The Mexican snack cart. Tamarindo push candies, chiclets (gum), nance (the jar with yellow fruit in it), pepitas (roasted pumpkin seeds), chicharrones with chilli sauce (fried pig skin crisps), mango slices with lime and chilli powder. Que mas? What else is on this cart? My personal favorite in this photo are the “huayas” (the green round fruit on the right). Crack the outer green shell and throw the slimey ball into your mouth and you’ll get a sweet and sour treat. Basically a sour skittle in its natural form. If skittles grew on trees.
When you just can’t beat the heat. You won’t find any air conditioning out here. This photo was taken in one of the most remote areas of Mexico I‘ve ever been to. Punta Allen is technically part of the Sian Ka’an Biosphere just south of the famous Mayan temples of Tulum. To get here, you have to navigate a narrow 40 mile unpaved stretch of road with ocean on either side. In rough conditions, you may as well turn your car around because you’ll never make it through the floods and natural potholes. If your lucky enough to get through, it’s another world on the other side. Electricity here runs on a generator and shuts down around 8:00pm leaving the sky crystal clear. I’ll share some follow up photos of Punta Allen but this one was just too good to pass up.
Over 15 years ago we visited this cenote named Ik Kil. It can be found near the famous Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza. If you have ever driven any long stretch of road in the Yucatan you should be familiar with cenotes as you can see signs for them all over the place. Sometimes you’ll see handmade signs on the side of road. If you dare follow them, it’s likely you’ll find yourself in someone’s private backyard where the ground gave way and a cenote was discovered. Over the years we have stumbled upon many amazing cenotes this way. The cenote in this photo, Ik Kil, reaches a depth of 130 feet and was once used for Mayan sacrifices and rituals. When it was first discovered, archaeologists found ancient jewelry and bone remains at the bottom. Would you swim in it?
Here is a peek around the corner of Calle 57 in Campeche, Mexico. Because it’s not the easiest place to get to, Campeche doesn’t fall on the typical tourist route of the Yucatan Peninsula. There are more Volkswagen beetles here than tourists. You’ll quickly fall in love with its relaxing vibe and welcoming residents. We have spent many blistering summers sweating into the cracks of these Cobblestone streets, walking up and down the “malecon” eating “machacados,” shooting off homemade firecrackers and generally just getting up to no good with our cousins. Maybe some good😉. Interestingly, before being colonised by the Spanish in 1540, a Mayan city existed here called “Can Pech” (hence the city’s current name).
The great Mayan ruins of Coba. We thought “Coba” was a fitting name for our cool-colored hammock since these ruins sit on the Caribbean coast catching the cool ocean breeze. Coba was first settled in 50BC. WOAH! That’s a long time ago. Most unique to these ruins is the largest network of stone causeways of the known Mayan world. These are elevated stone roads that radiate out to different smaller sites, some as far as 100 kilometres. These roads are geometrically almost perfectly straight and it is unknown how they were able to achieve this. In the Mayan language the pathways are called “sacbeob.”
