This incoming weekend is brought to you by a Maine kitty with two different-colored eyes:
…and a Maine lobster doing a headstand:
Don’t worry, he got a beer for his efforts:
Oops, or maybe not…
Spoiler alert: they all got eaten.
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I never shared what we brought home from Playa del Carmen! We have kind of a Dia de los Muertos thing happening in our bookshelves. We both love Mexican folk art, and my birthday falls on the first of the two days of celebration. Shopping for folk art in Mexico as a Texas resident feels a little strange, since we can easily find much of this stuff practically in our own backyard, but Mark and I did come across a couple things that called out to us. And with these latest additions, I think we are reaching official theme status!
And the rear view:
The wooden one came from a random store along the stretch of shops where they kept trying to sell Mark marijuana. We spied a cart full of the ceramic ones on one of the first nights and I enquired, in Spanish, as to the price. I understood about 10% of the response, just enough to determine that we would buy one another night when we weren’t headed to a bar. Mark and I quietly discussed getting it home safely on the plane, and I don’t know whether the woman had understood us, but she picked one up by the eye sockets and began banging it on another to show us how strong they are. Okay then! We told her we’d be back otra noche, which she seemed to take as a haggling tactic, so Mark told her we had to beber. She smiled and we parted ways. We went back on our last night and picked one out. Choosing a color was the hard part! I have a feeling we might bring home another if we go back… Chac who?
Our last dive day was a trip to two of the Yucatan’s many cenotes, caverns filled with fresh water. You don’t have to be a certified cave diver to dive these (and thank goodness, because cave diving terrifies me and I don’t see that certification in my future), but you do have to go with one. First he reassures you that, because cavern diving requires you to stay within visual distance of surface light, he will be able to get you to the surface in seconds if necessary. Phew! Then he gives you the lecture about how you had better not touch a single thing inside the cenote, including the guide rope that you will be following, because everything (with the exception of the rope) took thousands of years to form and will never regrow now that it’s full of water. Hope you’re feeling good about your buoyancy control! We went into Kukulkan (the easier of the two) first, so we could get a feel for things and so he could make sure we weren’t idiots. Down at a certain depth there is a halocline, where all that crystal-clear fresh water sits on top of salt water. When you swim through that layer and it mixes, everything looks very blurry (freaky if you weren’t expecting it; still slightly freaky if you were). It got kicked up in front of me and when we came up from that dive, I said, “Hey, what was that sign that said ‘stop’ and had the grim reaper on it?” The instructor said, “Oh, yeah, I don’t tell people about that.”  click for source page It says that more than 300 people have died while diving in caves, including instructors. In case you get down there and realize your Spanish is rusty, this conveys a similar message in a more rudimentary way (the haziness is the halocline, only slightly stirred up here):  click for source page But it’s not all death and stuff. Once you get comfortable, the views are absolutely amazing (I have had to steal other people’s photos for this post because I wanted to stay focused on surviving the experience and not touching anything):  click to see a few more incredible cenote photos by the same photographer If you are a diver and you find yourself in the Yucatan, you have to try this (shout-out to the dive shop we used — loved them!). You won’t have this experience anywhere else in the world. We are looking at going back to Playa someday to do our advanced open water certification, since diving the cenotes counts as a peak performance buoyancy dive. Speaking of buoyancy, the cenotes are an awesome confidence-builder for that. I surprised myself with how well I did — even though I became horribly anxious when we temporarily surfaced in the air dome in Chac Mool, inflated our BCDs, and I knew I would have to redo my buoyancy just in time to swim back through enormous, irreplaceable stalactites. And no, I didn’t touch anything. :) Hey, I learned a trick!
I figured out how to get all that blue out of my photos! I went back and did it for the last crop, but I’m not going to sub them into that post unless someone really cares. I will assume you do not. :) (BTW, those are french angelfish, another species with an interesting juvenile phase.) Yellow stingray: The dive that tonight’s entire batch of photos comes from was a carpet reef called ‘Tortugas,’ known for these giant turtles (the little yellow wrasses are probably 4-6″), of which we only saw a couple. I only photographed one, which is why you’re getting turtle butt: Big ol’ delicious-looking mystery fish, at least 2.5′ and 60 lbs or more. Mark was pretending to spear him and his friends as we drifted by:
Pair of triggerfish. Triggerfish are neat because they don’t look like much but they are one of the few fish you can buy to take on a mantis shrimp, which will otherwise happily eat everything in your saltwater aquarium:
This was a drift dive, so the boat captain was supposed to watch for our inflatable marker to surface and motor over while we did our safety stop, but when we surfaced he was nowhere to be seen and we had to wait for 15 minutes. I got so seasick bobbing around in the 4-5′ waves that once we got into the boat I couldn’t even put my fins back on to do the next dive. Boo. That’s the last time I skip my motion sickness patch. I have been on plenty of boats without getting sick, but I started wearing the patch just in case and now apparently I need it! Snaps from our first two dives. You see pretty much the same fish all over the Caribbean, and I’ve been there enough times now that I no longer come back with several hundred reef shots, but I have to take some! My camera tags along on every dive because you never know when you’re going to see something special. I use an underwater housing for my little Canon point & shoot, and it does well enough, but (Dear Santa,) what I’d really like is a nice Sea & Sea setup (and a trip to Thailand). Just sayin’. :) I like this shot because it looks to me like the puffer on the left, the parrotfish in the middle, and the blue tang on the right are laughing:
Some little highhats, and our divemaster reaching for the arrow crab that was my photo of the day:
My favorite frogman:
Grunts schooling under a ledge:
Grunt close-up:
Follow the jump for a few more! Just some snaps from around Playa! This is before our last dinner. I wasn’t feeling well, but the food was great:
A delicious meat restaurant that we tried on a whim and loved: Playa is the place to shop for all your luchador needs:
Making friends:
A neat sign:
I really liked the street signs along 5 Av, which had bright sculptures like birds and fish:
Next post, we’ll get into the water!
I’m home!
We spent the last week in Playa del Carmen with Mark’s side of the family. It was a lively week and the pluses far exceeded the minuses, though I am pretty sure Mexico tried to kill all of us at various points throughout the week. She was smart enough not to try too hard, however, because she knows we are suckers who will probably be back. I have to go recover now; stand by for photos. In the meantime, I’ve got my 365 stream updated for the last week and I’ve expanded the sidebar preview to six photos. Enjoy!
(Unrelated blog note: Today I received the replacement for the earrings that originally arrived missing pieces! Customer service was awesome, as expected. You can see them in my photo of the day!) There is a large pecan tree on the farm that gets a lot of attention during its leafless, winter months. When we were there in May, a severe thunderstorm (with so much hail that it piled up alongside the road!) broke a huge branch off of it. Fortunately the tree seems to be still thriving. I spent a while sitting beneath that tree with my biggest lens and my teleconverter, spying on the woodpeckers that were hanging off the branches at various angles as they tried to get at the pecans. Maybe a woodpecker is a woodpecker is a woodpecker, but I took so darned many pictures that I have to dump a bunch of them here or my time will have been wasted. Also, it will make me feel better about the fact that a bee crawled up my shirt and stung me.
More after the jump, including one bird that is not a woodpecker and a photo that makes me laugh! See if you can guess which is which. Continue reading Winter farm birds We’ve made it around the sun once more! I’m looking forward to seeing what 2011 brings. This year I’ve decided to attempt the ever-popular photo-a-day challenge, so you’ll see my latest results in the right sidebar. Hopefully this will also give me some daily practice using some new photo tools. I have a new Wacom tablet so I can fine-tune my editing skills, and I am likely having to switch software to use it. I used Photoshop for years, but the version I had stopped working a few years ago so I switched to GIMP. I have liked GIMP a lot, but I haven’t figured out how to make the tablet work with it, so I am trying to migrate myself back to Photoshop via the version that was included. As I mentioned in my last post, we spent a few of the last days of 2010 at our favorite Hill Country farm. The first full day was rainy so we just stayed indoors or on the screened porch, reading and snacking. The next day started grey but dry, so we pounced on the opportunity to walk the property and eventually it cleared up into a nice day. The goats were happy to see us, in their own odd way. Goats are a little like cats, in that they want your attention badly, but will act completely indifferent almost as soon as you grant it.
There were a couple kids so young that they still had bits of umbilical cord hanging from their bellies. They are adorable to watch, playing and leaping around, but if you get too close they will run off to find their mothers, crying pitifully all the way. I couldn’t get closer than about 10′.
The animal that was probably the happiest to see us was the donkey who was corralled away from all of the other animals. From talking to one of the caretakers, we learned that this donkey killed a goat and is being secluded until one of the other animals gives birth. Usually the donkeys are just marginally interested in us until they determine that we don’t have any good snacks, but twice this donkey actually RAN toward us for attention (until the caretaker dropped off some fresh hay, and then we were old news). I have to admit I felt a little sad that he seemed so lonely.
The one animal that could not have cared less about our presence was this malcontent cow who spent all day, every day mooing and chasing her two donkey pen-mates out of whichever area she currently deemed hers. I tried to touch her because she looked really soft, but she wanted nothing to do with us.
I’ll put the rest of this post behind a jump because I’m only about half done! Continue reading Happy 2011! Just got back today from some of this:
And a lot of this:
A good way to close out the year. Highlights from this trip to come. Have a safe and happy New Year’s Eve! |
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