Looking at the calendar, I can see it's been about almost a month since the coronavirus pandemic started directly affecting Germany and I suddenly found myself having to stay home from work. This has of course given me a lot more time for reflecting on past journeys and blogging about them, as my recent flurry of posts about Canada may have indicated.

Now that I'm done reliving my Canadian experiences, I'm now turning to the other country that borders the US, Mexico, which I think is an overlooked and misunderstood travel destination. Too many people on my side of the border think the whole country is ruled by drug cartels. While that may be true of most of the border states, much of the rest of the country is a world away from that. I first visited there during the first week of October 2015 by way of an equally, I believe, misunderstood means.

I really think cruising is underappreciated way of seeing the world. Sure, countless people ride on cruise ships every year, but how many of them take the time to step off the ship and see the country they've docked in? When I first discovered that there was more to cruising than just lying on exotic beaches, I thought at first that this was just another case of me not knowing what was going on while everyone else did, but more recently I've heard (I don't remember where) that cruise ships don't help port towns' economies because the passengers don't spend enough money there.

Take a cruise. Step off the ship. Do one of the shore excursions, explore the town away from the cruise port, spend your money in the local economy. You'll be glad you did. Assuming cruising is still a thing after the corona crisis, of course...

Monday

This trip had not been my idea; one of my friends in San Antonio wanted to get some people together to a relatively cheap cruise that would be stopping by Progreso, which I'd never heard of before, and Cozumel, which I had heard of but knew little about. At that point I was still thinking this was going to be a week of drinking and lounging on the ship and on the beach, and maybe bar hopping in the port towns. Not that I had a problem with that, of course. The ship we would be on was called Carnival Triumph, which sounded familiar for some reason. It was only $250 to share an interior (i.e. no window) double room on a lower deck. Of course, that's just the room, not including stuff like shore excursions and the onboard bar tabs we inevitably ran up.

There were four of us going. It took over three hours to get from San Antonio to Galveston. After parking in a huge lot and a lengthy process of checking in, handing over our bags to porters, and waiting in line to board the ship, the Triumph finally pulled out of the dock at around 4 pm.

Tuesday

This was a "fun day at sea." I don't think too many people are aware of how slow ships move. You know how when you're driving your car and you have to slow down in a School Zone? You may feel like you're barely inching your way down the street but that's like pedal-to-the-metal for any oceangoing ship. We departed Galveston Monday afternoon and were not due in Progreso until Wednesday morning.

I don't want to dwell too much on what happened aboard ship; after all, I'm here to write about and you're here to read about Mexico. All I'll say about Tuesday was that I went to a presentation that morning about all the possible shore excursions I could do. It was here that I realized there was more to cruising than I initially thought. There was a *huge* range of things to be done and sights to see at our destinations. For Wednesday's stop in Progreso, my mind was immediately made up as soon as they mentioned I could tour the ruins of Chichén Itzá, probably the most famous ancient Mayan city.

If memory serves (and it often doesn't) other options included tours of the Mayan ruins at Uxmal and various activities in the city of Mérida, capital of Yucatán state, one of which was, I think, a tequila tasting. I met some fellow travelers later in the cruise who had gone to Mérida and liked it, something I remembered a couple years later when I planned a trip there.

Wednesday

In the morning after the ship docked in Progreso, I disembarked from the Triumph and went through the procedure that was standard for anyone doing a shore excursion. Every excursion group meets at one spot or another in the cruise port, and you can find your group because one of the organizers will be standing there holding a sign with the excursion's name on it ("Chichén Itzá" in this case). Everyone doing this tour met by that person with that sign, who at the departure time led us to a bus that spent over two hours taking us to the ruins.

On the way we passed through Mérida, about a half hour by highway away from Progreso.

At this time I didn't know I'd be spending a few days here in a little over two years.

After two hours on the road, we stopped at a souvenir shop near our destination.

I bought a T-shirt here. It has the image of one of the Mayan's gods on it, and the shirt has made appearances at Cinco de Mayo pub crawls in subsequent years. I also got some Habanero pepper sauce as well as a wood-carved Mayan calendar round, not unlike what you see on either side of this picture, which just happens to be hanging on the wall in front of me as I type this.

After a short time at the shop, the bus finally took us to what are probably the most famous ruins in North America.

This ancient temple dedicated to the god Kukulkán is called El Castillo, Spanish for "The Castle." You can see there are four massive flights of stairs, one on each side. Each has exactly 91 steps, so put together, they have 364, with the top deck being the 365th--one for each day of the year. Tourists aren't allowed to climb the steps.

The Temple of the Warriors. On top of the structure, between the two pillars, there is a statue of a rain god, Chac Mool, and our tour guide showed us a picture of how at dawn on the equinoxes, the sun seems to rise right between the pillars and rest on the Chac Mool for a moment. The ancient Mayans really knew their stuff about astronomy, one of many things their conquerors failed to appreciate.

And now here's the Ball Court. The game was not unlike basketball, but the court was almost as big as a soccer field. On the two sides you can see the goals, stone rings. We're not sure exactly how the game was played but it seems the ball was a hard rubber ball about the size of a basketball, and the players couldn't use their hands or feet, only their elbows, hips, and knees. Our guide explained how, after a number of beheaded male skeletons were dug up in an underground river beneath the ruins in the 1960s, many historians have speculated that the ancient Mayans may have sacrificed the winners of the ball games, or at the very least maybe the captains of the winning teams. This was considered a great honor because in their religion, hardly anyone could get into the Mayan version of heaven after death, but being a sacrificial victim meant having a guaranteed place there.

This is the Sacred Cenote. A cenote, something that is very common all over the Yucatán Peninsula, is a sinkhole that opens up above an underground river. Mayans used to conduct human sacrifices in this one.

I'm putting this trilingual sign in here since it demonstrates how the Mayan language is still in use today. Our guides told us that there are still people, like some of their grandparents, who only speak Mayan and don't know Spanish. The language is also a required subject at public schools in these parts.

Not pictured: the coffee shop where I got a delicious cup of coffee and a bag of grounds to take home.

Thursday

There were a number of options for shore excursions in Cozumel. Some of them were on the island of Cozumel itself, while others were on the mainland in and around the town Playa del Carmen. I wanted something a little more laid-back and leisurely than yesterday's all-day expedition, so I opted for a half-day excursion that was part ziplining, part snorkeling.

Some of the other excursions available included a massive nature park on the mainland called Xcaret, an adventure park right next to it called Xplor which I heard has awesome ziplining, the Mayan ruins of Tulum, dune buggy driving on Cozumel's beaches, scuba lessons...

I can't remember the name of the ziplining park or the company that organized the excursion I chose, only that it was next to a resort hotel called Club Cozumel Caribe in the northwest of the island. Before doing anything we got to rent GoPro cameras with which we could film anything fun we were doing. The ziplining park wasn't all that big. It consisted of a bunch of towers of varying heights, some of which you climb up on a ladder, some of which you rappel down to the ground, and some of which you move between the tops by way of a shaky foot bridge or by ziplining. In fact, have you ever been to a Main Event? If you haven't, it's basically Dave & Busters with a bowling alley as well as these kinds of walkways and such, above the video games, which you need to be attached to a rope harness to use. The reason I mention the Main Event here is because this "adventure park" reminded me more of that than anything else. It was a fun way to spend part of my morning, though if you've done any seriously thrilling ziplining, like I did recently in the Black Forest, don't expect this to be like that.

After the ziplining was snorkeling in the Caribbean. For this we had waterproof cases to put our GoPros in. You don't even need to know anything about swimming to do this, since they handed out life jackets and flippers. So all this was, was looking under the water and watching the fish, occasionally taking pictures and video. You might think that sounds boring, but it wasn't, not with the dazzling array of colors provided by the fish...

This is only a sampling.

After it was all over, we turned in our life jackets, snorkels, flippers, and GoPros, and they gave us back the memory cards from the GoPros. I and someone else from the cruise I had just met there had a great lunch at Club Cozumel Caribe's restaurant, and then took the bus back to the ship. After that I was free to do whatever.

By then the day was only half over. My shore excursion finished, I changed out of my swimsuit in my room on the Triumph, and then stepped back off to bounce around Cozumel a bit.

Some cruisers just stay on the ship. Others may step off but don't stray further than the beach or the tourist-exclusive cruise port which is lined with hokey souvenir shops and joints like Señor Frog's where everything is priced in US dollars. I walked past all of that because I wanted to see Cozumel for real.

Pictured: a tourist-exclusive cruise port where everything is priced in US dollars.

Pictured: Cozumel for real. See the tricked-out VW Beetle? Those classic Beetles are a big deal in Mexico's car culture. Spend enough time in this country and you will see plenty of Beetles that have been modded, customized, and pimped out in various ways.

If you look closely you can see a pharmacy in this picture. There are drug stores all over Mexico which sell over-the-counter drugs which one would need a prescription for in the US. Naturally, Americans often drop into places like this to buy stuff like percoset.

Yes, I stopped at a supermarket, because I feel like anything you might buy at a place like this will be more authentic than anything from a tourist-oriented place. I bought some coffee. Remember, those prices are all in pesos, with one peso being worth about 5¢ in the US.

The last thing I have to say about the Yucatán Peninsula is that the weather at both ports was HOT. Imagine the oppressive heat of summer in San Antonio, combined with the stifling humidity of Florida, and you'll have a good idea of the weather I experienced. And that was October; I can't imagine how bad it must be in July or August. After walking back to the ship I was soaked in sweat.

And so ended my first taste of Mexico as the Triumph pulled away from Cozumel on Thursday evening. There was still more cruise left, of course; Friday was another "fun day at sea," which allowed me to catch up on the drinking and lounging other people were doing on the port call days, and then we docked in Galveston Saturday morning.

This trip definitely opened a lot of possibilities for future travel. Not only did it make me want to visit Mexico again, but it also made me want to take more cruises. I have since done both of these things, though only to the same general area as this trip, as we'll soon see. If cruise ships are sailing again in the post-pandemic world, I'll certainly be exploring more of Central America and the Caribbean this way.