Ruins, Small Towns, and Street Music (Craig)

After the night spent in the lovely little town of Ticul, where we last blogged, we had a MAJOR Mayan ruin day. Four ruins in a day. That´s on the verge of overdoing it, even for us (although we did more than that everyday for five days at Angkor). The first ruin was Uxmal, one of the more famous of the Mayan ruins. It is really a good one and was the best of the day. A fantastic pyramid as you walk in with several large buildings surrounding it. I´ll let Amy take care of the details, if she does, but the most fun we had was really going off the beaten track there, taking these little trails back into the bush. Mainly, the tourists stay in the area where the ruins have been nicely cleaned up. But if you just go a few hundred meters back along trails, you are bound to come to a ruin covered in trees and brush, but they still look great.

Yesterday we spent driving through several small Mayan towns. We only saw one other tourist, a young woman on a bicycle. These towns are the real deal. One had a great market, I´d love to tell you the name of the town, but it was some Mayan unpronouncable name that sounded like Ochtoktok or something. They are famous for their oranges and they were getting ready for their orange festival. Amy bought a huipile there that had the flowers painted on instead of sewn on. We had lunch in the next town, called something like TicTacToe and had a delicious ceviche. We indeed got stared at whereever we went here, but they smiled as they stared. The folks here are very nice and are always saying ´hola´or ´buenos dias´.

The only bad part about driving here is that at the entrance and exit to every town are ´topes´, which are these nasty speed bumps. Many don´t have any warning and you really can´t see them, so when you go over them you really feel them. Someone counted the topes between Merida and Cancun and there are 147!! I think I went over at least that many yesterday.

Today, in Merida, I finally bought a Panama hats. I have a couple of really nice Montecristo finos from Equador, but I don´t travel with those because they are a bit too valuable. Here we were quoted from 500 to over 1000 pesos (13 to the dollar), which sounded a little much to me. But in the Zocalo today, where arts and crafts are set up on Sunday, there were several stalls selling Panamas. These, as with the Equadorian kind, you can fold up and they pop right back out into shape. They are made from hennequen fiber, which was the big thing here 100 years ago when there were hennequen haciendas all over the Yucatan. But today I got one that was 250 pesos, so that´s not all that bad.

Now we are in the small town of Izamal, about an hour outside of Merida. There is a huge fiesta here, for the local Virgin of Izamal, where pilgrims from all over. Well, there are people who come here for a pilgrimage and there are others who come here to get drunk. Lots of Sol beer here, as I think they may be a sponser of the fiesta. The zocalo is filled with rides for kids and is surrounded by food stalls and stuff you can buy. But for some reason it is all very expensive. We had some tacos that would normally sell for 10 or 15 pesos, but we were charged 40. Belts I saw in Merida for 70 pesos were 160 here. Not sure whát´s up with that. There are a couple of really cool Mayan pyramids here, right in the middle of town. One takes up a huge city block and is supposedly one of the biggest of all Mayan pyramids. It´s free to climb, so lots of Mexican families were climbing it including little old ladies in huipiles and flip flops. I can´t imagine climbing on these slippery rocks in flip flops! Our hotel here is quite nice, the Mancan Che, and has individual cabins. $55 per night, including breakfast. A nice swimming pool that looks a bit like a cenote.