Bloggin' from Maya - Central

Steve: We drove to the airport in North Carolina fully refreshed from our time in the states.  Had Gail and Paul been any better hosts, we would have given up on the travel plans entirely and permanently moved into their beautiful house.  But we soon found ourselves in Cancun with little to report.  The woman at the rent-a-car place asked us innocently enough, “Would you like to take the toll road to your destination or the old highway?”  Well, I asked, how much is the toll?  “About $20”, she replied.  Sheesh, I thought!  We are in no hurry. Perhaps we should see more of the local towns and make the journey part of the fun rather than hightailing it to our next destination.  After all, that is what this is all about, right?  How much longer will it take if we skip the toll road?, I inquired.  “About an extra half an hour” was her reply.  No sweat.  Let’s be adventurous!  Well, the scheduled hour and forty-five minute trip took about five hours.  Seriously.  I am prone to exaggeration, but in this case, no hyperbole is necessary.  They love their speed-bumps in the Yucatan.  Well, whatever, you get what you pay for, right?  The scenery was lovely.

So we enter the town of Valladolid, our final destination for the day.  We have no real idea of how to get to our hotel, but we figure it can’t be that large a town and we have a GPS, so how hard can it be?  After about twenty minutes of driving the wrong way down one-way streets, we finally give up.  It seems all parts of town are the “wrong part of town”.  Dirty, depressed, uninviting to say the least.  We are completely lost, and a little scared. It is now night-time dark, and I am ready to throw the GPS out the window.  “Turn left on Calle 36…”  There is no “KA-YAY” 36, and if there were it would be a one-way street to the right in any case!  We’re gonna die in this damned 1983 Nissan Tsuru!  Breathe…

We found and stopped at a police "kiosk?" in the middle of nowhere special.  Can you direct us to this hotel?  Laughter.  “You aren’t even in the correct county, jefe.”  He speaks not a word of English.  I prod some more in broken Spanish.  OK, which way to the correct county?  He waves his hand in no particular direction and chortles again.  West? North? I ask.  “Yes, yes, hombre.”  OK, perhaps money will do the talking for me.  For a little bit of direction I’ll pay! I say, as I whip out a $10 bill.  “No thank you, he says.”  Great, I think.  We really should have exchanged for some pesos in the airport.  Just as I start to think we really are in for an awful night, he tells me that he will call his partner who speaks English and that he can help us.  YES!  A few minutes later, his partner pulls up in a pickup truck and, though still speaking no English, he asks us to follow him and proceeds to give us an escort all the way (probably 5 km) to our hotel.  We make probably 20 turns in the process, always on streets that you might mistake for dead-end alleys.  We never would have found it on our own.  But we made it.  The nice policeman drove off without even giving us a chance to properly thank him.  We had been transported from a place of fear and mistrust and regret to a place of gratitude and faith in the human spirit in a matter of ten minutes time.  Viva La Mexico!

Our hotel is awesome.  The “right” side of town is beautiful.  We live across the street from an enormous stone convent that dates to the early 1500’s.  Mass is held every night, and it is packed.  We have done the walk (about a kilometer) to the center square of town half a dozen times now, and every time we discover something new and wonderful.  Once, we discovered a chocolate store where they make their own product, and before all four of us had even crossed the doorway, a ridiculously friendly young woman had started us in on a whirlwind tour of the world of chocolate.  The ancient Mayans used cacao beans as currency, and she was showing us every step of the process in turning those suckers into little bits of heaven.  We got to taste every one of the dozen flavors they make.  The tour was quick and very educational and the little chocolate balls that we bought are all the more tasty for it. 

Part of the ancient convent next door.

The food here is awesome.  Carol and I keep telling ourselves that we will stop stuffing ourselves and will work on restraint at the next stop on our trip.  But that keeps not happening.  Last night, for example, I ordered something called the “Yucatan plate” from a nearby restaurant located inside an enormous stucco building made from the remains of old Mayan pyramids.  The menu said “for two”.  All four of us barely made a dent in it.  It was essentially an eight-course meal (if you count the homemade chips and guacamole plate that came first).  And none of the courses even remotely resembled a salad.  We couldn’t pronounce any of the entrees (all Mayan names, not Spanish), but that didn’t stop us from stuffing our faces!  Chloe has discovered Jamaica (the drink, not the island nation) and she may never drink another soda.  Fine by me.

Ninety-one steps to the room on top.  91 x 4 sides plus the one step to the underworld below = 365 days in a year.

Thankfully, we are getting our exercise here to compensate for all that eating.  We have logged many miles of walking both in town and in sight-seeing.  Our reason for coming this far inland was to see Chichen Itza, the most famous of the Mayan ruins, and one of the “Seven Wonders of the New World.”  I expected to see the one pyramid (above) that we have all seen in pictures, and maybe a few other busted-up buildings.  Instead, it was at least a square mile of super-cool building after super-cool building.  I thought I had found my favorite ruin probably ten separate times on the day.  The intricate carvings in the stone have really been preserved well in the thousand or so years since the Mayans built them.  And each Mayan city comes complete with its own ball court.  It seems as though the Mayans invented basketball about 1500 years ago.  Only you can’t use your hands or feet when directing the ball through the vertically oriented stone hoop.  Oh, and the captain of the losing team gets decapitated as an offering to the gods.

Chloe was ready to shop in the 1000 year old market at Chichen Itza.  But all that was left was hundreds of  stone pillars that formed the walls of the market.  They wouldn't fit in her suitcase.

Many of the ruins were decorated with pictures of the gods.    It was these details that astounded me most.

The underworld god seemed pretty upset that I was taking his picture.

The hoops court at Chichen Itza.  The hoop is way above my head on the wall and a bit to the left.

The only drawback to the Chichen Itza experience was that nobody except the people who worked there were allowed to climb on any of it.  Everything is now roped off.  This is a new development.  Apparently, somebody fell and died and so now it is “look, but don’t touch.”  I realize that it is probably better for preserving the stone for future generations, but it was a bummer nonetheless.  So how did we appease our need for tactile experience?  We drove to another Mayan site called Ek Balam.  The ruins here were nearly as impressive.  The biggest structure was actually taller, and much wider than the pyramid at Chichen Itza.  But best of all, climbing was encouraged!  I’ve included pictures, but as usual, they don’t do justice to the views.  The steps to the top of the main structure are at a 45° angle, and so seem quite treacherous on the way down.  Hence, the death of a  tourist from a few years back.  But we still managed to keep each of the four members of the family in one piece.

Climbing the steps of the main "castle" at Ek Balam.  Perspective is difficult, but it felt almost straight up and down.

A view of a couple of the other ruins (these two are four stories each themselves) from the top of the big one. 

Our favorite experience of the Mexico leg of our trip was not at either Mayan ruins site, however.  The Yucatan is also riddled with these natural sink-hole type pools called “cenotes”.  The word is a Spanish bastardization of a Mayan word meaning “abyss” or something to that effect. The Mayans used them as a water supply and also for sacrificial ceremonies.  The Mexicans use them as tourist traps.  The cenote that we visited yesterday was in an enormous underground cave complete with bats and stalactites.  The water was clearer than in a swimming pool and the multitude of resident fish nibbled at your feet.  Both Chloe and Josh wrote about this experience, so I will leave the details to their blog-posts, which you can read, or not, at your convenience. 

Chillin' in the cenote about 20 meters below ground level.

Limestone stalagtites riddled the cave.  That one hole (maybe 2m in diameter) at the very top is the only source of natural light. 

The second cenote was more exposed to the open air, but still ridiculously cool.

We intend to visit a second “cenote” today, just before we head back to Cancun.  We will be taking the toll road this time.  Carol has scheduled a little R&R for the family in Playa del Carmen.  All this sightseeing can be so taxing!  Just kidding.  But if you are in Cancun, you might as well take advantage, right?  So we have four days of lounging by the pool in an all-inclusive resort scheduled before we finally fly back to Costa Rica.  Well, before three of us head south.  Carol has to take a detour to Washington D.C. for work.  Someone has to finance this extravaganza!  But don’t think I’m freeloading it.  I still am cracking the whip making sure math, and science, and social studies, and art, and English are getting done.  At least, that’s what the kids would tell you.  Personally, I think writing a little blogpost after climbing Mayan ruins is a pretty cushy way of getting your social studies and English homework done.  And that whip hasn’t really seen the light of day since we were in Samara a month ago…

Link to map