Are We Under Water Yet?

Ugh. I am soaking wet, tired, and grumpy this morning. I am so sick of the rain! It just seems to pour and pour with no end in sight and seemingly no place to go. So much flooding here, I just can’t believe the shear volume of water in this country at the moment. I’ve been logging on to the National Hurricane Center’s website religiously hoping to see the gigantic cloud move away from the Yucatan, but no such luck every single day.

This morning we woke up to load thunderstorms and the sound of large volumes of water hitting the ground. Doesn’t exactly make you want to get out of bed! Today we are at a park called Xcaret. One of the rules of this park is that they expect students to come professionally dressed. Not a big deal, except when it’s pouring rain out, a skirt or pants aren’t really the most ideal clothes to be wearing. So yay for that. We loaded the buses for the park and drove the quick trip down the road. Unlike Dolphin Discovery where we were a very short walk to the classroom on arrival, we were dropped at the very entrance to the park and then had to walk about half a mile to our site. I’m just feeling super whiney and grumpy right now. I’m soaking wet, tired, and not feeling 100% which just doesn’t make me a happy camper. I’ve sat in lectures for 3 days straight now with the only “fun” activity being our manatee swim (which was amazing for sure! I’m just ready for the next fun thing to tide me over). Our schedule has been vastly altered because of the weather so I really expect the second half of our trip to be great, we just have to get through the monsoon at the moment.

Yesterday was 50% lectures and 50% free. We did marine mammal pathology for 4.5 hours yesterday (professor just kind of went on and on haha). After we finished for the day, a couple of us headed off to schedule some dives for Sunday. Right now we’re scheduled for a 2 tank afternoon dive and a night dive! Fingers crossed for the most beautiful weather the Yucatan has to offer that day. A couple of people wanted to go see some of the Mayan ruins so we began to explore our options. We split into 2 groups to allow some of us to get lunch. The plan was to catch a bus to Tulum to explore for a few hours. We ate our lunch, bought our tickets, and hopped on a bus to Tulum none the wiser. As it turns out, the bus to Tulum goes to the city of Tulum, not the ruins. 1^st oops. A bit confused, we stumbled outside to find a taxi to actually get to the ruins. The first guy my friend talked to said “it’s closed!” when she asked about a ride. Thinking he said “It’s close,” she say’s “great! Can you take us?” He gave us a very confused look and kind of just pointed at his buddy and walked away. Repeat the same conversation, but this time we figured out that he said “closed” and not “close.” Bummer. So now we found ourselves in the city of Tulum, in the rain, with no ruins. We decided to walk around a little bit before catching a bus back to Playa. Coming to Tulum, our bus ticket price was $38 pesos (about $3.80 US). Funny thing – to return to Playa? $66 pesos! No clue why the return trip was twice as expensive – we were pretty thrilled about spending $11 US to visit nothing in the rain for 3 hours! It does make for a pretty funny story at least, but I think we’re done with being spontaneous in Mexico! Lesson learned haha. The one awesome thing that came out of the trip was that we learned that McDonalds sells ice cream cones for $8-10 pesos which made us pretty happy!

Hopefully the rain lets up soon because I am really in desperate need for some sunshine! I really want to be able to maximize this trip after spending so much money too. Today is supposed to be the worst an final day of the rain, but I just can’t get myself to believe that. We’ll see come tomorrow. The main thing would be gorgeous weather for our whale shark snorkeling trip and diving day, but I’d like some better weather so that we can actually do the hands on stuff associated with our trip because the rain has been the main cause of the high volume of lecture hours at this point.

Rain, rain go away, and don’t come back until at least June 14^th!