The grandest monument in the Yucatan. Part 3

Sure, we could dilly-dally swimming in cobalt blue cenotes, visiting ancient Mayan ruins and poking about in little colonial towns. But the real reason we were here, as I’m sure is the case with most visitors to the Yucatan, we were going to pay a visit to the centre of the Chicxulub Crater.

The Chicxulub crater is so named, because the centre of this crater lies just off the coast of the small seaside town of Chicxulub. There isn’t much to see by way of actual crater or anything. The Yucatan is, after all, flat as a pancake and no 66 million year old meteor crater is going to change that.

_{Flat as a pancake.}

Also, the crater is actually sufficiently large that we had spent plenty of time within it’s confines, Izamal and the Tres Cenotes are located on it’s outer rim. The town of Merida is located even closer towards the centre.

_{That’s a big crater.}

So even though we had already spent almost two weeks within the confines of the crater.

Even though we had already visited the far more spectacular METEOR CRATER in Arizona.

_{Meteor Crater, Arizona. It’s a big crater.}

Even though we wouldn’t even be visiting the actual centre of the crater.

We made our way to the town of Chicxulub.

Why were we interested?

This particular 66 million year old meteor crater was formed by the impact of a space rock that most likely wiped out the dinosaurs—therefore representing the sole reason that I do not own a pet T-Rex. (Or that a T-Rex doesn’t have a pet Emma, who knows how things would have panned out if it hadn’t been for this space rock impacting the planet…)

66 million years ago a rock, of approximately 10 km in diameter came hurtling through the earth’s atmosphere and smacked into our little blue planet. Striking just off the coast of modern day Chicxulub it left a crater 180km in diameter and 20km deep.

From this point scientists disagree (as they tend to do on such things). Aside from upsetting everyone in the immediate area, there is a very good chance that the fallout from this impact resulted in the extinction of a whole lot of dinosaurs.

As a result, in the modest town plaza of modern day Chicxulub there is an… erm ‘grand monument’ to this mass-extinction event—we were lucky enough to visit it.

_{Yes, that is indeed a photo of Emma grinning inanely at a memorial to many millions of now extinct dinosaurs. It is hard to look solemn when you are this stoked to visit a place.}

We knew we had now seen the best the Yucatan had to offer. We figured we would just check off a few remaining stops en route to renew our temporary vehicle importation permit on the Belizean border.

We started with a peaceful night camping by a lagoon, which was full of pesky flamingos and some other bird that wished he was a flamingo, but didn’t quite make the cut.