Today was an interesting day. In the morning, we woke up, ground our teeth on some granola, and headed out with Dan to the ruins of Tonina, where the ruins are for the most part intact. You're free to roam around almost all of the site, and there are even tunnels you can climb into. there are a few areas that are roped off, due to danger, or lack of full excavation. T'was cool. There were a few areas which left me feeling like I could of gone further, like a narrow tunnel ending in a chamber with a wall blocking the way down. That was disappointing but overall the whole place was really cool.

Andy: yes, today was quite a treat. Tonina is east of here towards Palenque at an elevation of only 900 meters so the vegetation was much more tropical than the piney woods here. Tonina was also practically deserted so we had the place to ourselves. We'll try to post a few pictures. One surreal event that happened today was that we came across a big military road checkpoint just out of the park. We had all 10 of our bike bags in the back of Dan's truck and the young armed soldier started checking us very thoroughly. After looking under the hood (?!) he asked us to remove and open up all of the bags. After the second bag he suddenly asked in Spanish, "How do you say, 'have a nice trip?'" The rest of the search looked good from his commander's point of view but for us was an English lesson. We ended up writing the phrase down on a piece of paper, which sufficed for a glove box search. The kid turned from menacing soldier to innocent teenager in about 2 minutes. He had a hard time with the tr in trip. It was a wonderful interaction.

We leave in a little while for home. We'll be home Tuesday.