Jam-packed day

The famous arch that is seen in all tourist books about the ruins of Labna. The arquitecture is phenomenal! Why don't we have more arches in the US???

The pyramid where the temple and official offices were probably at. As you can tell, it hasn't been competely exposed because there are tons of rocks and grass under the upper-exposed part. I also took a picture in front of it so you could get an idea of how big it was!

The Sorcerer's Pyramid. I seriously don't remember what its official name is, but its Magician or Sorcerer something...! Sorry! This building looks huge while standing in front of it, but its even larger when you see it in the distance, just like in the picture below it. There are archaeologists working on this ruin trying to repair lost stones. This ruin is not able to be climbed either. However, I don't think I could have mustered up courage to climb it for how steep it was!

That is the Sorcerer's pyramid far in the distance. I hope that helps you understand how massive it is! It is absolutely beautiful! I'm excited to take Mom, Dad, and Neal to this site!

Thanks to our tour guide, (who called me angelita, which means "little angel"..haha..) he got a picture of me coming down the pyramid we were able to climb up and down on. It was very large and I of course was hanging onto over step because it was very steep! Zach, who is to the right of me in the picture just started running down the steps and I yelled at him to stop because it was freaking me out, but of course he is a guy and didn't listen! =)

On Friday our group went on an excursion to three different places. We went to the caves of Loltun, a mayan site called Labna, and Uxmal which is another archaeological site full of buildings with mayan arquitecture.

We spent a couple hours at Loltun because the cave tour took a little over an hour. It was such an amazing experience to be in deep, dark caves, but luckily they have proofed it for tourists so there are lights all through it. Our tour guide said that when people were first discovering the caves with torches, they would never come back out because they would never be able to find their way out, and I can understand why. The part that struck me the most was that when they were putting money into making the caves accessible to tourists was that they found a skeleton of an infant. But luckily, it wasn't there. It is now in an archaeological museum. We even got some pet therapy throughout the whole tour because the tour guide's dog decided to come along. She was sooo cute and she looked like the first dog I had.

After the cave tour we moved onto the mayan site of Labna where we were able to understand the difference between developed and un-developed Mayan sites. Labna is definitely an un-developed site because archaeologists ran out of money when they were exposing the buildings and ruins so there are a couple buildings that are sort of exposed and not fully exposed because there are still tons of rocks and grass all over them. There are mounds that look like little hills, but really there are buildings underneath them.

After Labna, we went to Uxmal and got to climb a big pyramid (I got over my fear of heights once again!). Uxmal is absolutely beautiful and very developed even though some of the buildings have not been exposed yet. There are archaeologists still working at the site repairing missing stones on some of the ruins. The site is absolutely huge, but definitely worth all the walking, climbing stairs, and sweating!! Luckily, there was a pool and restaurant just outside of the ruins, so we were able to fill our tummy's and cool off for a bit. Uxmal is just under 1 hour from Merida, so we all took a short nap in the van and had a relaxing night since we were all VERY worn out from the day.