Tulum

This is on the back side of the main temple looking out to the ocean.

On Monday, December 29th we went on a tour.   We went to three different sights that day.  Our day started at 7 am and we didn't get home until almost 8 pm.   Our first stop was the ruins of Tulum, from there we went to the ruins of Cobe and had an authentic Mayan lunch, which was delicious.  Our final stop was to the Cenote called Tankach-Ha.  We booked our tour with Alma's LDS tours.  It was a lot of fun to walk through the ruins and read passages in the Book of Mormon....talk about making the scriptures come to life!!  It was an excellent tour and I would highly recommend Alma's LDS tours, and they do non LDS tours as well.  They are a smaller company so your tour group isn't very large.  I liked that.

I'm just going to do Tulum today and save Cobe and Tankach-Ha for other posts.  While we were at Tulum, we ran into one of Nathan's cousins.  We knew her and her husband were going to be down in that area the same time we were and we wondered if we would run into them.....sure enough we did.  And moments after running into Nathan's cousin, our tour guide ran into his nephew who was doing a tour as well.   Alma's LDS tours is a family run buisness.

There was Nathan, me, meow-meow and a family of seven in our group.  The other family was from Price, Utah.  Our tour guide's name was Arnie.

Arnie.

Riding the train into Tulum.

Map of Tulum.

This is part of the wall that surrounded the inner courtyard of Tulum.  Only the elite class could live on the inside of the wall and have an education.  Everyone else lived out in the jungle and were not allowed any form of education. That is an original passageway into the city.

The city of Tulum is set on a cliff over the ocean.  It was a very impressive sight to see. We went from dense jungle to this as we came near the cliff and the ocean.

This is another entrance to the city and the one we went through.

Nathan and meow-meow.

The cliffs of insanity......  

This is the passageway we had to go through to get to the city.

Our first Mayan ruins for the day.

That boxy building on the hill is an ingenious building.  It's set so that when strong wind comes up, it goes in the door.  Then there is a little smoke stack on the top that would channel the wind up and make a siren sound.  The Mayan's used this as a hurricane warning system.   And apparently it still works.

More ruins.

The ancient Mayan city of Tulum.

More of Tulum.

More ruins.

And more ruins.

Someone's home.

There were tons of Iguana's.

That big building off in the distance is the main temple.

This was the temple for their Goddess.

This looks like a monkey but it's not.  It is some kind of mammal.

This is the backside of the main temple.

View of the hurricane warning building from the back of the main temple.

And this was the exit, a small narrow passageway.  

Tulum was fascinating.  We learned that the ancient Mayan's studied the skies very closely.  We learned that they knew the world was round and not flat (which is also in the Book of Mormon).  They knew the cycles of the sun, moon, and stars and that the Mayan calendar is based off of those movements.  We also learned that they liked to do human sacrifices.  We learned that these people knew of a white bearded God that descended down and promised to return. You could see symbols of this "descending God" as they called it everywhere.  Being an LDS tour, our tour was centered around the Book of Mormon and it's teachings. after Jesus was crucified and resurrected, he came to the America's to teach the Nephites.  Jesus ended the sacrifice of animals and the sacrifice was symbolically a broken heart and a contrite spirit.  When Cortez landed, Montezuma and his people thought he was the bearded white God.  They then had sacrifices to appease him.  Montezuma took his obsidian blade and cut out the heart of the victim and while it was still beating, he cut it (broken heart) and ate of it.  Then they cut off the head and ate the flesh around the neck (contrite spirit).  Cortez, of course saw them as barbarians and cannibals.  Montezuma and his people who, over the hundreds of years after Jesus came, corrupted his teachings and took the broken heart and contrite spirit to mean a literal thing.  They saw it as offering their God a broken heart and a contrite spirit.  It was quite the learning experience.  I realize that there are many other theories, stories, and ideas about the Mayan people and their practices, but it was really neat to learn about it in a manner that correlates with my religion.