Daniel says the Mayans bathed five times a day and that seems like about the right number. If I am not busy wiping sweat off my face here, I am focused on scratching a mosquito bite. I will not even try to discuss the joy of wearing a face mask when it is 95 and you are out walking Mayan ruins for 3 or 4 miles a day. You female readers of a certain age will know about an added bonus in regards to bodily heating/cooling circuitry malfunctions so factor that in as well;)
I write this from the porch of our little beach casita in Playa del Carmen, where we’re sitting for two days before we head home. It’s a lovely little beach hotel, just beachy enough to remind me that I am not a beach person in the traditional sense. I don’t like the salt, the sand, walking in the sand, getting sand anywhere on me, the moisture, the sargassum, or swimming in the ocean. Don’t let Ron know this as we shelled out more for this hotel room than any of the others. And, even worse, upon arrival here at Mahekal Beach Resort, I pronounced our first room too small and too hot and made Ron haul all his stuff over to a new room and give the hotel even more money for the upgrade. Ron is a lucky man.
We finished up our touring with Daniel by heading out to Uxmal, the final ancient Mayan city for this trip. Uxmal is a Puuc style site from between 600 and 900 AD with about 20,000 citizens. I loved Chichen Itza (Ron pronunciation: Chicken Itsa) for the grandeur of staring up at the pyramid from below but I loved Uxmal for the Puuc styling, which means that the pyramids have rounded edges and the upper sections are ornately carved with art and pillars. Here’s a couple of pictures from Uxmal. In the first one, you can see that my hat has taken on an entire life of its own and will not be controlled. In the end, my hat experiment did provide some shade, but also created its own tripping hazards.
Here’s a better shot of some of the carvings from the Governor’s Palace at Uxmal. The top one is the Platform of the Jaguars, a ceremonial altar.
I’ve been fairly determined to leave most of the COVID out of this trip but I know people are curious as to how it affected our travels. I will tell you that our time in Merida was impacted fairly significantly. We missed the Mayan World museum, a house museum downtown and then we missed two hacienda tours due to limited operations. We also missed our last cenote due to a closure. Here is Daniel, at the gate, begging and pleading for them to let us in, but no luck. Ron, the cenote traitor, was probably happy. Our beach casita here at Mahekal has its own plunge pool and it will have to do as our final “cenote.”
Daniel did get us into one hacienda, which was built in the 1700s. Hacienda Yaxcopoil was one of the largest haciendas, with 22,000 acres to start with, whittled down by economics and politics to 600. It started as a cattle ranch and then began making sisal fiber. It fell into disuse and sat abandoned for decades until, about 20 years ago, one of the family members started rehabbing it and allowing the public in. Here’s his work so far. From the first picture, Ron and I were sure the interior would be in similar ruins, but look at the next two pictures. We’ve been continuously struck by the contrast between building exteriors and interiors in the Yucatan. The charm is always a wonderful surprise.
That’s about it for us. I’ll leave you with a couple of pics: the first one is the road to a cenote. This took us about 40 minutes of driving and I could feel Ron’s glare, boring a hole into my skull through each and every minute. He made sweeping statements about how I better enjoy this cenote and this road is so long and so you can rest assured that this cenote was inaccessible to me, with no entry platform or safe ladder.
Finally, here’s Ron at Choco-Story in Uxmal. The history of chocolate making and economic development a la cacao but actually just another opportunity for Ron to make some new friends. There was an aviary as well, but I avoided it so that Daniel did not have to observe my meltdown when inside a chamber with free-flying birds, last on display in Costa Rica. I’ll be back with you all later this year:)
Travels with Valerie 