Ticketstub nostalgia

In the past week I found both tickets from a trip to Chichén Itzá on 18 December 2002. One ticket was in the bottom of a desk drawer and one was tucked inside a book of essays I chose at random from the shelf since I hadn't finished reading it. The fact that both tickets survived a trans-continental move and they turned up within several days of the other prompted me to remember the Stories about Ticketstubs website and write a little story about the trip behind them.

Since Finland is not known for its sunny, warm winters, one of the conditions of moving to Helsinki with my husband was that we take a holiday each Winter to somewhere with sunshine. We moved in January and took a trip to Cancún in December as there would be little time to travel after arriving in Helsinki and we would be far less likely to travel to Cancún from Europe. Both of us had always wanted to see the legendary Mayan ruins so it was a perfect complement to the warm sun objective.

When you arrive in Cancún there are 100 or so grifters who try to hustle you to buy various trips to the surrounding attractions but we had already scheduled 6 days of doing nothing at the beach and a 1-day trip to Chichén Itzá. The trip takes several hours by bus with a few stops along the way to help the local economy. One such stop was in the middle of the jungle to visit a typical modern home of the local Yucatan people. I found this brief excursion to be exceedingly strange and uncomfortable since we were just a bunch total strangers walking around an elderly couple's home. There were stray dogs lying in the middle of the dirt road and small children peering around trees to catch a glimpse of today's busload of people.

The pictures of Chichén Itzá in textbooks don't prepare you for the vast scale of the city. The Pyramid of Kukulcán has 365 narrow steps up to the top but neither of us decided to make the climb in spite of the fact that the museum would not be allowing people to climb it after 1 January 2003. We wandered around for the afternoon after our guide had finished the tour in awe of how a civilisation so clearly advanced could suddenly abandon a city and disappear into the jungle. I managed to take a few pictures to remember the enjoyable, sunny holiday in the midst of the whirlwind of moving 3500 miles to the frozen land of Finland.

I'm not really sure why, but I think the ticketstub stories are really interesting. Perhaps it is because it's something different and unique which is a rarity on the net these days. It's sure to attract the affection of those who always seem to find themselves saving small bits of paper and recalling the who, what, where, when and why when finding them stuffed in a book or at the bottom of a drawer.