Well, I'm back from Cancun. I had the opportunity to go because my friend/officemate Margaret was chosen to go on this trip for work (a reward for people in the sales organization who met their quotas or who supported those salespeople) and she invited me as a guest, lucky for me!
Cancun was created about 30 years ago specifically as a tourist spot. There was nothing there before: no old colonial buildings, no mines, no nothing. One of our guides told us that after it was built, they paid people to live there because no one wanted to, since it was so far away from everything.
Unfortunately our snorkeling trip got cancelled because of rough waters, which was too bad--I love snorkeling--but we did a lot of other fun stuff. We went to Xcaret, a great ecological zoo/park where were saw dolphins (poor things were in pens, but it was still exciting to see them), tropical birds, monkeys, a puma, a jaguar, bats, and lots of other animals. We also floated down an underground river, which was super cool.
We visited Tulum, Maya ruins about an hour south from our hotel. They were very interesting, but they no longer allow people to climb the temples because of stupid people who graffitied it in the past. A couple of the people on our tour are Mormon, and they went on the special Mormon tour. Apparently Mormons believe Quetzalcoatl was Jesus Christ.
One day was spent sailing on a beautiful Catamaran. We went to the nearby "Isle of Women" (so named because they discovered a lot of statues of women on it) and I did some smashingly poor negotiation, followed by some slightly better negotiation. Nothing at all has prices on it, and pesos have a dollar sign in front of them. Learn from my mistakes.
