12 January 2010 - Beheadings, drownings and a nasty cold

Merida was excellent and definitely the rest that we needed - it was nice to have a few days of not doing too much, sleeping late and generally relaxing. We managed to fit in a few sights - we visited the city's anthropological museum and on Friday the site of the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza. The latter was particularly impressive as it comprises the ruins of 15 or so large buildings that were used as temples, ancient sports arenas and for other ceremonial purposes. Chichen Itza was made particularly fascinating as it was the site of a large number of human sacrifices both of vanquished military foes and and members of sports teams unfortunate enough to find themselves on the losing side. Sacrifice took the form of beheading or being thrown into the sacred cenote - a large watering hole - to drown. All very grizzly, but very interesting.

We left Merida for Campeche on Sunday planning to stay for a couple of nights before moving on. Campeche is a pretty walled city that served as an excellent place to relax some more by sitting in the sunny zocalo (main square) during the day reading our books, exploring the old ramparts of the city and eating Mexican food in the evenings. Our stay has been extended from our initially planned two nights to four as Lisa is suffering with a terrible cold and hopefully some more rest here will help her recover.

We've also been doing some planning here with the intention of doing some more voluntary work and perhaps a language course as we move further into central America. It seems that our appetite for standard traveling has been tempered a little recently as moving from place to place only staying long enough to see the main sites has become a little repetitive (arrive by bus, find hostel, get map, find supermarket etc, etc) and probably needs to be broken up with a more permanent stay. Our thoughts have frequently turned to our time at Pretty River in Canada and how spending an extended period of time with the same group of people made us really happy - I think that this is what is driving our attempts to have some more extended stays in places.