ScotBlogs

MITZPE RAMON, ISRAEL–I’ve always enjoyed seeing the Ora Formation, which is exposed only in Makhtesh Ramon and to the south. It is early Late Turonian in age, so it is part of the Upper Cretaceous and about 90 million years … Continue reading →

We had an amazing trip through a variety of wetland habitats and ancient Maya ruins in the biosphere of Sian Ka’an. It was expensive and hard to get to, but well worth the trip in so many ways. Our tour … Continue reading →

In a very interesting comparative experience to our time at Kilometer 50 Café in the little town of Jose Maria Morelos, in the much larger, beachside, entirely tourist-oriented city of Tulum we stumbled upon something we did not expect to … Continue reading →

In our reading of Wearing, Stevenson and Young’s chapter “Encountering the Other”  from Tourist Cultures:  Identity, Place and the Traveller (Sage, 2010), the authors remind us that “in developing nations the indigenous inhabitants are often used as servants by the … Continue reading →

Tulum is the only archaeological site that I have visited where tourists walk around with bare feet.  Here the beach is part of the archaeological zone; a swim is part of the tour.

An interpretive text from Tulum, the most heavily trafficked archaeological site that we visited, invites the tourist to imagine the first encounter between the Spanish and the ancient inhabitants of Tulum from two different perspectives.  This encounter, it tells us, … Continue reading →

You would be hard pressed to find any history of the Yucatan Peninsula in which the relations between the indigenous Mayan population and the Hispanic conquistadores would be described as anything other than fractious and violent.  Certainly to call it … Continue reading →

Leaving Uxmal we discovered a restaurant that surely relied upon the tour buses that visit Uxmal. In fact, two pulled in after (thank goodness!) we had already ordered. Most of the [other] tourists were Russian.  The bus driver (fluent in … Continue reading →