A Little Taste of Mexico

With only 14 hours before I step onto a plane to return to the US, I have to briefly tell you about my last few stops in Mexico, Tulum, Chichen Itza,... and Cancun. 

Tulum and Chichen Itza are both sites of Mayan ruins.  Tulum is a popular place to visit less because of the ruins themselves and more because they overlook the Caribbean from atop cliffs. Chichen Itza (pronounced Cheechen Eetza) is in the north central part of the Yucatan Peninsula and has impressive buildings and a lot of well-preserved sculpture.  Both are like Disneyland in that they attract droves of tourists every day.  It was a bit of culture shock for me to visit these places after spending three months in countries that have a small, though steady, flow of tourists.  Even at Tikal, there was only a fraction of the people that I encountered at Chichen Itza.  And it was hot in Chichen Itza.  Walking on the open grass near El Castillo (see below), I could feel my face baking in the sun.  But I had to count my blessings after I overheard a tour guide telling his group that the heat was nothing, that day it was only 90 degrees, but in July and August it can be 110 degrees. 

The ruins themselves at Tulum are pretty small.  What attracts people to visit is the seaside setting.  Here are two sights in Tulum:

Templo del Dios del Viento (Temple of the Wind God)

Iguana - they were everywhere

In addition to visiting the ruins, I also took a half day snorkeling trip, first in the ocean, and then in a place called Dos Ojos (Two Eyes), part of a series of fresh water caves called the Cenotes.  While in the ocean, I saw my first sea turtles.  They are really cool animals with a lot of personality.  You would think that the sea turtles would be the best part of the day, but actually, the fresh water caves were amazing.  We spent the majority of the half day, exploring one of the two eyes.  You access the caves by walking over top of them and then down and around the side of the the large entrance, which is an opening in the ground like the door of an igloo.  There is a little staircase into the cave, and once you get to the bottom of it, you're swimming.  At the entrance, the cave went back about 30 feet in relatively shallow water that looks turquoise because of the white rocks at the bottom.  There were passageways to the right and left that led deeper into the cave system, where there was less natural light and the rooms were covered in stalagtites and stalagmites.  At one point, the guide took us through a narrow and winding path where we couldn't bring our heads out of the water because the stalagtites came down too close to the water and there wasn't room.  The path led to a small, dark room where we all turned off our flashlights and treaded water in silence.  The Mayans used the room as a place to meditate and I could see why.         

I spent just over two days in Tulum.  From there, I did a long day trip from Tulum to Chichen Itza to Cancun.  In hindsight, I'm not sure why I rushed through Chichen Itza.  I could have at least spent one night there to put off my inevitable and much-dreaded arrival in Cancun.  March is spring break time when underage American college kids flock to Cancun to attain a state of perpetual drunkenness.  But, now at the end of my trip, I'm looking forward to coming home, and the thought of spending another night in a small town didn't have much appeal at the time.  After four days in Cancun and its environs, I regretted that decision.  Anyway, Chichen Itza was well worth it.  When planning this trip a few months back, I really thought I would hit a saturation point in Mayan ruins.  But I've now seen two more sites than I originally planned, and each site has its own unique and interesting features.  I mentioned before that Copan, Honduras is known for its sculpture, while Tikal is known for its Temples.  Chichen Itza was impressive because in addition to having sculpture that rivaled Copan, and an impressive pyramid, it had an additional defining feature of hundreds of columns, each of which had carvings on all sides.   The pictures below show what I thought were the hghlights:

El Castillo - The only pyramid at Chichen Itza.

Templo de los Guerreros - Temple of the Warriors

A Closer Look at the Columns of the Temple of the Warriors

Close up of a building whose sculpture depicts the heads of people killed in war by the Mayans.

 
It was a great blessing to have a little bit of time in Mexico.  I've only explored a tiny portion of the country and will have to come back another time to see more.

Crocodiles, Monkeys, Mayan Ruins, and More

I spent five days on Caye Caulker and then made one last stop in Belize before leaving.  The stop was in the north central part of the country in a place called Orange Walk.  It's main attraction for me was the opportunity to take a boat ride down a river to the Mayan ruins at Lamanai.  Enroute to the ruins, you pass a Mennonite settlement, a sugar mill, a rum factory, and you see a lot of white herons, snowy herons, crocodiles, monkeys, etc.  It's a great day trip, and since Orange Walk is a little bit off the beaten path, it's a good way to get a break from the tourist mob.

The hotel options are sparse in Orange Walk, but I found a small family-run place just outside of town and right on the river.  It had a large veranda facing the river with a restaurant that was popular in the daytime, but I was the only guest there so it was a quiet little retreat for me. 

The boat for the daytrip to Lamanai picked me up first and we started upriver to pick up the rest of the tour group (mostly Americans daytripping from the beach resorts on Belize's coast).  On the way, I saw my first crocodile:

Check out the Teeth!  We saw some babies too, but this was the biggest one.  She was about 6 feet long.  That's pretty small as they can get to be up to 10 feet. 

It took about an hour to reach Lamanai.  The weather was perfect, no clouds in the sky.  We were lucky because the day before and the day after were cloudy and cold - more of that abnormal weather.  Lamanani is only partially excavated, so the pictures below constitute the bulk of what there is to see.  The climb up the main pyramid was the best part.  From the top, we were higher by far than anything around us, and we were surrounded by jungle on three sides and the river and sugar cane fields on the fourth side.  There was an archaeological marker at the top dated 1966. 

The Main Pyramid at Lamanai - it's ~112 feet high

Climbing the Main Pyramid - Going up was Nothing; It was Down that was Hard

Mask at the Base of a Temple at Lamanai

Jaguar Mask at the Base of a Smaller Pyramid

On the way back from Lamanai, the tour guide made a few extra stops.  One by the sugar mill where barges were being loaded with sugar and attached to a tug boat to go up-river.  Two, we visited a few spider monkeys in a little inlet by the rum factory (which looked like a barn) to feed them bananas.  One of them came right onto the boat and sat within a foot of me, so I got some great pictures of him. 

The Sugar Mill

Barges Loaded with Sugar Waiting to be Transported Up River

Spider Monkey

Lamanai was another great stop.  The next day, I took a chicken bus into Mexico, which wasn't in my original plan.  I have rescheduled my flight back to the US from Cancun so that I don't have to go all the way back to Costa Rica.  So, I've been able to see a few things in Mexico while making my way up to Cancun.  More to come...

If You Don't Belizen it Yet, Maybe the Pictures will Convince You

Belize it or not, my arrival in Belize City was the first time I have seen the Caribbean.  Well, truth be told, I did see it from Galveston, TX once, but the waters were kind of murky there, so I won't count that.  Here are a few pictures of the Caribbeans more beautiful parts:

From the beach on Caye Caulker

The "split" - Caye Caulker was divided in half by a narrow channel of water when a hurricane came through a few years back.

You Better be Belizen It

Every middle-aged white guy in Belize was wearing a shirt or hat or something with that saying printed on it.  Tikal was my last stop in Guatemala before crossing the border into Belize and heading for the turquoise waters and white-sand beaches of the coast.  My first stop was Belize City.  After 3 months of travel, I have met many, many people who have traveled through Belize City and none of them had anything good to say about it.  So, when I arrived in the city I went straight to the ferry terminal and caught the next boat to the island of Caye Caulker, a 45 minute boat ride east of Belize and very close to the giant reef that attracts divers and snorkelers from all over.

I didn't have a plan when I got to Caye Caulker, but I ended up staying for five days, did some great snorkeling, and got a fantastic sunburn.  The latter was due to some fake sunblock that I bought in the ferry terminal in Belize City.  The same thing happened to a fellow traveler.  The moral of the story is, among others, that if your SPF 40 doesn't feel like syrup going on, it ain't the real deal.

Belize, like many other places in the world, has had abnormal weather lately.  My first full day on Caye Caulker, it was cloudy and cold.  The streets were deserted.  It was like everyone went into hiding until the sun came back. 

The island is car-less, so the only modes of transport are bicycles, golf carts, and your own two feet.  It's a tiny place, so you really don't need more than your feet to get around.  The streets, if they are paved at all, are covered in white dust and sand blown inland from the shoreline.  There is a lot of rastafarian culture.  That means lots of dreadlocks, reggae music, crazy accents, and the speed of life cranks back a few notches.

By day three, I and the weather were finally ready for some snorkeling.  I signed up to do a full day snorkeling trip at three different sites along the reef, and culminating with the Hol Chan (for those of you familiar with the reef).  At the first stop, we saw stingrays, sharks, lots of schools of fish, and lots and lots more fish.  The boat dropped us off a ways from the reef and we swam out to it with the sand beneath us gradually turning to thick and varied plant life.

At the second stop, our boat captain threw bait in the water to attract a shark.  He fed it for a while and then told us to get in the water... He assured us that sharks don't eat humans, they just bite sometimes because they get confused about whether we are food.  So, we all got in the water. 

The Shark (Sorry I don't remember what kind it was)

The third stop, the Hol Chan, was a hole about 30-40 feet deep lined with coral.  The water was so clear that we could see all the way to the bottom and watch hundreds of fish doing their thing.  On the way back to the boat, our guide spotted a moray (sp?) eel.  Everyone was very excited about it, so I assumed that it was a somewhat rare sight.  It came halfway out from under a rock, checked us out, and then disappeared again.           

The only other snorkeling that I have done on this trip (and really ever) was at the beginning of the trip in Costa Rica, where the water was murky and rough and I saw one blue fish and one purple fish and at one point, we all panicked because we thought we had lost one of our group.  This snorkeling experience in Belize was way better.  I had to do it again... but later.    

P.S. Sorry, I don't have more pictures to share.  I don't have an underwater camera :(

The Mayan Ruins at Tikal, Guatemala

After I walked on lava in Antigua, climbed the highest mountain in Central America in Xela, painted a Mayan masterpiece on Lake Atitlan, and visited the market at Chichicastenango, I had only one more stop to make before leaving Guatemala.  That was all the way on the other side of the country in the northeast corner.  I took another olympian bus ride across Guatemala from Antigua to Flores and from there took a day trip to Tikal.  The ruins are kind of remote, an hour+ drive from Flores, so I had to get up at 4am to catch a shuttle that would get me there in plenty of time for good pictures before the sun got too bright and too hot. 

The ruins are tucked back in the jungle, the jungle that didn't exist when the Mayans lived in Tikal.  After the Mayans mysteriously abandoned their big cities, the jungle grew up and over Tikal.  Archaeologists have uncovered a lot at the site, so you can see six big temples, and hundreds of smaller structures.  It's a huge site and you easily spend a day wandering through the jungle paths from structure to structure.  It takes 20 minutes to walk from the front gate to the Grand Plaza where two of the six temples are.  Tikal was a much different experience than the ruins that I visited in Copan, Honduras a few weeks back.  Copan is known for its sculpture, while Tikal is known for its towering temples.  If you look back at the pictures in my posting about Copan, you can easily see the difference.  Below, are a few pictures of Tikal to give you a sense of the place:

Tempe 1 and 2 in the Grand Plaza Rising Above the Jungle Canopy (The picture was taken from the top of Temple 4)

The Bottom of Temple 1 (Taken from the top of Temple 2)

Temple 2

Temple 5

So, you've ascertained by now that you can climb several of the temples at Tikal.  You can see in the picture of Temple 5 that the stairs are crumbling in some places, so separate wooden staircases/ladders have been built on the sides.  These staircases have seen better days and it's a goose bumpy experience to climb up and especially back down them.  But the views from the top are phenomenal.  Temple 4 was the tallest, at about 180 feet, but because it is still covered in jungle (except for the top) it's hard to fully appreciate its size and height. Temple 5 was my favorite because you can better appreciate just how high you are. 

Staircase to the Top of Temple 5 (When I got to the top of the first set of stairs, the railing came loose in my hands!  It was not a good way to start the climb.)

Tikal for me was like the denouement of the trip (where the story peaks and then afterward, you're resolving the loose ends and closing up).  Everything before it felt like I was working towards it, and everything after feels like I'm squeezing it in before it's too late and the story is over.  My expectations for Tikal were completely met, particularly when I stood at the top of Temple 5 looking over miles and miles of jungle, with ant-sized people at the temple's base, and vertigo setting in. 

Lago de Atitlan, Guatemala

I'm playing catch up now.  I visited Lago de Atitlan two weeks back, but haven't had the opportunity to write about it until now. 

The lake was my next stop after visiting Antigua.  It's a relatively remote place, but with smallish towns at each corner linked primarily by speedboat.  There is San Marcos, dominated by hippies; Panajachel, it's main street lined with restaurants and souvenir stands; Santiago, right between the two volcanos on the southern shore; and then there is San Pedro La Laguna, an odd little mix of tourist and indigenous Mayan culture.  I spent my time on the lake in San Pedro.  It's such a quiet, low key place that for the first afternoon there I wondered what I was going to do with myself.  There are some good hikes to do in the area, but my guidebook recommends that for security reasons, you take along a machete.  No thanks.  No Guatemalan gang members on hand here to act as tour guide, so I found other ways to fill the days. 

Crossing the Lake by Boat

I signed up for a Mayan painting class and painted myself my own little souvenir.  My instructor was a Mayan guy who has lived on the lake his whole life.  He was educated through the eighth grade (standard here) and then took up painting as his trade and has done that ever since.  I'm not sure how painting classes are supposed to work, but I imagine that generally the teacher sits back and tells the student what to do.  In my case, the teacher tried to do that, but I apparently was making such a mess of my painting that every time I added the color to the canvas, he would let me play with it for a minute and then take the canvas and shape my puddle of color into what it was supposed to be.  Every time I look at my canvas I think of him literally giggling at my efforts and telling me it's good, just before taking it out my hands to fix it.

I Don't Have a Picture of My Painting, but This is More Interesting Anyway

I ate my breakfast most mornings at a little restaurant right next to the water.  There were never more than one or two other people there, so I pretty much had the place to myself.  The lake fills the valley that would otherwise exist at the base of the mountains that surround it.  It's picturesque at any time of the day, but the mornings were best.  The mountains were a hazy blue high above the shoreline, and the water was a calm glassy, gray-blue.  There were patches of tall, green reeds along the shoreline.  Each morning, local fishermen would be out on the water in their rowboats fishing.  There was an old dock that went out from the shore near where I sat.  The only thing left of it were the support beams that came up out of the water.  Birds had adopted the posts as perches and would fully occupy them at all hours of the day, always facing in the direction of the sun.

Birds on the Old Dock Greet the Morning

Fisherman Hard at Work

My second day on the lake a friend from Antigua came out to join me.  We ate dinner at a restaurant overlooking the water whose menu boasted a big plate of crab legs and shrimp (that's really what the picture showed).  That sounded to us like too much unexpected luxury to pass up, so we both ordered that.  We were very surprised when the food arrived and instead of a big plate of food, it was a big bowl of watery broth with a whole fish, a whole crab, and a bunch of leggy, eyes-in-tact shrimp all floating in the broth.  I cried laughing (you all know how I can be that way) as we fished around - pun intended - in our broth to discover what else might be floating there.  It definitely wasn't the Alaskan crab legs and peeled, de-eyed and de-legged jumbo shrimp I know I had imagined when I ordered.  Even after weeks of traveling, I can be deluded by my expectations.  We ate what we could of the soup, but were unable to get meat out of the crab, and the fish was too bony to bother with.  So, on the way back from the restaurant we stopped at a hamburger shop owned by a proper ex-pat American who made us a big juicy hamburger while explaining to us what we had just experienced.  Apparently, we had ordered a traditional Maya dish, only we made the mistake of actually trying to eat the seafood, which was only meant to flavor the broth. 

And as a last little adventure on Lake Atitlan, I smoked one of the Honduran cigars that I got on my cigar factory tour a few weeks back.  For those of you who have told me that you want one, you have a good cigar coming your way.   

There's So Much to Say...

Sorry for the long delay from post to post.  I'm in Tulum, Mexico and have finally found a reliable internet connection again.  Ironically, the more developed country among my destinations (Belize) was least reliable for the internet.  I'll write a lot over the next few days to catch you up on my latest little adventures.  I just arrived in Tulum from Belize this afternoon and will be here for a few days.  I'll visit some Mayan ruins on the Caribbean coast tomorrow and will probably be snorkeling in a cave the day after and maybe visiting more Mayan ruins the day after that.  I only have 8 days left of my trip so I'm squeezing in every last bit of activity I can at this point. 

Thanks for keeping up with me.  I'm looking forward to seeing all of you when I get back to the States!