Uxmal

Uxmal

Touring Vulcan Industries Limestone Mine: By Blake Price

On January 8^th it was one of our last days in Mexico and what would have been a better way to end the trip than touring Calica, one of the world’s largest limestone mines. When we first got to the site, we were greeted with very warming hospitality, typical of the Yucatan’s citizens. The first thing we did as part of our tour was attend a presentation by one of Calica’s managers who explained to us how they extracted the limestone, and why it was economically feasible for them to essentially ship rocks to the United States. After the presentation we got to take a tour of all of their facilities in order to understand how they ran their operations.

I was completely amazed by the scale of their operations, and was astonished to learn that they shipped hundreds of millions of pounds of limestone to the US every year. Even the size of their equipment was massive, and we learned that just one tire for this truck costs over $10,000. 

One of the coolest parts of the tour was when we got to walk to the top of a giant tower that controlled a huge rock crusher. We got to see how the operator controlled the machine and I couldn't believe how powerful this machine was. I learned that this single rock crusher could process over 600,000 pounds of limestone rock a minute and I got to see firsthand how this machine threw around slabs of rock probably weighing a few thousand pounds each like it was nothing.  

After touring the processing facilities it was time to have a little excitement; we learned that today would be their blasting day and we were going to see firsthand several thousand pounds of rock blown up by dynamite. We drove out to the blasting site and received the countdown, and even though we were a long ways away from the blast we could still feel the earth shake and see the massive explosion.

All in all it was a very informative trip and I thoroughly enjoyed getting a chance to learn a great deal about an industry that I previously had no knowledge of at all. This trip gave me a chance to tour such an amazing operation that was so grandiose in size and scope that it is hard to explain. I definitely walked away impressed with the people who put such a huge operation together, and now I can say that I have seen a dynamite blast in person which checks a task off my bucket list. 

Visiting the Hacienda Sotuta de Peon and its Beautiful Cenote: By Blake Price

                On January 2^nd 2015 It was a beautiful day to take a tour of one of the newly restored haciendas that used to grow henequen, the green gold of the Yucatan. Henequen was a plant that was grown for the purpose of making materials from its fiber, and in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s the Yucatan had a monopoly on this product which made it one of the 5 richest cities in the world at the time. Out of this great wealth came many beautiful hacienda’s which are very similar to the plantations that used to exist in the southern United States. The particular hacienda that we visited was called Hacienda Sotuta de Peon, and it was built in the late 1800’s during the boom of the henequen industry. We were fortunate enough to have an excellent tour guide who painted a very detailed picture of what the hacienda used to be like during its prime years of production. We got to tour all of the haciendas operating facilities and saw the complete process that transformed the henequen plant into a usable fiber. We even got a chance to try the old method of separating the henequen fibers over a metal comb, and it was definitely more difficult than it looked. 

This hacienda happened to have restored many of its original machines back to a working order, so during the tour we were able to see how the hacienda operated during the prime years of production.

This particular machine made rope from many separate henequen strands.

 After our tour of the production facilities we were transported by cart and mule out into the henequen fields where we met an 81 year old Mayan man who has lived and worked on this hacienda all of his life. He told us the story of the hacienda’s history, and how much it has changed over time. One thing that surprised me about this man was how happy his job seemed to make him. He had been working one of the toughest jobs in the world in an extremely harsh environment, but it seemed that he couldn't be happier. He told us that when he was younger he would have never imagined getting to meet people from all over the world that came to tour his home, and he said that it made his life worth it to be able to tell us about his history.

After we finished talking to him we got on our cart again and traveled out to a cenote to go swimming. A cenote is essentially a cave filled with water from an underground spring, and when we descended into the cave I was amazed at how beautiful it was. I had never seen such beautiful, crystal clear water from a natural environment in my life, and going swimming in this natural spring felt so refreshing. Because the water is so crystal clear I thought it was only a few feet deep, but after putting on goggles and trying to dive to the bottom I found that it was actually around 30 feet deep with tunnels that descended much deeper into the earth. It was an amazing sight to behold, and definitely one of my favorite experiences of the trip.