Got up early to catch the bus. We waited at the travel agency where we had purchased the tickets, and where we had seen another tourist waiting for the bus the day before. The guy with the cricket bat showed up and talked about how he had camped out the night before in a new tent that he had just used for the first time, to discover that it was too small, and he had to sleep with his feet sticking out of the door. He was from Australia, and was basically making his way around the world without any plan.
The guy who ran the travel agency (and sold us the tickets) arrived, and noticed that someone was missing. He went to roust the guy up, who showed up a few minutes later. We sat around a bit more, blinking and looking at birds, waiting for the bus.
The bus arrived about a half an hour late, and we all got on. The Australian cricket player and the late awaker, who turned out to be from London, sat near each other and chatted for quite a bit, comparing travel notes. They were both young, recent college graduates. They had both travelled around the Pacific Northwest. One thing that they said was that “the U.S. portrays itself as a classless society, but that’s total bullshit.”
The van was late leaving, but it finally departed. The “tour” basically consisted of us being transported to sites and being left to wander around by ourselves for a bit at each location.
The first stop was breakfast, which was pretty decent. It was a buffet, in a large wooden shack, that seated maybe 100 people or so, at shaky tables with log rounds for chairs. The food was scrambled eggs, with or without tomatoes, refried beans, rice, tortillas, very reasonable coffee, fresh fruit (banana, papaya, pineapple and water melon) and juice. We ate heartily and drank a few cups of coffee. We sat near one of the other passengers on our bus, and learned that he was from Italy, and living in Mexico City, while studying at college. We had one of those funny multi-lingual conversations, mostly in English and Spanish, but occasionally lapsing into Italian, with Xie and CM digging for a few words in that language.
The driver never gave us too much information about how long the rides would be, or when we were going to stop. After several hours, we arrived in a town called Bethel, on the Usumacinta river, which separates Mexico and Guatemala. We had to pick what we were going to eat for lunch. Jess chose chicken, while Xie and CM chose carne (beef). Then the driver got back in and drove us down to the river, where there were long, flat river boats waiting. We piled into one of the boats and after a while, motored off.
The ride down the Usumacinta was cool. We saw groups of people doing laundry, with their kids playing around them, cows coming down to drink, kids jumping off the rocks, into the water and running along the shore.
The limestone formations along the river were interesting to look at, big rocks all smooth and blobular. The geology of the whole Yucatán peninsula appears to be limestone and more limestone. We don’t recall seeing any other type of natural rock there.
We arrived at Yaxchilan and had just over two hours to explore the ruins. We started heading up the trail and immediately started seeing interesting birds in the trees. A dilema – with our limited time, should we spend our time looking at birds, or at the ruins? We tried to make a balance.
The first thing to see was the labyrinth. This is a building that you could go inside. There are many twisting passages, and you could easily get lost. You wouldn’t be lost for terribly too long — the building wasn’t that huge. The real danger was that you could trip on stair steps and hurt yourself. It was very dark. CM was glad to have a bright flashlight in his backpack, but using it between the three of us was a little perilous.
The first really exciting thing was a giant spider with crab-like pinchers that CM happened to shine his flashlight on. Along with the pinchers, it had two extra long legs in front, presumably for swinging around and feeling for prey. Its abdomin was maybe an inch long and its regular legs spread to a diameter of about five inches. The antenna-feeler legs made an even huger diameter, probably about 1.5 feet. The eyes were tiny, maybe because it didn’t need to use them in the dark. After spending a bunch of time looking at the spider, we turned the corner to find an even bigger one. It turned out that they were all over the labyrinth, which made it even creepier walking around with inadequate light. Fun-scary.
When we got back to Seattle, we tried really hard to figure out what these spiders were, but we had no luck! If anybody reading this knows, we’d love to find out.
The next exciting thing was bats. There were bats all over the place. We started taking pictures of them, which was really challenging with them being on the ceiling and it being dark. We managed to get a few reasonable pictures, but we were getting too aggressive and started bugging them enough that they were flying around, so we left them alone.
Another exciting thing – as we were walking toward one more remote building, which is supposed to have a good view of the area (an awesome jungle walk with few people, really a joy), we saw some howler monkeys. We stood and watched them for a while, then Xie stayed a while longer, while the others continued up to the building site. The monkeys were too far away to get good photos, so it was just about watching. Which can be pretty nice sometimes.
We got up to the temples on the hill, which looked pretty neat. The trees were pretty grown up around the area, and full of foliage, so we didn’t see the Guatemalan mountains that we’d hoped for.
On the way back down, we saw an interesting lizard with a big flap of skin on its head that disguised it like a leaf. We stopped to snap a few photos and continued down, rushing back to the boat. Xie and CM were the last of the group to make it back. (When we got back to Seattle we tried to identify the lizard too, to no avail.
Do you see the lizard above? He’s hard to spot. He’s more obvious in the photo below.
We boated back up the river to get our lunch.
We were all tired and hungry. Lunch was decent, starting with a thin soup, followed by the meat or chicken, and finished up with a desert of fresh fruit salad with a sweet milky dressing. We were glad to find pitchers of agua de himaica (hibiscus tea), chilled with ice, on the table. Xie spotted a postcard with a scanning electron micrograph photo on it. The back of the card talked about the plant, a rare saprophyte, without chlorophyl, and so needs to rely on fungi in its roots to get sugars. This is the only known plant with the male organs in the center of the flower and the female organs around the center. The card was made with the point communicating the need for conservation around the Usumacinta River, since the plant is very rare, only found sporadically in this region, and could well have not been found, had the area been developed.
After lunch, we headed back to where we had earlier dropped off the Australian cricket player, and headed in to the Bonampak ruins. We had a very short time here, about an hour. We saw some leaf-cutter ants right away.
On the way up the path, we heard a distinctive bird call, but were having a hard time spotting the bird. It sounded like a maniacal laughter. We kept hearing it, along the path towards the ruins. Xie and Jess hung back near the beginning of the site, looking at birds, while CM went to the other end (of the relatively small site), to look at the buildings. Near the larger temple structures, there was a tree with more than twenty hanging nests (nidos — both in Spanish and Italian) and dozens of the laughing birds. Xie identified these as Motezuma Oropendola (golden pendulum), so called because of their bright yellow tails and that the males flipped over and hung from the underside of the branch every time they gave the laughing call. Xie stayed and watched them for most of the time we were at Bonampak.
The archaeologically significant features of Bonampak were the carved stellas (standing flat stones), depicting a beloved king, who married a woman from Yaxchilan to join the powers of the two cities, and the paintings on the walls of one temple, amazingly preserved for hundreds and hundreds of years, still with lots of color. Sadly there was no sign to explain the paintings, but they looked like depictions of people bringing gifts and paying homage to the king.
We were worried that we weren’t going to have much daylight time at the ecological reserve, and were excited to get there. So, imagine our surprise when we were dropped at a family’s residence right off the side of the main road. They had built an extra out building to rent as rooms and a one-room “restaurant”. We were pretty upset. We had paid $120 pesos each for the whole tour, and part of the reason we’d selected this one was because we’d wanted to see the reserve. The guy who sold us the tickets had told us that we’d be staying in the same place as the people who had been dropped off in the middle of the jungle at some nice-looking free-standing cabañas. We were pissed, but there wasn’t much we could do about the situation at this point. We got three rooms in this weird open out building with only partial walls between the rooms. Each room had one outlet and a double bed. We used all of the outlets to charge our cameras and phones, but only two of the beds.
We decided to try and make the most of the “ecological preserve”, even given the bad situation. We put our stuff in the rooms and walked out behind the building toward an old corn field (small). On the way, we saw banana and papaya trees. We were hoping that some trails would take off from the field, but no luck. Instead, we watched a leaf-cutter ant nest.
Disappointed, we returned to our rooms. CM was tired, and stayed behind to write in the journal, while Xie and Jes went for another walk, this time deciding to go back up the road towards where the other group had been dropped off. The sun was already doing down, and we were nervous about the sparse cars that came tearing down the road periodically. The jungle was growing right up onto the road in most places, so nothing like a shoulder was available, and we were wearing dark clothes.
Right as we were about to turn around, we noticed a significant trail going back into the woods. As soon as we got on it, we wished that we had found it sooner. It was beautiful and quiet from lack of human noises and loud with jungle sounds. We rushed down the trail, but soon had to turn around, due to the dusk. On the way out, we saw a man going in with a gun. Hopefully he wasn’t poaching.
Dinner was quarters of chicken, deep fried and very dry, with three flecks of onions and tomatoes to garnish it and some tortillas along with the choice of water or a soda to drink — no salsa. The chicken would have been fine, if it hadn’t been so dry. It was kind of funny too because we had just been watching all of the little chickens pecking around in the yard.
After dinner, we went to sleep on uncomfortable foam mattress beds with pillows that were extra, extra firm and too big. The lousy bed, along with super loud rain on the tin roof and a crying sick boy in the next room did not yeild much rest that night.
