When empires bite the dust

I mentioned a few days ago that we’d been away on a trip. One of our stops was at the Mayan ruins at Tulum, on the east coast of the Yucatan Peninsula in the state of Quintana Roo, Mexico. Tulum was occupied, they say, from around 1200 A.D. until contact was made with the Spanish in the early 16th century. And one empire was essentially smashed by the other.

The archeological site is fantastic. The area’s gorgeous, with the ruins sitting about 40 feet above the Caribbean Sea. Iguanas are accommodating and pose for pictures.

Of course, I’ve long been fascinated with fallen empires. It’ll be interesting to see what Wall Street looks like in a couple hundred years.

The ruins of Empire

While everybody else is posting photos of the Hurricane Ike devastation on the Texas coast, the folks at Environmental Graffiti are offering up creepy shots of this railway station in Abkhazia, northwestern Georgia, abandoned almost two decades since the collapse of the USSR. This railway was, in its prime, a busy passenger line between Abkhazia and Russia. I find these pictures both eerie and fascinating.