“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)
***
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.
Even now, with people plotting travels to Mars, things turn up that make you think: how is it possible that no one has found this stuff before? In June 2020, an archaeologist from the University of Arizona announced that his team had unearthed the oldest and biggest Maya structure in Mexico’s Tabasco state, near the Guatemalan border. Using lidar, a type of laser technology that creates a 3D map of a landscape by repeatedly flying over it with a plane, the archaeologists found a colossal platform, 400 by 1400 metres, built from clay and earth. I repeat, 400 by 1400! A hundred football fields and no one had a clue.
God knows what might still turn up.
***
In Belize, we stayed on the Stardust Sanctuary Farm amidst that rich history. An old ruin hid on the farmland, waiting for excavation, and workers regularly found pottery or other remnants from the people who inhabited these lands more than a millennium earlier. With a bit of overstatement, you could say that one could plant his shovel anywhere in the soil and dig up a Mayan artefact.
It inspired the amateur Indiana Jones. One French Workawayer, prone to keeping himself occupied without working too much, was keen to prove the said statement and went digging in random spots on the farm. Big was the consternation of the other farm residents when, once, he returned out of breath, ecstatically claiming he’d found Something Important. There were, he believed, even some kind of hieroglyphs on the damn thing. And it was huge! The clever guy had found drum roll an old water cistern.
To Uxmal with a detour
All of the above to say that tourists have every opportunity to choose which ruins to visit. For every Tikal, there is an Ixkun. For every Chichen Itza an Ek Balam. The most famous Maya ruins in Mexico, Chichen Itza, qualify as one of the seven wonders of the world. But we had also read that hordes of tourists stampede over it, from cruise ships and monster hotels along the Riviera Maya. That prospect didn’t appeal to us. Hence, we chose to visit Uxmal instead.
We found ourselves an Airbnb in the closest town to the site, Muna. I realise this is funny for our Estonian readers. Partly because it felt weird to return to Mérida for another night, having stayed there for a good three weeks. More importantly, we assumed it would be more straightforward and quicker to reach the ruins in the morning.
***
Boy, were we wrong! Despite instructions from our Airbnb host, a tour guide himself, there didn’t seem to be a bus in the early morning. Or we’d missed it. The token taxi driver offered to take us, claiming that the next bus would be running only at 10 am. The oldest tourist scam in the world.
It was 8 am, opening time of Uxmal, and I had no wish to wait that long. I am terribly impatient — only a few things are worse than waiting idly, one of them is waking up very early for no reason. Instead of counting on vague promises of a 9 am collective taxi, we began walking in the direction of Uxmal. Not that we could realistically reach the site on foot, but we might get lucky hitchhiking. Alas, the road was devoid of any traffic whatsoever. Until a lonely shiny car zipped into our direction. The car stopped.
Travels with a Great Dane
Teresa was a middle-aged lady from Portugal, who lived in France with her older husband. Travelling in the Yucatan had mostly meant sitting by his sickbed. Now he started feeling slightly better – good enough to leave the hacienda where they were staying – they had explored some sites together the previous day. But he still needed to rest. Teresa was crazy about Maya ruins, so she set out alone. She proposed to take us to Kabah, a less famous site that she was going to visit before heading to Uxmal. We happily accepted her offer.
After she had generously paid for our entrance tickets to Kabah, Teresa argued with the lady behind the counter. We didn’t hear what they said but saw how Teresa grumpily retreated to the car. It turned out that her two stuffed animals, a woodpecker named Woody and a penguin named Pedro, had been rejected entry to the park.
***
She explained to us that she didn’t go anywhere without them. And she took many pictures of them, adorned with little Mexican sombreros. In fact, when she showed us her photo feed from the previous day, we noticed that not a single of her pictures was without them. Once, when the animals couldn’t enter the anthropology museum in Mexico City, she admitted, she had also refused to go in. The museum receptionist had offered to keep them in custody for her, but she had rejected that suggestion, claiming she would feel heartbroken if something were to happen to them.
Woody and Pedro had belonged to her late Great Dane, who had gotten bone cancer, undergone an amputation and, despite the worst predictions, had still lived for 13 months, six of which he’d spent travelling through Europe. The dog had been so happy, Teresa said, running and jumping with three legs. Teresa belonged to a support group of dog owners with canines suffering from bone cancer. The group’s president had encouraged her to write about her travels with her three-legged friend, to show others that amputation could be a viable option even for big dogs.
Alas, after the death of the dog, Teresa couldn’t let it go. Maybe something snapped – she called it the child in herself being reinvigorated. Instead of storing the stuffed animals away in a suitcase in the attic, she continued to travel with them. “They have their own character”, she said. “Pedro is the wise and calm guy. Woody is vain, wild and always eating.” Her two daughters thought that she’d lost it, Teresa confided. “But I think they have lost something, their childlike wonder.”
Kabah: “Out of this world”
We explored the ruins of Kabah together. It is true – not two of these Mayan sites are alike. Here, we saw intricate carvings, patterns that could come straight from the book of an interior designer. Or from the towels of Marimekko. The Palace of the Masks, Codz Poop, contained hundreds of masks of the rain god Chaac, the long-nosed protector of the harvest.
We found iguanas lazing on sunny rocks, orange trees in the middle of an ancient courtyard and a dazzling view of the surroundings, with at least one other unexcavated temple mount in view. “It’s out of this world”, Teresa kept saying. What was even more remarkable: we were the only tourists on the site until an older American couple, doing the tour of the ruins of the Yucatan, joined us. Neither them nor Teresa could stop joking about the lack of tourists.
Spotting iguanas in Uxmal
Uxmal was busier, fair enough, but not killingly so. Upon entering this prominent site, the Pyramid of the Magician draws the attention straight away. A 38-metre high elliptical structure, its little stairs running up at such a steep angle that they induce a sense of vertigo by just looking at them. A legend claims that, challenged by the local governor, a local dwarf built the pyramid in one day.
Although we were too late to have Uxmal all to ourselves, we enjoyed clambering over the ruins, admiring the stone carvings and spotting many iguanas, seemingly ignored by everyone else. The iguanas blended in so well with the temples that it sometimes looked like they were part of the whole setting, that they had been sculpted out by a Mayan artist rather than having appeared from a crevice for a sunbathing session a minute earlier. There were also plenty more images of Chaac.
We climbed up the Great Pyramid, a partly renovated endless staircase. After emerging on top, we took a moment to find our breath before we could enjoy the magnificent panoramas. Rainforests as far as the eye reached. Exploring this site, or any similar Mayan ruin, it takes a bit of imagination to remember that real people breathed here once. People, built up of flesh and blood, hopes and fears, lived, loved and died on these very spots. Somehow it’s easier to assume that history is just entertainment for future generations. But when that realisation finally hits, it also fuels a lust for life, an understanding that life needs to be lived without regret.
***
For the record: there were no cenotes in this region, no permanent sources of fresh, potable water. The Maya of Uxmal and Kabah depended entirely on the generosity of Chaac, the rain god. Hence, the reverence of his person. Just like in Kabah, hundreds of masks of Chaac plaster the Governor’s Palace in Uxmal. Whenever Venus set behind the palace, in April or May, the rainy season started. The sign that Chaac was benevolent. Other, probably more practical souls started collecting water in chultunes, to compensate for that lack of natural supply. Chultunes were cisterns in the ground. Maybe that French volunteer was right after all!
(Tips for exploring Uxmal and Kabah follow after the pictures)
Tips for exploring Maya ruins on the Yucatan peninsula
- Go early. Crowds are thinner and the sun isn’t that brutal yet. We make it a habit to find accommodation close to the site rather than being ferried on a godforsaken hour.
- Stay late. Maya ruins, especially the popular ones, are relatively expensive. We usually made a full day trip out of them. This way, you can take things slowly, take plenty of breaks for picnics or to simply read under a tree.
- Don’t rush. You’re probably seeing this wonder only once in your lifetime. Do you really want to run through it so you can make the happy hour in your hotel? Sites such as Tikal, in Guatemala, are very extended. You can walk for hours over small jungle trails to find completely abandoned ruins. Most people, however, only allocate a little bit of time for exploration, exclusively to the main buildings. This is a shame.
- Don’t look only at the obvious ones. Chitzen Itza and Uxmal are popular for a reason. But the Maya were absolutely everywhere in this part of the world. It’s probably a good idea to visit some less famous sites as well.
- Pack up picnic and plenty of water. So you don’t have to rely on supplies at inflated prices on the site itself.
Pingback: 9 remarkable reasons why we love the Yucatan - Volcano Love