My new favorite part of traveling in a tropical area is laughing to myself at obscenely sunburnt white tourists.

We started off today late as usual, because we all need some sort of constant in our lives.

James, Gianni, Uncle Brian, Oppa and I went to Hidden Worlds, which sounds like a scary place one would typically try to avoid at all costs, but it was actually pretty snazzy. They had zip-lining, skycycles, cenotes, rappelling, spider monkeys, and jungle buggies (or as Umma called them yesterday, "Jungle Boogies"). And lots of bugs and mosquitoes.

On the drive there, we had to stop to get gas. As soon as we pulled up to the pump, it started to pour. To our left was a family of tourists in a convertible Jeep, who were probably really excited about getting a convertible until it started raining buckets. This amused us much more than it would any family of decent human beings with souls. We watched them sit in the rain for about 5 minutes until they finally decided to put up the cover, which made us really sad. Then they drove up to the convenience store attached to the gas station, except the driver's method of stopping the car involved driving until he hit the curb. I love ridiculous tourists. I love Mexico. Life is swell.

Oh by the way, see how much more exciting this blog is when we aren't being tormented by horrendous karaoke?

Back to blogging, though. The drive was a litttle over an hour, so on the trip, we played our own version of Cash Cab, which was basically Uncle Brian and Oppa asking us questions, James and I throwing out random answers, and Gianni quietly muttering the correct answers to himself. The three of us lost, though, because James kept shouting "China" and "Oakland." He also invented the state "Mexas." Remember how he won those awards? Because I sure don't.

(Justkidding,hereallyisasmartkidandI'msupposedtostopmakingfunofhim)

So anyway, we made it to the Hidden Worlds welcome center, where there was a really awesome dog that Uncle Brian and I were playing with that made us miss Brucie and Max. We sorted out stuff, jumped into wetsuits (and by "jumped," I mean wiggled uncomfortably), and took a 15-20 minute ride on a buggie into the jungle, which I suppose is why it's called a jungle buggie. If you want to know what it was like, it was a little bit like the Indiana Jones ride, except on Indy you have a seatbelt, you aren't being eaten alive by mosquitos (toes? tos? I don't know, so I'll just alternate my spelling), your driver doesn't speed towards an oncoming buggie, and there's a guarantee of reaching the other end safely without falling out. Then again, on Indy, you aren't driving through an awesome jungle.

Once we made it to the actual park, one of the staff members put us into a harness (for the skycycling, zip-lining, and rappelling), and suggested we do the skycycles first. We had the option of either a 20 minute walk through the jungle or being driven. The walk meant we'd get to see the park's spider monkey habitat, so we chose that option. Now, when you hear the phrase "spider monkey habitat," and hear about how the people at the park rescued these monkeys, you'd think it would be something really nice and awesome--essentially, a place where, if you were a spider monkey who was rescued (from I don't really know what), you wouldn't mind being relocated to paradise. The place we ended up seeing looked like a bad zoo exhibit (remember the velociraptor entrapment in Jurrasic Park with the electric fence). Three monkeys were confined in an electric fence, and one even had a leash because it was apparently outsmarting the park attendants and escaping the habitat to the snack bar. Awesome. (Again hard to believe that the park people admitted to being outsmarted by a monkey!)

Oh, I forgot to mention earlier that on this jungle walk, we were warned not to touch (or hug) trees, because there was one that was poisonous. We weren't sure which one it was, though, so we were going to use James as a test, and the rest of us were the control group. Haha. Ha. Hahahaha. We eventually found the right tree, though, but not by using James. It was labeled with a large sign. Double Awesome.

Us on the trail:
Poisonous Tree:


One of the staff members was telling us a cool legend about the tree. Apparently, the tree that the cure for the poison of the first tree always grows near the poisonous one. Legend has it that way back when, there were two Mayan princesses, one of which was really nice, and the other really mean. The mean one must have done something to piss off a witch, because the witch put a curse on her to make her into a tree (the poisonous tree). The other princess, not wanting her evil sister to kill people from her sap, asked the witch to be made into a tree that could cure whatever the poisonous tree did. And that's the non-scientific reason why they always grow together. This version of the story, by the way, is the Mia Adaptation.

Soooo anyway, we made it to the skycycles. I was going to try to describe what they were, but then I realized that I can post pictures, which is a lot easier.
This is a skycycle:

We got to ride those above the jungle canopy, which was amazing. I think we were a teeny bit apprehensive though, because they were excitedly telling us about how they designed the skycycles themselves. Greeaaaaaaat. Actually, we were harnessed in and everything, so it really wasn't bad at all.

The skycycles led to a cenote (called The Church), so we did some snorkeling.



There were really awesome stalagtite formations everywhere, and birds and bats were flying around. Oh, there was also a floating rat carcass that smelled like death. But besides that, it was really pretty. After about 20 minutes of snorkeling, we rode the skycycles back and did some zip-lining.



Super rad.

After the zip-line, we rappelled into another cenote. I've never done rappelling before, but for some strange reason, I volunteered to go first. If you've done rock climbing before, rappelling is pretty much when you reach the top of the wall and start to go down, except you control your own descent. All of this was done into a hole in the ground about 25-30 feet deep. As I was standing at the top listening to instructions, I was so nervous that if I were to have swallowed a lump of coal, it would have come out as a diamond (I used some form of this metaphor when describing the experience to Umma, and she got excited about the diamond part. Lol). Once I figured out what I was doing though, it was actually a lot of fun. Gianni posed for some fun pictures as he was going down:



Next, we zip-lined into a cenote. You know when you skip stones across water and they jump? Zip-lining into water was like doing that, except your butt was the stone. It was an interesting and unique experience. After that, we snorkeled in that cenote (this one was called Hidden Worlds), which was bigger than the previous one and had the added bonus of not having a dead rat. All jokes aside, though, they were both really really pretty, and definitely an awesome experience. Once that was done, it was pretty much closing time for the park, so we took the jungle buggie back and left.

I slept for most of the ride back (because I'm me), so I don't really know what happened. I think they did more trivia, though. When I woke up, it was really really cold in the car, so I reached into the back and grabbed a hoodie. Gianni and James were using towels as blankets. Evidently, we were all pretty cold. A few minutes later, Oppa starts yelling at us for putting the AC on really high. Too bad no one touched it but him. But anyway, it got so cold in the car that I think Oppa's getting kind of sick now :(

We got back to the place, showered, ate food, and then Uncle Brian, Umma, and I went downtown to do some shopping. On the way back, it started pouring again. We found a pharmacy, where we decided to hide from the rain and buy Oppa some vitamin C because he needs to get better before we leave. We're all afraid he's going to be quarantiened going back into the States. So anyway, Uncle Brian asked for vitamin C in kind-of-Spanish, which the woman didn't understand and Umma and I found this hilarious. Umma said we needed some vitamin C, and the woman nodded and left. While she was gone, Umma and I laughed at Uncle Brian some more until the woman came back with what we think was some Preparation-H ish medicine. We said it was the wrong thing, and she had us write down what we wanted, and then we got the right stuff. We caught the bus back to our place, got here, and now we're sitting in some other lobby that some guy told us about last night. Not many people come here to use the internet, so its like a bajillion times faster. AND there isn't any crappy karaoke! Life is awesome!!

That's about it for today. Tomorrow we do Cozumel (for real this time.. hopefully). Maybe when we go back upstairs, we'll act like ninjas and do some sneak attack on James. We'll keep you updated on that in tomorrow's post.
Until then,
Mia and Uncle Brian