The fourth day of the tour was a gap day where had only one planned shoot with some time to get a little rest. This is when the government actions to fight the pandemic started to catch up with us. We had planned to leave early in the morning to shoot at the wildlife reserve at Rio Lagartos, the site I got the amazing pictures of flamingos and other seabirds last year. However, we learned that it was closed down by government order and no boats would be allowed to leave. They had also closed the beaches, so we were lucky to have gotten our beach shoot the previous day. We switched plans and instead of a morning shoot, we planned for an afternoon shoot at a beautiful nearby hacienda.
Since we had the morning free, I decided to take a walk into downtown Izamal to get some cash and do a little sightseeing. I was joined by a couple of the other photographers. After a bit of a challenge bouncing back and forth across the main square in order to find an ATM, we decided to go check out the Kinich Kakmó pyramid. Walking along the streets a local trinket vendor showed us through his house right across the street from the pyramid sold us some carved jaguar heads, and told us we could climb the pyramid if we wanted. I think we ended up going up the non-standard way, but it was pretty cool. It provided a beautiful view overlooking Izamal. The pyramid was built around 400-600 A.D., and described as one of the most important constructions of Mesoamerica. It was dedicated to an important local solar deity “the fire macaw with the sun face.” Later we learned that some other tourists from our hacienda had been turned away when they tried to go up the normal entrance as it was the kind of place being closed down to tourists due to the pandemic. Nonetheless there were a bunch of people up there when we got to the top. I’m glad I made this unexpected side trip since I was in the area.
As we got ready to leave for our afternoon shoot, we learned of one more impact of the pandemic driven rule changes. One of our models, Sienna, is a Canadian citizen who lives in the US, and they had just announced they were about to close the US border to non-citizens. So to be able to get back home, she had to abandon the tour to try and get back into the US immediately before the borders closed. It was sad to lose her from our group, but there was an unexpected upside. Dasha graciously chose to model for us on our afternoon shoot, and they were able to find a replacement Mexican model for the remaining shoots, who turned out to be terrific. So over the course of the tour, I ended up getting to shoot with five different models.
The afternoon shoot was at the beautiful boutique hotel Hacienda Sacnicte where we had shot on two occasions last year. It has beautiful artwork and numerous beautiful locations to shoot in. So while I was disappointed at not getting to the wildlife reserve, it was nicely mitigated by this beautiful shooting location and the opportunity to shoot with Dasha again. After the shoot wrapped, we headed back to our home hacienda for another delicious meal.