Mexico Itinerary.

We're set to go!  Itinerary finalized and air plane tickets bought!

My brother and I will be doing the full trip - a combination of several tours cobbled together and independent travel. I like to mix and match things up. We do the tour where it makes sense and whenever possible, we travel on our own.

My friend and former colleague Ayşe ("ai-yee-sha) will be joining us on the Puebla to Chichén-Itzá leg after which we will continue on to Tulum and she will head to Cancun to spend the night before catching the plane back to DC.  It will be her first trip to Mexico and she's very excited about going! 

I still have to finalize the tour arrangements for Ayşe which should be taken care of next week.

Cenote.

Millenia ago, the Yucatán Peninsula was originally under the ocean.

Through a combination of geological events and climate changes, the foundation of the Yucatán evolved into is a porous limestone shelf of fossilized coral.

One of the unique geological facts about the Yucatán is there are no above ground rives; the rivers are underground.

All of the ground water sinks through the porous limestone and travels to the sea in these underground rivers.

Quetzalcoatl.

Painting by Dan Staten

Quetzalcoatl (ket-sahl-koh-aht-l) was one of the major deities of Mesoamerican mythology.
The name Quetzalcoatl means "Feathered Serpent". The name is a concatenation of the words quetzal which is a magnificent green-plumed  bird, symbolizing the heavens and the wind, and coatl which is the snake, symbolizing the earth and fertility. Quetzalcoatl's name can also be translated as "precious twin," and in some myths, he had a twin brother named Xolotl, who had a human body and the head of a dog or of an ocelot, a spotted wildcat. No, they were not the most handsome of twins :-)

Taxco.

A beautiful colonial city built on the slopes of a mountain of the "Sierra Madre" of Guerrero, the official name of the city is Taxco de Alarcon in honor of the playwright Juan Ruiz de Alarcon born in Taxco in the year 1581. I've just always known it as Taxco - the place in Mexico that you go to if you want to buy silver.

Historically, and presently, the majority of silver has been discovered at the Mexican Silver Belt, called La Faja de Plata. This belt, which extends for approximately 800 kilometers along the Sierra Madre Occidental Mountains, is easily the world’s most productive silver district.  Situated in this area, Taxco has been a mining town going back to the times of the Aztecs.  To them, the region was known as Tlacho meaning the "place of the ballgame".