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The Wilkinson School: Trip report by Fizzy
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| Getting there ~ Tulum ~ Chichen Itza ~ Celestun ~ Uxmal and more ~ Uxmal ~ Akil ~ Trip report by Fizzy ~ Glyphs by Crystal & Mariel ~ | | | The Yucatan 2003, Trip report by Fizzy: 27 April 2003 |
Intensive Studies Week
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| by Fizzy |
4/27/2003 |
My Mom and I spent Intensive Studies Week studying the Mayans of Mexico. There were some activities that we really enjoyed and some we did not enjoy. Our guide, Victor, was very nice. He helped us all week. Victor took us to many places and pointed out many interesting things.
The parts of the trip that were not as fun were:
- I got homesick.
- It was very hot!
- We drove around a LOT in a bus.
- We even had homework to do. We had to answer a hundred questions and a journal page to write each day.
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We saw and walked though many Mayan villages. A couple of them had pyramids. We got to climb a pyramid in Chichen Itza and one in Uxmal. I climbed halfway up the pyramid at Chichen Itza before I looked down, got terrified and went back down. At Uxmal I went all the way up! (There was a dead tarantula with ants all over it there.) Once again, I looked down and that scared me, so my teacher Mr. Woo walked down right next to me.
In Mexico, my Mom and I visited lots of little shops full of neat stuff.
I especially liked the flutes, the hammocks, the armadillos, the jewelry, and the shells.
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I bought a Mayan flute with colored string hanging down and a one-person and a four-person hammock. The one-person hammock is hanging from our bottom deck. My Mom and I also bought three armadillos made of rock and one made of wood. I bought shells for my Dad and my friends Stevnae, India, Laura, Sammy and Mary Jane.
I bought pens with little green clay lizards on them for Lexi, Savannah, Elizabeth and me. I liked the pens because they were hand-made
and the lizards on them look like the iguanas we saw throughout our trip.
My Mom bought a bunch of refrigerator magnets and other things with flamingos on them.
I also bought a whistle from a street vendor and drove my Mom crazy playing it. I could make it sound like a rooster, a crow, a peacock, and a number of other animals.
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While in Mexico we stayed at some really great hotels where some really nice people worked hard for us. All the hotels had fun pools, comfortable rooms and beds, and clean bathrooms and showers. I went swimming almost every night. Each hotel had a variety of geckoes. I liked looking at the geckoes; the boys had gecko hunts. Whenever a boy caught a gecko, I asked if I could help let it go.
In our hotel room at Chichen Itza, we found a giant scary cockroach. My Mom called the front desk and they sent someone to take it away. The cockroach was hiding in the closet when the guy came. The guy went into the closet with a towel and then we heard a loud "Crunch". I felt sorry for the cockroach and I still do. I had hoped the guy would take the cockroach away, not kill it. The next day I learned that other people in our group had cockroaches too.
We went on a lot of long bus rides to get to a lot of places.
Two of the places I liked visiting most were Xel-Ha and Celestun.
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Our guide told us that Xel-Ha means "mixed water". It is on the Caribbean Sea.
We went snorkeling there. It was my first time snorkeling.
I was cold at first, but then I got used to the water.
Now I snorkel all the time in our hot tub. Snorkeling was fun, but it was also scary,
because I saw a giant fish as big as I am. It was bright blue with orange stripes. It
was so big that I was too scared to take a picture of it. Later on, I saw lots of big
schools of little fish. I couldn't get pictures of them either because they moved so fast.
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Celestun was really cool. Everybody in our group was assigned to a motorboat to ride on.
We rode in the boats to see wild flamingos.
Wild flamingos eat shrimp larvae.
The guide caught two of the larvae and showed them to us-they are tiny, about a cm long
and about as wide as a strand of fishing line. The shrimp they eat make flamingos pink.
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We took the motor boats through an estuary, and passed a place called Bird Island.
Bird Island is a place where lots of birds rest safely away from crocodiles. It is safe
for them on Bird Island because the island is surrounded by very salty water and
crocodiles don't like salty water. Some of the birds we saw near Bird Island were
egrets, cormorants, pelicans and others.
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Next, the boat stopped at Ojo de Agua so we could go swimming.
Ojo de Agua means "Eye of the Water". You can see the spring water coming up to the surface. When I first jumped into this deep pool I thought I was going to freeze! But after about 20 seconds, I got used to it.
There was a fuzzy, slimy log in the water. I tried to sit on it twice but slid off both times. The scary part is that we found out after we swam there that the biggest crocodiles hunt at the Ojo de Agua at night.
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| On our last day in Mexico, we went to a village
in which Mayan people still live. (All the other Mayan places we visited were abandoned by the Mayans long ago.) We brought a bag of toys for the kids at the school we visited in Akil. The bag was almost as big as my older sister. The little kids did traditional dances in their traditional outfits for us.
They were cute.
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Mommy brought her I-Zone camera and took pictures of them that she gave them.
Then we went to a high school where they learned to raise animals and crops.
We went to see the cows but they weren't tied up so we had to leave the pasture.
We didn't see any other animals except wild dogs.
The dogs got kicked a lot so they were scared of us.
Then we got to try fresh coconuts from their coconut trees. I didn't like the coconut or the coconut milk! I don't know what American coconuts taste like but I don't think it tastes like the coconut in Akil.
I had to use the bathroom at the high school. The interesting thing about it was that the people don't flush the toilets there the same way that we do. They have a circular faucet that you spin to flush the toilet. Also, they don't keep toilet paper in their bathrooms. We had to bring the toilet paper into the bathroom when we went in.
In conclusion, I had a great time in the Yucatan and I hope I can return.
The End
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