Retrospective: I’ve never been to any part of Mexico other than the Yucatán, but I have to say, I love this culture and these people! Many of the people are Maya—small but mighty! Art, color and music are everywhere, overwhelming the senses. Buildings are painted in what we in the US would consider garish colors: turquoise, rose, salmon pink, mustard yellow and avocado green. Walls are covered in fabulous murals, often quite surrealistic. In the areas we hang out, people walk down the middle of the streets, loud music blares from every doorway, and shopkeepers greet passers-by to entice them into their shops and restaurants. And everyone is smiling and friendly—greeting “Buenos dias!” to all.

Here and back in the States I have met many Mexicans—and a nicer, friendlier, more generous, helpful, family-oriented people you could not find anywhere. I am deeply offended and apologetic by the hostility of the Orange Oligarch to our good neighbors south of the border. These are the kind of people we should welcome into our country with open arms!

We spent most of today lying on the beach. I got a nice Mayan massage and caught up on email and other messages. And completed my journaling of this adventure!

30. Morning at the Ojo del Aqua Hotel and Beach Club

9:30pm

We had our final dinner at a restaurant down the street called El Che Carlitos, which is famous for having “the best empanadas in town!” We tried to go there last night, but it was full. And wow—indeed the best empanadas we’d ever tasted! We had a lovely conversation with the camarera (waitress), who had moved here from Mexico City.

Tomorrow morning we depart the hotel at 5:30am for a half-hour taxi ride to the Cancun Airport, where we’ll board our planes for home!

Concluded in Yucatán Pilgrimage: Final Thoughts

Yesterday (Saturday) was epic! We took a taxi from our hotel to an amazing and unique experience park called “X3NS3S” (Senses), with sensory illusions along an underground “Path of Feeling” in total darkness, a crazy gravity-defying town where a stream of water along the disorienting road appeared to flow uphill, a zip line “bird flight” experience, and a “Xitric Garden.” Changing into bathing suits, we were led through a water toboggan flume, a salty river and a mud river to float along on our backs (followed by a gauntlet of water jets to wash off the mud). A central entry area featured chambers of optical illusions to pose for pics in, including a fun house mirror maze. The whole place looked like it had been designed by Salvador Dali, with many weird and wonderful art constructions to climb on and pose with.

29. Optical illusion seat at X3NS3S (Xenses)

But the most remarkable thing was that the park was constructed in and through a complex of natural caves and cenotes, with limestone ceilings and walls covered with 66 million years’ worth of stalactites, flows and curtains, along the paths and often just a foot above our heads. We walked through water much of the way in the natural caves, and one particularly gorgeous cenote featured a central island with trees and vines reaching up through the opening above. Another had a beautiful waterfall with flamingoes, huge iguanas and vultures in the trees. And all underground!

Unfortunately, since we were in bathing suits and water through all the really photogenic parts, I couldn’t bring my cell phone and camera, so I got no pics to show. The park had cameras set up everywhere, and we did pose for many of them, but at the end, when we tried to select and buy a few especially good ones, they insisted that we had to purchase all of them, for $68! Well, that wasn’t gonna happen, so no pics.

From X3NS3S we took a 35-min. taxi ride to Puerto Moreles, about an hour south of Cancun, where we checked into our favorite hotel, the Ojo del Aqua Hotel and Beach Club.

Continued in Yucatán Pilgrimage: Day 8

Jan. 11, Sunday. 6:00pm

On Friday, 1/9, We took the bus from Valladolid to Cancun (a 2½ hour ride), and then got a taxi for an hour ride to downtown Playa del Carmen, where the balcony of our room in the Unic Hotel overlooked the brightly-lit main party street, replete with performances by Mayan dancers, musicians, acrobats, vendors, and a constant parade of people of every description and apparel.

28. View from the balcony of the Unic Hotel in Playa del Carmen

Continued in Yucatán Pilgrimage: Day 7

Today we’ve hung out in Valladolid, exploring the Chocolate Factory and museum, with many superb life-size dioramas and other displays depicting the fascinating history of the sacred cacao bean and beverage.

After buying some chocolate bars to take home, we visited the Casa de Los Venados (“House of the Deer”), a gorgeous18,000 square foot private residence and folk-art museum filled with over 3,000 colorful Mexican paintings and sculptures, where the owner, John Venator, greeted us personally. Afterwards we returned to our hotel where I am writing this blog.

23. Dining room art in Casa de Los Venados

24. Poker table at Casa de Los Venados

25. John Venator, owner of Casa de Los Venados

10:00pm, 1/8

After dinner tonight, we walked out of the restaurant and caught a spectacular video light show projected on the face of the mighty fortress-like church. From outer space, 66 million years ago, we watched the comet plunge into the Yucatán and wipe out the dinosaurs, sending cracks throughout the peninsula that filled with water and became cenotes. We saw Mayans throwing human sacrifices into them, as the caves became the Maya underworld of Xibalba.

26. Video light show on Valladolid church

The entire history of the land and the people unfolded across the façade of the church, depicting the Mayan mythology and the Spanish conquest, with images of Ek Balaam, then showing the stones of the local pyramid being torn apart and rebuilt into this massive cathedral. Kukulkan/Quetzalcoatl—the great green feathered serpent—slithered all over the face of the church. It was all gorgeously psychedelic, as the church itself appeared to come apart and reassemble itself throughout. The narrative was in English, and the final words that boomed across the plaza were: “REMEMBER WHO YOU ARE!”

27. Cathedral at Valledolid in daylight

Continued in Yucatán Pilgrimage: Day 6

Wednesday Diego made all the plans. First we hung out in another underground cenote cave, with warm saline water, beneath the Hotel Zentik where Deigo, Beth and Sundance were staying. The hotel was a fantastic art installation, with bizarre sculptures and surrealistic paintings everywhere.

15. Creature sculpture at Hotel Zentik

16. Cenote cave under Hotel Zentik

The cenote was wonderful, and magickal. We were the only ones there, and our voices reverberated and echoed throughout the watery cave as we chanted and sang, joining our voices in a song Jiva had written for her troubled son, with the powerful refrain. “Remember who you are!”

17. Circling and singing in the cenote under Hotel Zentik: Dona, Beth, Diego, Sundance, Jiva

18. OZ under waterspout in Zentik Cenote

After lunch we all crammed into the rental car and drove to the Maya ruins of Ek Balaam (“Morningstar/Venus Jaguar”), which we explored all afternoon, with all of us except Dona climbing the steep stairs to the top of the great pyramid to admire the beautiful carvings and the spectacular view. How and why those small people had made their stairs with 18’ risers I’ll never understand. We had to climb them using our hands as well as feet, like babies climbing the stairs in their house!

19. At base of big pyramid at Ek Balaam: Dona, OZ, Beth, Sundance, Diego, Jiva

Dona and I have explored many Maya ruins throughout the upper Yucatán, and I am always astounded at the effort these very small people had taken to create such edifices. I mean, they had no draft animals, no hard metals (only gold, silver and copper), and not even wheels for carts or wagons! All those stones, many weighing hundreds of pounds, had to be quarried (how?), carried, lifted and fitted into place solely on human backs! And there are apparently hundreds (maybe thousands) of such sites, with great pyramids, ball courts, and other large buildings across the entire Yucatan Peninsula.

Estimates range to over 2,600 pyramids, completely eclipsing ancient Egypt, though only a small fraction of these sites are fully excavated and open to the public. Just within the state of Yucatan, there are 18 archeological zones maintained for visitors, with hundreds more buried and lost in the surrounding jungle.

So I cannot help asking, “Why?” I mean, I keep trying to imagine a bunch of Mayans sitting around with nothing much to do. No TV, no movies, no books, no video games…boring! Then someone says, “So, whaddya wanna do today?”

And someone else says, “I know—let’s quarry, dress and haul a few million big blocks of stone on our backs and build a giant pyramid! And then a huge ball court, and maybe an enormous palace and other multistory stone buildings…” And they’re off and running…

20. Corbelled arch gate at Ek Balaam

21. OZ at Ek Balaam

For dinner, Diego had in mind what he’d been told was the best Mayan restaurant in Mexico. It was a long drive to the little town of Espita, and when we arrived at 5:00 we were told that the restaurant, Casona, wouldn’t be open for another two hours. But Diego has a way, and he talked them into letting us in early, and serving us tiny samples of nearly every Mayan dish on the menu! Some of the best food any of us had ever eaten, though we had no idea what any of it was called, or what it contained.

After dinner Deigo, Beth and Sundance took off to Puerto Morales, and Dona and I commissioned a local taxi driver (whose daughter came along) for the one-hour ride from Espita back to our hotel in Valladolid.

22. Chocolate Factory diorama: Cortez meets Monteczuma

Continued in Yucatán Pilgrimage: Day 5

On Tuesday we met up with our friend David Aaron, whom we’d met serendipitously last year (he’d admired my custom walking stick when we got on a bus, and then I discovered that my wallet and cell phone had been stolen in the bus station). He took us home to his 138-acre ranch near the little village of Tixcacalkupul. His charming wife Victoria was away when we met David last year, but she was here this time. They have a few sheep, three sweet donkeys, a javelina pig, and chickens. David had bought the ranch because it has a cenote on it, which Vicky had wanted. It’s a huge deep circular pit, with undercut cliff sides, but it’s a dry cenote, with no water.

5. Victoria & David Aaaron

6. OZ with donkey

However, the well on the property seemed to be rather deep as it appeared to open below. Rappelling down into it, David discovered a great underground lake 60 feet below the surface, inside a vast limestone dome with a few stalactites and curtain formations. Vicky got her watery cenote!

7. Jiva, Sundance, Diego and David at the original well

Over a few years, with local help, David built an incredible concrete staircase down into the cenote, with platforms, all illuminated by floodlights. This is what he’d brought us to see on our previous visit, a year ago, when we had met by chance on the bus. When he learned I was a Pagan Wizard, he’d brought us out to his place to swim in his cenote.

8. Deigo going down into David’s Cenote

9. The stairs down into David’s Cenote

10. Stairway down into David’s cenote

So naturally this trip we had to introduce David and our other friends to each other. David and Vicky drove Dona, Jiva and I; and Beth, Diego and Sundance followed in a rental car for the half-hour drive. Everyone hit it off splendidly, and fast friendships were formed. Jiva, Beth, Diego and Sundance were as blown away as Dona and I had been last year, and we swam, sang and chanted while Diego played his flute and Sundance drummed on an innertube. About dusk, the solar-powered lights went out, and we had to ascend in total darkness, with flashlights.

11. Underground lake in David’s cenote

12. Beth, Diego and Sundance in innertubes in David’s cenote.

We returned to Valladolid Tuesday night, checking into the San Clemente hotel as there was no room for another night at the Casa Quetzal.

13. Surrealistic art at Hotel Zentik

14. More surrealistic art at Hotel Zentik

Continued in Yucatán Pilgrimage: Day 4

On Monday the 5^th, Beth, Diego, Jiva, Sundance, Dona and I took a bus to Valladolid—a two-hour trip. We checked into a luxury hotel called Casa Quetzal with absolutely gorgeous gardens—which are typical for hotels and restaurants, behind the unprepossessing blank walls that front the sidewalks on every city street.

4. Casa Quetzal gardens

Continued in Yucatán Pilgrimage: Day 3

We flew down to Cancun on Sunday, Jan. 4, and took a cab to Puerto Morales, where we spent the night at our favorite hotel, Ojo de Aqua, on the beach. We met up with our dear friends from previous trips: Beth, Don Diego and Jiva Falcon. They brought along another friend, Sundance. All are Rainbow Gypsy performers connected to Dona via the Renaissance Faires, where Dona has vended her beautiful mirror plaques for the past 50 years—longer than any Rennie alive!

At dinner, Diego pulled out his guitar and entertained the entire restaurant with rousing renditions of popular Caribbean songs—to which everyone enthusiastically joined in.

3. Dinner with Pagan friends—David, Jiva, April, Russell, Dona, OZ, Patricia, Beth, Diego, Sundance, Ryan

After dropping off our suitcases, we were immediately whisked away to dinner with a bunch of locals: April, Russell, Ryan, Patricia, David. We’re all Pagans, and after dinner we went to Russell and April’s lovely home for a drum circle. Sundance is a virtuoso drummer, but all we had was a 5-gallon plastic bucket, which he played masterfully, accompanied by Diego on guitar and flute.

Continued in Yucatán Pilgrimage: Day 2

Jan. 8, 2026

Dona Carter and I have been making pilgrimages and expeditions to sacred sites throughout the world periodically since March of 1987, when we traveled throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, visiting museums and archaeological sites in Spain, France, Italy, Greece and Crete. Since then, our travels have taken us to Peru, Guatemala, Ecuador, and several times, to Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. I have journaled each of these journeys, and taken many photos, which I eventually intend to publish in book form. I have included excerpts from these “Legendary Journeys” in several of my books: The Wizard & the Witch (2014; 2021), That Undiscover’d Country (2021), and Hystory’s Mysteries (2024).

1. Yucatan Peninsula

We have now returned to the Maya Yucatán, staying for a few days in the city of Valladolid, while we explore local pyramids and cenotes. (A cenote is an open sinkhole, caused when a collapse of limestone bedrock exposes groundwater flowing beneath. Cenotes are unique to the Yucatán Peninsula, where the ancient Maya used them for water, and occasionally for sacrificial offerings. A complex system of caverns connecting the cenotes are the result of the comet impact 66 million years ago that killed the dinosaurs and 95% of all life on Earth. The impact site was on the northwest Yucatán coast, where the city of Merida now stands, and it sent cracks throughout the coral peninsula, into which water flowed as with any other limestone caves. And the resulting interconnected cavern complex constitutes the Mayan Underworld of Xibalba.)

2. Beth, Diego, Sundance, Jiva, Dona, OZ

Continued in “Yucatán Pilgrimage: Day 1”