Templed Out…

¡Hola! We’ve finally found time to do another post after a hard week and a half on the road. Completing the Ruta Maya in Mexico was intense - we covered seven sites in eight days, equal to over two thousand km of travelling - but great fun. We were very grateful for the comfortable fleet of first class intercity buses and excellent roads (luxurious after Belize!). There were only two drawbacks. One was that we had to endure loud Hollywood movies, two or three on each journey. There’s only so many times you can watch I, Robot dubbed into Spanish, after all. The other drawback was that the bus company clearly views their passengers as perishable goods, to be kept chilled throughout the journey. We quickly learnt to bring socks, fleeces and long trousers onto the bus. We did hope to go as far as Oaxaca, in the centre of Mexico, but in the end we couldn’t face another fourteen hours of travel, not to mention the return leg.

We started off in the Yucatan peninsula, at Tulum. In hindsight, we could’ve skipped this site. The setting was beautiful, on a clifftop overlooking the turquoise Caribbean, but the ruins themselves were nothing compared to what we saw later. Also, the village itself was an expensive tourist trap lined with Italian restaurants, souvenir shops and internet cafes. We spent one night there and left.

Chichen Itza, on the other hand, was mind-blowing. We’d heard that the Great Pyramid was fantastic, but we didn’t expect the incredibly well-preserved reliefs - some of them still showing their original colours - and intricately ornate decorations on the other buildings. We got there at 8:30am, a good move because by 10 o’clock hordes of tourists were flocking in, and the heat and humidity had become unbearable. It got up to 40 degrees that day. We stayed in Valladolid, a town nearby still largely unspoilt by tourism, and also got to swim in a cenote, a section of an underground river revealed by the collapse of its limestone roof. It was very beautiful. The light shone down from a hole thirty metres above, through which the roots of an alamo tree stretched down into the pool. Bats flew above and black catfish swam with us in the clear water.

Uxmal was equally good, if not better than Chichen Itza. What knocked us out was the endlessly repeated abstract motifs and vividly carved serpents, tortoises and gods everywhere we looked. We also visited lesser sites at Kabah, Sayi and Edzna on the same day. Our base for this tour was Campeche, a beautiful and laid back walled city proud of its pirate legacy. There is street after street of immaculately clean, pastel-coloured colonial buildings and Mayan ladies in their traditional dresses living their everyday lives undisturbed by tourism. Everyone there is so relaxed and friendly that there´s a Mexican expression, “campechando”, for when people are having a good time.

Our final site was at Palenque, in Chiapas, a Mayan city rising from the jungle on beautiful hills. The ruins themselves were not as stunning as those in Chichen Itza or Uxmal, but the site, spread out in the middle of misty, jungle-covered mountains, screeching with cicadas, was very atmospheric. You could almost feel yourself in an Indiana Jones movie. The same afternoon we went to a couple of waterfalls nearby. Misul-Ha was the most breathtaking. A powerful river dropped twenty-five metres onto huge rocks sending up whirls of spray around us into the jungle.

We are now on Isla Cozumel, on the Caribbean coast, and enjoying some spectacular diving before we fly out to Peru on the 18th. Unfortunately, this end of Mexico is so heavily reliant on tourism from the States that it´s completely lost any authenticity. Once again, the streets are tourist traps with touts constantly trying to get you into their cigar, diamond or silverware shops. However, you forgive all this once you get into the water. The sea is a stunning turquoise - we´ve never seen anything like it before! - the coral formations are gigantic and the visibility so good that the colours are brilliant. Here there’s a powerful current, the Gulf Stream in fact, so all dives are so-called drift dives: you just relax, fold your legs up, and let the current propel you past the reef. It feels like you’re flying.

It hasn’t all been fun here though. News of the London bombings reached us quickly. A dive shop assistant told us about it, and we are still shocked and angry about it now. Thank goodness all our London friends are fine. We also kept a careful eye on Hurricane Dennis as it swept past us towards Cuba. In the end, though, we just got a couple of storms from its tail end, and certainly nothing as bad as those we experienced in Belize.

OK, we’re off for some hot-dogs now. Piccies will follow soon, we promise, including some of very strange marine life…

02:46:17 - Sunday, 10.07.05

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