If there are white caps in your toilet... 4

On the second morning this is what greeted us. Hubby Guy (the only one up that early) caught some gorgeous pictures of sunrise. He knows that I love it when you can see sunbeams (Tyndall effect) so he took pictures whilst saying to me "If you'll drag yourself out of the bed you could see this beautiful sunrise." I vaguely remember him suggesting I should get up but I rolled back over and chose to enjoy the beautiful photos instead of the real thing.

Our first stop in a port was Costa Maya, Mexico. It was the first time I got to see the really pretty turquoise water. The pier there is really, really long (like 1/4 mile or 1/2 mile). It was really fun to watch all that happens to dock the ship. We watched from our bubble (of course). Here is a picture of the ship from standing in front of the orange building. As you can see, there was another ship there that day too. We got the inside parking spot.
Costa Maya was where we went to see the Mayan ruins. (The one the shore excursion guy recommended). The Yucatan Peninsula is eat up with Mayan ruins. There were ruins available to see at every port. We wanted to see the best option. We were impressed. We took LOTS of pictures. I'll post the highlights. The Kohunlich ruins are ruins of an entire Mayan city. We've seen ruins out west and they are generally just of a dwelling or a couple of dwellings. This was a city and we didn't even see all of it because we didn't have time on account of how long it took to ride inland on the bus (2 hours in and 2 hours back). We had to be back on the ship by a certain time. Anyway..

When we first got off the bus we encountered two dogs at the little potty stop place. One of them was just too cute. I started talking to her. I was eating the sack lunch that was provided so she was pretty interested in anything I had to say. I didn't give her anything to eat because I didn't know if the people there were keen on that. Well... Hubby Guy when he saw how cute she was went ahead and gave her most of his sandwich and some of his banana. Suffice it to say we made friends. She became our tour guide. She went wherever we went. We called her "Tour Dog" (original... I know). Anyway, here's a picture of the two of us.

This was the first building we saw. I forgot the name of it but the stairs were impressive. When you get to the top it opens up into several rooms.


At the top of the stairs you can see a door. As I went to walk through the door I saw this. There were very pretty plants and flowers all around.


Across the grassy lawn from that building was a building called the king's castle. I couldn't help but take a picture of "the king" sitting on his castle.


After a couple more buildings we walked up a big hill to visit the temple of the sun god. There were several huge carvings of faces. A couple of them were still colored with the original stain the Mayans used all those many years ago. After seeing several buildings I was amazed at how solid the construction was. I was curious what they used to stick the rocks together. Just before we got to the temple our tour guide (the guy, not the dog) stopped to show us a tree. It turns out they still harvest those trees from that area. They are the tree Chiclets gum is made from. Back in Mayan days they would mix the sap with rocks to use as cement to build with.



After the temple of the sun god we walked a bit through a bit of a jungle. There were all kinds of pretty plants along the way. Here's a hybiscus I was taken with. I took his picture from several angles but I like this one the best.


The last picture I have is of our real tour guide. His name is Manuel. He was AWESOME. He was very knowledgeable about the Mayan people. He is a proud descendant and that made him all the more believable. He was also very kind and funny. Here's a picture of him showing us some of his artwork. He is an artist on the side. He had several really cool paintings of Mayan stuff. If he had been selling his paintings I definitely would have bought one. He brought them just to show us though.


We got back to the ship in just enough time. By the time we set sail it was already dark. That night we took in a stage show in the main theater. We wandered around the ship for a little while and called it a night. And that was day 3.