As you’re probably aware now, I’ve been out of the country for the last week. My sister was married in Mexico, and that gave me an excuse to add some more exotic locations to my geocaching log.
For the couple weeks coming up on the trip to Mexico, I started grabbing all kinds of Travel Bugs for the 2000+ kilometer journey, as it would be a big leap for some of them, and I checked Geocaching.com for where I may find myself caching.
Unfortunately, my caching was rather limited, as the week was full of wedding events and sight-seeing tours near the resort in the Mayan Riviera. The only caches that were handily available within an hour’s drive were virtuals, unless I wanted to take the 1 1/2 hour drive up to Cancun, or the hour long drive and hour long boat ride to Cozumel. Both of those were not options, so my “farthest from home” and “most southerly” geocache finds are now marked by a virtual in Tulum.
Fortunately, I did manage to get some physical geocaching in when we ventured out to the ancient Mayan city of Chichen-Itza. The grounds have one virtual, and two physical geocaches. That’s the good news. The bad news was that we DNF’d on one cache, and the other was a 35 mm film canister tucked into part of an ancient structure and behind some rocks. Not very travel-bug friendly – all the bugs ended up returning to Canada with me, but I’ll be logging a mileage drop for each of them nonetheless.
Not to mention: do you know how un-nerving it is to remove rocks from a 2,000 year old building with Mexican Federal police wandering around. Really uncool. On the other hand, the park is crawling with thousands of muggles. Tourists and peddlers alike.
Still, it was nice to put one of my “Canadian Flag” edition stickers in a log book where English is not the primary language. Just be careful out there, because the jungle isn’t forgiving – especially when you’re talking about ancient sites!
So, now I’ve geocached in 2 Provinces, 3 States, and 3 countries. I also set a new mark for “lowest geocache found” at 77 feet above sea level.