To Puerto Morelos

After leaving Puebla we spent the night on the Veracruz coast, hot and sticky (just like Atlanta). The next morning we stopped in La Venta, the earliest large "pyramid" in mesoamerica, actually an earthen mound like we have in the US, that dates to the preclassic (i.e. pre-Teotihuacan) period, around 1000 BC. Some see its builders, the Olmecs, as the mother of mesoamerican civilizations. The museum was pretty poor, but I wanted to see the site since I had learned about it, but had never visited.

An Olmec head in the La Venta Museum.

Main mound at La Venta from the plaza.

At the top of the main mound, well above the trees with view to the horizon on all sides.

Active army ant trails in grass next to the main mound.

We headed for the road along the base of Yucatan hoping to find a place to spend the night near the sites of Becan and Rio Bec. When we finally got there, we found a brand new hotel with virtually no guests. Unfortunately, they wanted to charge $650 MX (which seems pretty steep to me), and we only had about that much on us, so we went to the modern town of Becan to find an ATM. Of course there was none, the closest being in Chetumal, a couple of hours away. We regretfully left Rio Bec behind and continued on to Chetumal. I would really like to visit it someday.

Chetumal is on the Caribbean, with a large bay. It too has grown in the years since we had our VW engine replaced. We spent the night and went on to Tulum the next morning.

From the municipal dock looking back at Chetumal.

On the way, we stopped at Bacalar where we had stayed while our VW was being fixed. We could not find the lab where we had stayed, but we did see the 1930s fort, built just after the end of the Caste War (which lasted from the late nineteenth century). The Maya turned out to be a bigger problem than the folks in Mexico City originally realized.

The fort at Bacalar

We got to Tulum in the evening. It became apparent that the area had been hit by hurricane Wilma, as the trees looked like they had been mowed off about 5 meters above the ground.

The town is a few kilometers from the beach. Christiane wanted to sleep to the sound of surf, so we stayed in a cabaña on the beach instead of a hotel in town. We had dinner in town before heading back for a beer at the bar at the cabañas. The electrical generator turns on at sundown, around 6:30, and lasts for two hours, then everyone just goes to bed. The bath was in a central building, cold water only; and I looked around carefully for scorpions when I got up to go to the john, just like my grandparents had told me to do.

The cabañas on the right and the restaurant/bar on the left, view from the beach.

View of the beach of next set of cabañas, note the missing sand on the beach thanks to Wilma.

Home sweet home. The wattle walls allow a lot of wind to come through.

Working on the blog just before lights out, battery power only.

The restaurant/bar.

The next morning, we packed up and headed to the site of Tulum before the buses from Cancun showed up. We just made it. The site is no longer as easy to reach as it was 30 years ago. Back then I body surfed up the beach and climbed the cliff to the site. Now you have to go in the main gate and stay on the paths, which is really a good thing with the numbers of tourists who come through everyday.

As the buses from Cancun showed up with their hoards of camera toting Americans, the rest of us left to visit other sites. We had read in our French guidebook to visit Tulum early in order to avoid the Cancun tourist buses, and curiously, nearly everyone else who showed up early was also French. They had to have used the same guidebook, Le Routard.

Tulum was a Maya "port" catering to the extensive coastal canoe trade at the time of the conquest, and continuing for a few years afterwards. Three sides were protected by stone walls, and the fourth side by these cliffs. All the buildings are somewhat poorly constructed and about half-sized. It was the main such "port" city on the coast. It was reinhabited and became the capital of the Maya rebellion after Puerto Carrillo fell to Mexican forces in the early twentieth century during the Caste War.

One of the better preserved temples with a plaster bas-relief of the upside-down god in the center tablero and found on several buildings in Tulum and in other sites such as Labna.

We headed to Coba, which had only just opened 30 years ago when we first visited. It was a lot further than I remembered, and the jungle had grown back over most of the site that had been quite open and exposed 30 years ago. Rather than renting a bicycle to get around like the other folks, (they must have had a different guidebook), we decided to walk around the site. Bad idea. It is BIG. I declined climbing the main pyramid, which is possible now, but which had been closed then. My vertigo took one look at it and decided it was too steep and the steps to uncertain, and there was no rope or chain. So I guess I will never get to the top. Coba is known for its elevated roads, or sacbes; but we did not see any.

Coba's main pyramid with rounded ends like Uxmal.

A ball court at Coba with temples on the tops of both sides facing away from the court.

A minor pyramid at Coba with rounded ends, and steps making it nearly impossible to have been climbable. There are no stairs on the other sides.

We continued on to Puerto Morelos where Lilia has her cultural resources company, Empresa del Manejo Cultural, S.A., and checked in a the Hotel Inglaterra (probably not the best choice).