Merida

The Yucatan Peninsula is the most easterly portion of Mexico – the bit of land above Guatemala and Belize that separates the Gulf of Mexico from the Atlantic Ocean. The most well known city in Yucatan is of course Cancun, the famous international beach resort with miles of pristine sands and hotels… package holiday paradise. Actually Cancun is the final destination of this trip as it has a handy international airport – it’s on the north east corner of the peninsula. But we have a few stops planned en route for our last two weeks travelling, allowing us to see impressive Maya cities, crocodiles, and perhaps to scuba dive in some of the clearest tropical waters on earth. Or at least that is the plan!

Anyway, our first stop in our tour of the Yucatan Peninsula is the Spanish colonial town of Merida, situated near the coast on the northwest corner of land. It was a painful 8 hour bus journey from Palenque, through loads of pointlessly bureaucratically time consuming yet completely superficial police checkpoints (aimed we assume to give the impression of tackling local terrorist groups and drug cartels… but in reality the police were more interested half-baked searches of foreign visitors’ luggage than locals bags – making it completely pointless?).

Eventually we arrived in Merida to discover it is another pretty little Spanish-style town, with a lovely leafy central plaza, nice cathedral, pink churches… and lots of vendors trying to sell souvenirs to the herds of tourists from the USA. The touts really don’t pester us anywhere near as much as all the other travellers here – perhaps in the course of the year we’ve learnt to project an aura of disinterest! A very handy skill!

One of the reasons we were keen to visit Merida is that it is close to lots of ancient Maya ruins – after all we really liked Palenque and the other ancient Mexican cities we visited a few weeks ago. So we spent one day on a very handy local bus service visiting a number of sites in the region. One very hectic day. You see, the second class bus company ATS runs a service that leaves Merida terminal at 8.00 am each morning, loops around an impressive cluster of Maya sites on the Puuc Route, and then returns to Merida in the late afternoon. This trip is a cheap, handy way of seeing the most impressive temples and cities in the area while avoiding tours completely! No irritating guides, no herding around, lecturing – perfect. The only drawback is that the bus stops at each Maya site for a relatively short time: 20 – 30 minutes at the smaller complexes, and 1.5 hours at the large city of Uxmal. So you really do have to get your skates on to see each set or ruins… this is not a trip for the unfit!

The day we selected for our whirlwind tour of the temples was absolutely beautiful – clear blue skies, roasting sunshine. We’ve left the chilly altitudes well behind now and are firmly in the tropics again. The roasting temperatures didn’t exactly make the rapid trot around the Maya pyramids particularly comfortable… but the brilliant blue of the sky certainly made the photos we took pretty! Luckily the bus was well air-conditioned and offered a good respite on the short trips between ancient complexes.

First we visited Labna – a small but interesting site with its long El Palacio decorated with lots of columns and serpent’s heads. Labna also had a few temples, a rubbly pyramid, and a beautifully proportioned arch complete with decorative swirls. Then it was a quick 5 minute bus trip on to Xlapak which consisted of little more than a few isolated buildings in the middle of a reasonably dense forest. Afterwards we moved on to Sayil with its really impressive 3 storey El Palacio nestled in a pretty forest clearing. Actually there are plenty of temples and small structures scattered in the woods around the Palace… we went in search of a few and ended up running out of time horribly and having to run back to the bus! We did manage to find the well preserved and oddly roofed temple El Mirador, and a stone carving depicting a very well-endowed fertility God though! And then we travelled to the last of the minor complexes – the very wonderful Kabah. This was particularly worth seeing as it has a huge El Palacio, extensive and curiously decorated temple compounds, carved figurines, large pyramids… and for the really big lizards scampering through the undergrowth!

Our last stop of the day was at the extensive Maya city of Uxmal. By this time we were feeling more than a bit hot and bothered with our 30 minute-dash-stops at all the small sites, so we were glad to have a leisurely one and a half hours to see Uxmal. But Uxmal turned out to be so extensive that our one and a half hours turned into a bit of a lightning tour again! It’s just as well we normally walk fast! Anyway, this place is really worth seeing. It was clearly an important Maya city in ancient times, and the beautifully restored remnants remain impressive today. Huge palaces, governor’s houses, temples, bell courts, pyramids… and all blissfully quiet. During our visit we didn’t encounter a single large tour group (until we passed an irritating bunch of 30 odd overweight US teenagers on the way out) – perhaps most visit in the morning, which would make the afternoon arrival of the ATS bus trip a particularly good option for exploring in peace and quiet. We particularly liked the huge 39 meter high curved-pyramid-like temple Casa Del Adivino that looms over the entrance to the complex – if you clap your hands at the base of the rear of the temple you are rewarded by a really odd squeaky echo! Or there’s the Grand Pyramid with its impressive flight of steps to climb, the intricate serpentine heads decorating the Palacio Del Gobernador, or even the giant-lizard-infested rubble of the Cementerio pyramids with their skull and cross-bones engraved walls! Uxmal is lovely to wander around, and still nice to race through at break-neck speed in scorching temperatures like we did!

Well, we don’t have much time to catch our breath – tomorrow we visit Chichen Itza on the way to the coastal town of Tulum where we can catch our breath slightly for two nights before moving north towards scuba-diving heaven!