short post because I haven’t showered yet, we have dinner in an hour, and frankly, I’m freaking exhausted.

We arrived at Cozumel this morning around 9:30. Leigh and I had booked an excursion to Tulum, an archeological site on the mainland. Cozumel, which, for those of you who don’t know, is an island that sits 12 miles east of the Yucatan Peninsula; consequently, we had to leave the ship, board another, smaller ship, and head over to Playa del Carmen, which is the nearest port on the mainland from Cozumel.

So we get to the mainland, board a bus, and ride for more than an hour to Tulum, which is a site of Mayan ruins. Oh, and on the way to Tulum, some dipshit on the bus had to pee so bad that he made the bus driver pull over. I was secretly hoping he would get smashed by a car while he was getting back on the bus, but his luck held out and he made it back on safely.

Tulum (pronounced too-loom) was a fairly late addition to the Mayan empire. It was probably built around the 1200s, but since the Spanish Conquistadors destroyed so much of the Mayan civilization, archeologists are actually unsure of the date.

Walls surround Tulum on three sides, and the back of Tulum sits on the edge of a huge cliff overlooking the beautiful waters of the Caribbean. Try to imagine these pictures without all the annoying tourists:

Leigh and I love going to archeological sites like Tulum, but normally we do so alone and not in a tour group. Oh sure, sometimes we hire a guide at the site, but we never go on tours with more than five to ten people.

We had a whole bus-load of people on our tour today, and I think that I now need high-blood pressure medicine.

I hate to sound like an asshole, but touring Tulum with a big group of people reminded me that most people are fucking morons. Here’s my short list of why most people are fucking morons:

1. We’re touring an archeological site that’s more than 800 years old, and the majority of the people on the tour were more amazed by the damn iguanas that were running wild than the ruins themselves.

2. It’s Mexico. We’re near the equator. It’s gonna be hot. Unfortunately, people wouldn’t stop talking about the fucking heat.

3. All the yapping maws made it impossible to hear the tour guide. I wanted to spit in the mouths of all the jerks that wouldn’t shut up.

4. Yes, I know that one of the places we stopped at was Jamaica. But we were in Cozumel, which is another freaking country, and many of our fellow tour-mates kept answering Mexicans with “Ya Mon!”

5. While we were in the big tour group, people kept trying to shove me over so they could see something. I have a temper. I shove back, and the asshats had the audacity to look at me in an offended way when I did.

Here’s my last complaint and then I’ll go shower””our guide was an imbecile. A nice guy, sure, but an imbecile nonetheless.

First off, he got a lot of facts about the Mayans wrong. Facts like dates, cultural habits, religion, and so on. Now, I’m not an expert on Mayans. Far from it. But I could have given a more factually accurate tour of Tulum.

Second, he believes in the Mayan prophecy.

And no, I will not repeat the lunacy that is the Mayan prophecy here on this blog. I’ll hyperlink to a wiki entry of it, but I won’t repeat it. It’s too stupid to repeat.

Off to the shower”¦