9 remarkable reasons why we love the Yucatan

After all that whining about the Riviera Maya, you might suspect that I dragged myself with a long face through the Yucatan for five weeks. Couldn’t be further from the truth. Even though we only discovered a small piece of Mexico, it left us craving to see more of this land of cacti and cartels, mescal and peyote, Maya and Aztec, spicy candies and delicious food, Frida Kahlo and pint-sized, moustachioed guys with funny sombreros playing mariachi. After the lament, the eulogy. These are the reasons why we adore the Yucatan peninsula.

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Exploring Maya ruins on the Yucatan peninsula: the story of Woody and Pedro

“Almost every evening, on returning to the convent, the padrecito hurried into our room, with the greeting, “buenas noticias! otra ruinas!” “good news! more ruins!”

(John Lloyd Stephens – Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan)

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The Maya world – Yucatan and northern Central America – is strewn with ruins. Stones that once, more than a thousand years ago, belonged to temples that belonged to ancient cities that belonged to small and bigger empires. There are more historical Maya sites than qualified people to dig them up, more discoveries to be made than money to fund them.

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Birds in Copán Ruinas: a must-visit for lovers of our feathered friends

A pelican flying over your head when you’re floating in the salty Caribbean Sea. A walk through a toucan forest on the way to impressive temples in Guatemala. Bright red scarlet macaws gliding by in Honduras. A colony of pastel pink flamingos fluttering their wings in the low water of the Mexican coast. Central America is a true paradise for bird lovers.

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Five things we learned about the Maya in Central America

Who doesn’t know the game in which one person says a word and the other one completes with the first thing that pops into your head? I have no idea about the purpose of the game, except to prove that you have a dirty mind. Until a year ago, if you’d asked me to play and threw the word ‘Maya’ at me, I’d probably have replied ‘the bee’.

What about you? Be honest. Unless you’ve visited Central America or have a degree in history, you likely don’t know much about the Maya. Continue Reading →

Laguna Chicabal, a sacred volcano lake, or: How I Learned to Stop Being Impatience and Love the Slowness

The evening before our trip to Laguna Chicabal, we watched a cartoon called Zootopia. Don’t judge! When spending all day going to Spanish classes and trying to cram as many irregular verbs in your head as possible, we all need time to cool down our slowly sautéed brains. For those less educated in animated films, Zootopia is about Judy Hobbs, a rabbit from Bunnyburrow who tries to make it as a police detective in the big city.

Assigned a case about a dozen missing predators, Hobbs and her unlikely partner Nick Wilde, a red fox, head to the Department of Mammal Vehicles to have a plate run. Alas, the department is staffed entirely by three-toed slots which are stamping and stapling forms at a speed that would make the latter Pope John Paul II cringe. It’s easily the best scene of the film, and I laughed my head off. But Anete, as ever more prescient, asked: “Would you be laughing if it happened to you? Continue Reading →