Cozumel :: Mexico
All the temples you can eat. And a beach too. Very Mexican.
Places: Palenque, Merida, Chitchen Itza, Tulum and Cozumel.
Coolest thing I did: Had all-you-can-eat steak for 5 pounds. Still digesting it.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: .
I wasn´t expecting much of Merida, after arriving at 5am and finding at town that has not much going for it besides a colonial town square I was ready to write it off and move on. I´m glad the thought of getting back on another night bus talked me out of it. On Sunday the main square (I´ve since found all town squares are called Zocalos, not just the one in Mexico City) is shut down to vehicle traffic and people wander around all day and night soaking it all up. I spent the evening in a cafe in yet another old colonial building eating and watching a band play. The best bit was when old couples would just be walking past, stop and start dancing samba or the cha-cha in front of the band. Happened all the time and was very cool to watch. It turns out that Sunday night in Merida was one of the best so far in Mexico. Serendipity is tops.
Merida was the one break in my mad dash to see south central Mexico´s main Mesoamerican sites in 3 days. I´d left the Banksey-esque stenciled streets of San Cristobal with the full intention of staying overnight in the jungle near Palenque but arrived early enough in the day to work out that was going to be a bit of a pain in the arse so I left my bag in the bus station and booked a ticket on the next night bus. From what I´ve heard since I would have been sleeping to the sounds of guitar struming hippies and howler monkeys so I´m kind OK with my decision.
Palenque is the best of the Maya ruins I´ve seen. It´s still pretty much set right into the jungle and even though the main buildings have been partially restored in some places it´s still cool to see some with trees growing out of the middle of them and vines running down their side. Lots of pyramids, some with the temples on the top still intact and even with inscriptions and stellae that haven´t been carted off to the Louvre. I´d say from what I´ve seen if you´re going to see just one of the ruins out here then this is the one to go to. There was things I liked about Teotihuan and Chitchen Itza better, but overall this one is hard to beat. It´s also where they dug up King Pukal, whose Jade death mask you see in the museum in Mexico City (though they´ve since transcribed his name from the heiroglyphs as King Sun Shield II or something. I think they might be a little too literal in their translations...). Or rather as I just found out, a replica of it. Apparently the real one was stolen in the 80s and never found. Keep you eyes out on eBay, you never know.
I think another thing that I liked about Palenque was the noticable lack of Yank in the air. I arrived in Chitchen Itza about 11am and already the busses were disgorging their American daytripper bounty from Cancun. It´s hard to position yourself between the herds and still get good pictures without being interupted by such soundbites of wisdom as "I bet that´s old" or "what do you think they made it out of?". I kid you not, I heard both.
Chitchen Itza has a couple of very cool things about it. The best is the main Pyramid, that has been restored to it´s former glory so there´s no imagining about it. There´s these big serpent heads at the base of the stairs and during the equinoxes the shadows in on the stairs make it look like the body of the serpents are either climbing the stairs or going down them. That must be pretty cool to see. The other thing is they have a big domed building they think was an observatory. To think this was about the time my anscestors were busy rapeing and pillaging convents all up and down the Irish coast and that´s a pretty cool thing. All the sites are big on architectural tricks you can do with the alignment of celestial bodies.
Tulum doesn´t have the prettiest of ruins (in fact, they´re pretty crap compared to the others) but it´s all about location. Tulum was the only one of these cities that was inhabited when the Spanish arrived and it´s a walled fortress perched right on the cliffs of the Caribbean so all you´re pictures have white sand and turquoise seas in the background. That alone makes up for the fact that it´s much smaller than Chitchen Itza and thus the ratio of Yank to surface area is much higher. They travel in packs and a guide in broken Spanglish is trying to tell them something they could read on the plaques on the ground if they weren´t all blocking them. Deep sigh. I did see a big iguana right up close, making me look like a top notch nature photographer instead of really luck that it sat still.
I did a fair bit of reading about Mesoamericans because it´s been alomst impossible to get ahold of books in English and I ran out of things that aren´t the Lonely Planet to read quite some time ago. It seems that the two main groups the Spanish encountered, the Aztecs and the Toltecs were pretty much just a bunch of blood thirsty bastards that had taken over when the far more advanced Maya had collapsed about 500 years earlier. Both were big proponents of human sacrifice (there´s a platform in Chitchen Itza whose sole purpose is to make pyramids of the skulls of your defeated foes on) and the afore mentioned ball game. I reckon they should hold a soccer match in the reconstructed ball court at C.I., the accoustics are incredible and it would be pretty cool to watch from the temples overlooking the court. You wouldn´t even have to sacrifice anyone at the end, it´d just be fun.
Tulum was a revelation. The beach is what you expect Caribbean beaches to look like and I managed to get myself a cabana on the beach for two days to enjoy it. After my mad dash through temple land to have a nice pristine white sand beach to lie on and bright blue water to swim in right outside my door was pretty cool. The cabanas are slowly being replaced by big hotels so coming back in a couple of years might not be as relaxing, but I´m sure by then someone will have discovered another old fishing village just down the coast to replace it.
Today I´ve surfaced in Yankland. I thought steering clear of Cancun would have kept me away from the Yanks but I´ve been via Playa del Carmen to the island of Cozumel and I´m a bit depressed by all the rednecks drinking giant Margaritas outside Senor Frogs. I´m hoping things get better once the cruise ships pull up anchor for the night and I get to start some diving tomorrow. The second biggest barrier reef in the world awaits and it´s nothing but azure waters from here to Belize.