Yucatán 2008 Day 12 – Caye Caulker, Belize (2008-03-27 Thursday)

Since Xie had gone to bed earlier than CM and Jess, she also woke up earlier. It was a beautiful day outside. There was a picnic table right outside the cabaña, and she sat there a while and looked at birds and wrote in the journal.

Then she went looking for coffee. She found a place open early – the Amor y Cafe. It seemed like a pretty cool place, with lots of regulars ordering delicious-looking food. Xie just got a coffee, then later a delicious banana smoothie. She sat and wrote in the journal, then spent some time reading the fish book again.

At that point, it had been a couple of hours since she got up, so she headed back to the cabaña, thinking CM and Jess would be up. They weren’t, so she spent some more time at the picnic table.

When everybody woke up, we got dressed and packed up for our snorkeling expedition and headed back to the Amor y Cafe. This time we got breakfast. They have delicious, fluffy, homemade bread from which they make grilled cheese sandwich, with or without various veggies. Xie got a grilled tomato and cheese, plus another smoothie, this time pineapple. The pineapple plus the yogurt was a little too tart. Jess got the same thing, except with a banana smoothie. CM got the sandwich with salami instead of tomato and a cup of coffee. The coffee was not very strong, which Xie had promised it would be based on her earlier experience. CM got a second cup.

During our breakfast, Fred Peterson came over to ask if he could join us. We had a large table, so of course we invited him. He explained that people had started smoking at the other end of the balcony, where he had been, and the smoke bothered him. We asked him about why he had come to Caye Caulker for six months of every year for the last seven years. He explained that he had found the place by accident. He was on his way to another vacation spot, when someone talked him into coming out to the island for a couple of days. He loved the place, and ended up just staying. He talked about the development of the island. When he had first started coming out, there was no electricity and no concrete construction on the island (now there were both — they generate their electricity with big diesel motors). He said that things had certainly changed for the downside, and that things were getting frustrating there. When Jess asked him if he had a new place in mind that he could go to next, he said that he certainly did (and it was clear that he wasn’t about to reveal the name or location of his new secret tropical paradise).

Fred was a Canadian, and he lived in the Okanogan Valley, in British Columbia. We talked about his two sons. One works for a fancy audio installation company that does large, complicated projects for Disney and the like. They use software to control the sounds, such that they can make the audio of a bee flying around the room to be very realistic. His other son went to school for business accounting, got very high marks and was very good at it. However, shortly after school he realized that accounting was not at all the career that he wanted, so now he works at a coffee shop and plays guitar a lot. Fred said that he encourages that son to get back into the game, but is mainly glad that he is happy. Fred kindly invited us to look him up if we were in his area.

We went over to Carlos’ shop after breakfast. He was there, and started right in with his low key everything’s a joke but you can’t let on to it being a joke style. He fitted us for gear. Xie brought her own mask and snorkel, so she only needed fins. CM was glad that his mask had a reasonable seal, despite his mustache.

We sat around for a while outside the shop. There was a woman from Texas who had recently finished her first army tour in Iraq. She had likes and dislikes about the army, but had re-enlisted. Her next tour was supposed to be in Germany.

CM noticed a tiny little puppy in a milk crate with a board on top to keep it there. We took turns petting it. It was so young that it tried to nurse on your fingers. Apparently it hadn’t weaned yet. Carlos came out of the office and told Jessica that she could take the puppy out of the crate. The story was that someone had dropped it off in the crate during the night about two weeks before, and Carlos found it in the morning. He said that they had to nurse it to health; it had lots of worms. He said that he wanted to call the puppy Western, because it looked bowlegged from behind. Jess fell in love with the puppy and named it Panucho (after the Yucatecan food, similar to a tostada). She and Carlos had playful arguments about the proper name for the puppy.

There was another couple, from Colorado, John and An-something. CM mistook them as being the Coloradan family that we had met the evening before at Carlos’ shop. The others on our tour were a brother and sister from Sweden (er, or something like that).

We headed down to the dock to get on the boat. It was a large motorboat with a big outboard motor that comfortably seated all of us. We were introduced to Carlos’ assistant, Dylan, who he called Bob Dylan, he explained, because Dylan didn’t like the name Matt Dillon.

Carlos passed out natural ginger candies – for combating sea sickness – to those who wanted them (more than half of us), and then he started the motor. It took Carlos eight or nine tries to start the motor, during which he acted nonchalant, like it was no problem. CM imagined us a mile out on the reef, unable to start the motor. However, there were no more starting problems for the rest of the day; it must have been because the motor was cold.

We zoomed right along in the boat for 20 minutes or so, and reached our first stop, a location where the local fishermen cleaned out the conch shells. This was a popular stop on most of the snorkeling tours, because the giant turtles and sting rays liked eating the scraps that the fishers threw out. We got in the water, and Xie quickly learned that there was a problem with her mask. It instantly started filling up with water. Fortunately, Carlos had brought some extra equipment, and had another mask for Xie to use that worked well. We swam around for a bit, watching the turtle and rays. There were two fish, called Remoras that would always stay right underneath the turtle, where ever it would go. CM figured out why that was when he saw the turtle eating a scrap of food. The two fish immediately came out from underneath the turtle and started biting and pulling the food away from its mouth. Perhaps there was some benefit to the turtle, or else it simply couldn’t avoid those fish hanging out underneath it, because they were always there. Similarly, just about all of the rays had a smaller fish swimming right underneath their tails.

Before leaving, Carlos paid the fishers a tip. He spoke Spanish with them, which was interesting.

We got back in the boat and motored out to Hol Chan, the location that Fred Peterson had recommended as being the best local area for fish diversity. We arrived at Hol Chan and hooked the boat up to a rope and float which were permanently attached to the bottom. Carlos lectured us about staying close to him, both because he would be able to point out the interesting fish and because he would keep us away from the areas with a current that could possibly pull us out. This was a great swim. We saw a bunch of fish, most of which we can’t remember, but including barracuda, different types of parrot fish, crabs (a male and female pair in their little cave-hole), as well as a bunch of different types of coral. Some of the fish swam in large schools, of maybe two hundred fish, and others were basically solitary.

Another stop was called “shark alley”. Here there were more boats from other snorkeling tours. We waited in the boat for fifteen minutes for another, much larger tour to swim away. Carlos made some comments under his breath about how their leader was having trouble keeping the group together. It really is too bad that he has to compete with other tour companies that are pushing the profit/cost ratio too far and are running much lousier tours.

Carlos threw some bait (probably chunks of fish) into the water, to attract the sharks. They were nurse sharks, which aren’t huge, but maybe up to four feet long. We got into the water and started swimming around. Carlos warned us not to put hands in front of the sharks. For the most part, the sharks didn’t seem to care about us people, or were perhaps even mildly curious about us (or more likely associated the snorkeling tours with getting bites of bait fish). At one point, Carlos got a grasp on one of the sharks, and turned it over, so it was belly up, while he was holding it. We took turns getting the chance to feel its skin, which was smoother than expected (most sharks have sandpapery skin, with tiny proto-teeth all over). The sharks were pretty. Carlos pointed out the shark which had bitten him a few weeks before.

After we got back into the boat, Carlos showed us the finger that had been bitten by a shark. It was pretty much healed by now, but you could tell from the scars that it had been torn up fairly well. He said that he was on a regular tour, and was doing the catching the shark trick. For some reason, the shark had bit his finger, and started sucking it. They are called nurse sharks, because they bite on to something and then suck like crazy, instead of shaking to tear away flesh, like other sharks. He said that after a minute, the shark just let go of his finger. The folks on that tour must have been pretty shaken up after that.

We stopped in San Pedro, a town on a neighboring island, for lunch. Carlos explained that food was relatively expensive here, and recommended a nearby restaurant as being on the reasonable side. He also pointed out the diving shop to Xie, that he had earlier recommended as being a place to buy a fish book. A little girl ran up the dock to see Carlos, as soon as we were landed. He asked her where her mother was, who came walking up a minute later. She talked about taking the girl to the dentist earlier, and was upset that she had a little gum disease.

The dive shop was closed for the lunch hour, so we went to eat. Apparently we were the only group that chose the restaurant that Carlos had recommended. The food was decent, but not really memorable.  Pretty much the only spice in all of Belize seems to be Marie Sharps, a salsa of habeñero chiles with carrots and onions. We compared different bottles of Marie Sharps, which were labeled with different hotness levels.

After lunch, we rushed back to the dive shop, to get a chance to look at the books before we had to go back. They had the really excellent fish ID book and fish behavior book that Carlos had lent Xie overnight so that she could study up on the fish, but they were both pretty expensive ($95 Belize == $42 USD). We settled on a laminated page with fish on both sides. It didn’t have all of the fish that we had seen, but it was better than nothing.

We all got back to the boat at a reasonable time. The Colorado woman kept asking Dylan if we were good gringos, and wouldn’t let up until he replied that, yes, we were good gringos.

Our last stop was the “coral garden”. Carlos explained that we were on our own for this swim, because he was going to stay on the boat to cut up some fruit. A fruit plate was apparently requisite for any reputable snorkeling tour.

We swam out in the direction that Carlos had suggested. We didn’t really see new coral that we hadn’t seen before, but it was a good area, spectacular with coral growth. The types we saw: brain, lettuce leaf, fan, mustard hill and a few others that we didn’t learn the names of, like one with purple fingers.

After a while, we heard Carlos whistling and waving to us to get us to come back to the boat. CM and Xie were the last to get back. When we got back, there was a cooler top full of cut up fruit – bananas, pineapple, very yummy papaya and watermelon. Carlos kept encouraging everyone to eat more, saying several times, “I’ll tell you when you’re done.”

We boated back in, and everyone was pretty tired and wiped out. It was starting to become clear that Xie and CM had gotten sunburns on their backs, despite having applied SPF30 sun block several times during the day. We piled up the equipment while Dylan started washing it with a bleach solution. Jess and the others were playing with Panucho Western, the puppy, and Carlos tried his best into talking each person into taking it home with them.

Carlos downloaded the photos from his camera that he’d been shooting with his underwater digital camera all day, and we gathered around his laptop to look at them. He reiterated the names of most of the fish. Then he offered to burn a CD with the photos for an extra $30 Belize. We all settled up for the tour (none of us had paid yet), and bought a CD of photos.

We said our goodbyes to Carlos and headed back to our room. We took showers, which felt good to wash the salt off, but also made the sunburns more apparent. After washing off, it started to rain pretty heavily, so we were shy from going out to find smoothies and/or dinner. We listened to the rain get slower and faster for awhile, and napped or worked on the journal. Finally we decided to go out to the restaurant associated with our hotel, because it was so close.

CM ordered conch ceviche, while Xie got the fish special and Jess got the chicken special. The conch meat was a little chewy (not so much as octopus), and had a pleasant, sweet flavor. Xie and Jess had a rum punch drink that came with their meal. The punch was pretty tasty, with a mix of real fruit juice, not some overly sweet artificial crap. CM drank yummy draft Belikin beers.

At some point, Xie realized that she had left her mask and snorkel at Carlos’ shop. Even though the mask was broken, she wanted to retrieve her nice snorkel, and CM was interested in trying to fix the mask (the problem seemed to be with the water vents near the nose). We walked down to the shop, but unfortunately it was closed.

On the way back, we stopped at a little store to get some snacks for the bus ride. It was a crowded little store, and the best snacks they had were chips and cookies of various sorts. It was interesting to try and understand the Kriol conversations that a customer couple was having with the shop keeper. The were discussing the prices of various items and how much the folks owed the shop keeper (maybe they had a tab). Kriol is one of those languages that sounds very interesting and expressive, with a lot of ups and downs.

We were pretty wiped out by now, so we went back to go to sleep, so that we could get up early enough to get breakfast before catching the water taxi back to the mainland.

 

Yucatán 2008 Day 11 – Flores, Guatemala -> Caye Caulker, Belize (2008-03-26 Wednesday)

The bus to Belize City was leaving at 7:30am. We’d had the choice of taking that or an earlier bus that left at 5am. The bus was with the same company from which we had gotten the Tikal tour. I’m actually pretty sure that all of our traveling we’d done so far was with this company – San Juan Tours. The bus was late. While we were waiting, we talked to some women who were having really bad travel luck. One of them was originally from Belize and was traveling there with 2 friends. They were largely staying in Belize, but they had decided to take a day trip the day before to see Tikal. The touring company had told them that it would be a day trip, and they were going to be back the same night. But the bus they had was so rickety, and the driver drove so slow, that they didn’t even make it into Flores until dinner time! They didn’t have any clothes or equipment for spending the night. They made the most of it, though, getting dinner and a room and said they had thoroughly enjoyed the evening. Now they were catching a bus back without ever having seen the ruins. How sad!

The bus eventually came, and we had a long ride to the Belizean border.

The women we had talked to were very loud and happy the whole ride, yucking it up. At the border, we went through passport control in Spanish, then walked with our bags across the border and went through customs with nothing to declare. It was funny crossing the border, because we were going from a Spanish-speaking country to an English-speaking one. It was certainly odd to be in the middle of Central America to be speaking English. It was kind of nice, though, for Xie and CM to be able to talk to anybody again and not have to go through Jessica or stumble through the Spanish. We had a little bit of a hard time finding our bus after customs, because they had parked all the way at the other end of the lot, almost out of sight. The buses weren’t very good at telling us where they were going a lot of times. While we waited, we talked to a couple of new people that the bus had picked up. They had been travelling around for several weeks and both had about 8 months of time off in between school. They had decided that they liked being home better, though. They missed their families.

After each border crossing, we could definitely notice differences in the countryside that was going by. Belize had a lot more houses on stilts, and a lot more houses that looked “American”. We were kind of watching for American-looking houses because Jessica had made a comment that a lot of the houses in Flores looked more like home. This cracked up Xie and Colin, who thought it was basically a sign of Jessica being in Central America for too long and forgetting what houses in the states look like, because to us they didn’t look at all American. But some of the Belizean houses did a bit. Xie pinpointed what it is that makes a house look “American” – siding. None of the houses in Yucatán state, Chiapas state, or Guatemala had any siding. They were either cement, stucco, flat wooden slabs stacked vertically, cinder blocks, sticks sticking straight up, or some combination of those, but never with siding. There also seemed to be a lot fewer trees in Belize.

Most of the signs were in English, but there was also a reasonable amount of Spanish. Once we started interacting with people, we realized that the main real language is actually Kriol. Belize is a really fascinating country. Some interesting facts from this fascinating Wikipedia article.

• Belize didn’t become an independent country until 1981, before which it was a British colony.
• The population density is the lowest in the Central American region and one of the lowest in the world.
• During the African slave trade, captors went to Africa, enslaved a tribe and boarded them onto a ship bound to the United States. The tribe rebelled then killed their captors. They were actually very sea savvy and successfully sailed to the southern area of Belize and settled there.
• According to the CIA World Factbook, Belize has the highest unemployment rate in Central America at 9.4%. The population living in poverty is at 33.5%.
• Self identified Mestizos comprise 50% of the population, Kriols 25%, indigenous Mayan 11%, and Garinagu 6%. The rest is a mix of Mennonite German farmers, East Indians, Chinese, other Central Americans, whites from the United States, and many other         foreign groups brought to assist the country’s development. Racial tension is rare because of constant admixture among the various ethnic groups.
• English is the official language because Belize was a British colony and retains ties to Britain. However, most Belizeans use the more familiar Belize Kriol, an English-based creole.

The Kriol language was fascinating. Supposedly based on English, I basically understood none of it, save a word every few sentences. It was crazy being a tourist there, because everybody would talk to the visitors in English, but be constantly talking amongst themselves in Kriol. It was like it was a secret language. Unlike with Spanish, the residents could basically be guaranteed that none of the visitors would be able to understand their native tongue. Many people also spoke Spanish, so when we accidently asked for “mas una cervesa” or said a “gracias”, it would be understood and the reply would be in Spanish.

When we got off the bus in Belize City, we were immediately ambushed with solicitors. Everybody was offering us this or that service, or just asking for money. They were very loud and very aggressive, albeit friendly. It was really disorienting, but we managed to get some cash from an ATM (around 0.5 Belizean dollar per 1 USD) and make our way inside the bus and water taxi station, where we bought round trip water taxi tickets to Caye Caulker and bus tickets for Friday to go to Chetumal, Mexico, from where we would buy our tickets to Mérida. Then we waited for our water taxi, managing to avoid being talked into any expenditures.

In a while, the water taxi came, and we loaded up, in a rather hectic fashion. Xie having now taken 3 boat rides without any nausea was starting to hope that maybe Colin was right, and she was getting better about her boat-sickness issues. Sure enough, the ride to Caye Caulker went fine.  It was a beautiful ride, although the boat was partially covered and crowded, so the views were limited. The water was gorgeous and blue and turquoise, and you could see all kinds of different shades based on what was underneath. There were Cayes (pronounces “Keys”) everywhere, including some really tiny ones. We saw one that looked like the classic “stranded on a desert island” cartoon, with a single house and a single (or maybe a few?) trees. We also saw an island that was a gigantic golf course. In the guide book it said that it was a super-exclusive executive golf island.

When we got to Caye Caulker, we were again immediately surrounded by people wanting to help us with every which thing. But we had already picked out an area that we wanted to stay, that according to the guidebook was on the quieter end of the island. We started walking down that way, right along the beach. Our idea was to walk to the end and check the prices at each place along the way, and then to make our decision. But the second place we looked at used the same ploy as the place in Flores, giving us a key to check the room out ourselves, and again we were hooked. It was a one-room cabaña right on the edge of the beach, facing the ocean, with a single and a double bed, and a bathroom. We decided to take it.

Our main goal that day after picking a place to stay was to pick a snorkeling trip for the next day. The reef off of Caye Caulker is a barrier reef, and not right next to the island, so you pretty much have to hire someone with a boat to drive you out to it. There are a ton of snorkel tour agencies on the island (mostly 2-5 person outfits), and they all had very similar sets of tours. They had various half-day tours, that would go to a few places, and various full-day tours, that would go to a few places, stop for lunch in San Pedro (a larger town on a nearby island), and then go to a few more places. We stopped at several of the tour huts and buildings, learning about the different tours and discovering that they were basically identical in itinerary and price

We were hungry, so we looked for a place to eat. We were having a hard time making a decision. Eventually, we happened upon a place that one of the people on the bus with us had mentioned, called The Happy Lobster. Xie got some fish with creole sauce, CM got stewed chicken with rice and beans, and Jess got a chicken burger. The food was very good!

While we were eating, we ran into a very friendly man who had been living on the island for 7 years, named Fred Peterson. He told us that we should make sure that whatever tour we take goes to the “Hol Chan” and talked about a bunch of other stuff about looking at fish. Later, we ran into him again and asked him if he recommended any particular snorkeling company. He was reluctant to recommend, saying that most of them were equivalent, but finally said “you could try Carlos”.

After lunch, we started going around to places again. We had kind of picked one of the ones we’d looked at earlier, but when we went in to sign up, the original guy we talked to wasn’t there, and we didn’t like the new guy as much.

We ended up going to check out Carlos. At first, he pretty much freaked us out. He was being really reluctant to tell us anything about the tour, and he was making weird jokes that we couldn’t tell were jokes and stuff. But there was a very gregarious family of 4 in the room, just coming back from a snorkeling tour, and they said “Don’t listen to him. He’s the best guide on the island!” Carlos warmed up after a bit. When he learned we were interested in the specific fish, he gave Xie this great book called “Reef Fish Behavior: Florida, Caribbean, Bahamas” to borrow for the night and bring back in the morning. Xie ended up reading that book for much of the night.

After picking a tour, we decided to have a walk around. We walked away from the tourist side of the island, and quickly found ourselves on the other side, among a bunch of weird industrial/fishing stuff and houses. Xie felt pretty weird, like we were intruding into people’s real lives now. We were so obviously tourists. Colin wanted to get a juice but we had a hard time finding it. We ended up splitting up. Jess went to go find a dock to watch the sunset and write in her journal. Xie and CM finally found a place to get juice back up by Carlos, called the Sandbox. CM got orange juice, and Xie got a delicious mango smoothie. The island has really excellent smoothies everywhere. They’re all made with delicious yogurt, so they’re really tart. Colin wrote in our journal, and Xie read the fish book. When we were done, we went back to our cabaña and did the same. It started getting really stormy, and we hoped Jess wasn’t getting wet. Eventually she came back.

Xie was really tired, so she slept while CM and Jess went to dinner. They went to the Sandbox. CM got fried fish filet with banana chutney, which was ok. Eventually they came back and went to bed too.

 

Yucatán 2008 Day 10 – Tikal, Guatemala (2008-03-25 Tuesday)

We woke at 3:00am, with Colin’s and Jess’s cell phone alarms going off simultaneously, thanks to the miracle of network time synhronization. Because we went to bed early enough and were tired enough to get to sleep right away, we got nearly a full night’s sleep, and it was not too difficult to wake up. We got dressed, grabbed our bags, and headed out to the front of the hotel to wait with the few other tour attendees.

They had told us to be outside at 3:20, in case, but the bus didn’t come until like 3:45. When it came, we got on, and then the bus drove around to pick up the other tour-goers from the other hotels. At one hotel, the people weren’t waiting outside. The driver called and honked and waited, but they never came.

We drove to Tikal, passing a tiny town called El Remate on the way. The guidebook says El Remate is a growing spot for tourists to stay while seeing Tikal.

We got to the park, got off the bus, and milled around, confused as to what to do. Several buses arrived at the same time, and there were at least 3 tours getting ready to visit Tikal. We all had to pay the park entry fee. Some people were in line to pay at the desk, and some were paying their tour guide. We were in line, but apparently we were to pay the tour guide. After a while, our guide announced that only one person had not yet paid. He asked the person to come forward, because he didn’t want to have to check everyone’s receipts (which wouldn’t have worked, because he didn’t give the 3 of us receipts). It was the most expensive of all of the parks we visited – more than $20/person. It was also the biggest park. Driving in, we went past miles and miles of jungle surrounding the archaeological site.

Once we were all paid and split into our proper groups, we got a brief talk about keeping quiet, not eating, and not smoking atop the pyramid. Then we were hurried out and along the trail. Birds and animals could have been heard, but a lot of young folks – telling stories about travelling in India, and how they were the smartest, because they had brought a laptop and so many movies, but then there wasn’t any power – drowned out the animal and bird noises. Some people thought that the howler monkeys were jaguars. They certainly sound vicious.

It was already on the light side by the time that we got up to the base of the pyramid. There were wooden stairs with easy hand rails, which were much easier to climb than the original (usually restored) stone stairs of most pyramids.  Xie stopped at the restroom and CM followed the crowd up the stairs. Most of the crowd was already up there, so the best seats were taken. There was scaffolding around the top of the pyramid from the current reconstruction efforts, and there was a tarp over one section that was making a lot of noise in the wind.

Folks were mostly being quiet and speaking in whispers or low voices when they did. Lots of people were taking photos, and a few had flashes going off, of course. There was one guy whose camera was on a tiny tripod that he was balancing on some of the scaffolding. His camera would give a dozen beeps each time that he took a photo. Finally a woman asked him to turn off the beeps.  When he said that he wasn’t sure if they would go off, the woman replied, “Oh, they will.”

It was a marvelous sight. We were above the canopy, and could see all of the dense tropical forest, as well as several other tall pyramids sticking out of the trees. There were a bunch of grackles, and we saw other birds, including a bunch of toucans in a nearby tree and a few parrots flying by. There were a bunch of clouds on the horizon, but the sun peeked out from behind them a couple of times, and gave some nice colors.

Finally one of the guides came up and gave some instructions on how to split the large group (~100 people) into smaller groups when we got back down to the base of the pyramid. We lucked out and got the great guide, who is mentioned in some of the travel guide books because of his reputation.

Once at the bottom, our guide gave us a talk about some of the interesting things about the site. The ruins had been long lost and totally covered by jungle overgrowth, until the late 19th century, when some chicleros (gum tree hunters, who extracted the sap, processed it and exported it to Wrigley) found the entrance to one of the temples while in the area. The chicleros climbed the gum trees and cut zig zags in the bark, and then collected the sap in canvas bags.

The guide stopped to point out birds numerous times, as he told the history of the site being partially uncovered and some of the temples restored. It was a great birding site, with more than 6 species of birds spotted in one single tree, during the story. It made it really hard to concentrate on the guide, with crazy new birds flying and walking around everywhere.

When the site was a Mayan city, more than 1000 years ago, the whole area had been completely logged and cleared of trees and brush. This in sharp contrast to how it is today. Now, while the trees and other plants are kept clear from the tops of most pyramids, and the main plaza is kept clear, the site is also a National Park and wildlife preserve, so the carefully balanced any clearing of plants with the desire to maintain the ecosystem. Only one tree has been cut in the last five years. It was hard to picture Palenque as a bustling stone city when walking araound through a beautiful jungle.

Our guide had studied archaeology as well as various aspects of biology, including birds and the epiphytes of the tropical canopy. This made for great stories they whole time, of animal and plant behavior, as well as the history of the ruins and the people who lived there.

The architecture is a little different than most Mayan sites, with one of the main differences being that the pyramids are much steeper that those of most other Mayan ruins. Because it was such a large and important site, a lot of trade went through there, and the influence of sites such as those around Mexico City can be seen in the architecture of some of the buildings. Another fascinating fact is that no slaves were used to build the entire city (being the largest Mayan city, with thousands of buildings). Only 15% of the buildings have been uncovered at all. The topology of the land is entirely flat, with no hills at all, so any hill that is seen is actually a grown over pyramid or other structure.

Our first stop down the trail was at a lime oven, where they cooked the mined lime for three or four days with a wood fire, to create cement. They used particular trees, such as the copal and tropical cedar, as the smoke from these trees was heavy with the sap, which created a stronger cement. The cement was mixed with ashes and stones to create a concrete, which was used as mortar to hold the large limestone blocks together. The guide talked about the Jarod Diamond book, _Collapse_, and about how one theory of the decline of the Mayan civilization is that they destroyed too much of their forests, cutting trees to cook lime, and damaged the ecosystem to the point that they could not get enough food to eat.

At our next stop, he pointed out some of the trees (tropical cedar, mahogany), and then said that there were howler monkeys in the close vicinity. He said that he could see the fresh scat, which we looked for, but couldn’t spot. He started looking in the trees and clapping. Then he started this crazy grunting, several times in quick succession, followed by a loud wheezing roar, that actually sounded quite a bit like the howlers. It was pretty funny to watch and listen to him, and we were trying not to laugh out loud. We heard one woman saying “yeah, right…”, under her breath to someone near her, and it did kind of feel like he was mimicking the howlers, since he couldn’t find them. But then, all of the sudden, one of the males woke up, right in the tree above him, and gave the same series of grunts and a roar right back. Every time that he did his grunts and roar, one of the monkeys would answer him. Now we were laughing out loud, because it was so hilarious to hear and see. He explained that he could speak their language. He had to stop and drink some water after all of that roaring, as his voice was a little hoarse.

We had another birding stop. Actually, it was a stop so that folks could climb one of the pyramids, but when he saw that both Xie and CM were hanging out, looking at birds through the binoculars and trying to identify them, he came over to talk to us. He asked us if we were ornithologists, or biologists. We told him that it was a hobby, and he seemed to like that. He could spot birds like crazy. He’d show us one, and while we were still trying to get a good look at it, and find it in the book, he’d have spotted another, and would tell us about that one. He knew the birds by their calls, and also knew all about their habits. He said that the next day he was taking out a group of professional birders with lenses this big (holding his arms all the way wide) on their cameras. He showed us how he shot bird photos by aiming a small digital camera through one side of his binoculars (which were very nice).

He talked with another young guy (20s), who had just gotten back from an emergency bathroom run. The guy talked about how he had eaten spicy tacos, from a street vendor the night before, but that it was well worth the trouble today, because they had been so tasty. The guy showed that he was no longer wearing socks, and said that there was no toilet paper in the bathroom, so he had sacrificed one of his socks. Our guide made a joke about the tacos being pica (spicy) when you ate them, and re-pica the next day.

When the group had gathered again, he announced that he was going to show us the laughing falcon. We walked for a few minutes, and then started to hear it. Its call was like the laughter of a mad scientist or something. He pointed to a tree, where two of the pretty gray falcons were sitting. The laughing falcon is unusual in that its diet is entirely snakes.

Next stop was to see some tarantulas. The guy on the bus the morning before, who sold us the tour tickets, had explained many times that we were not to pick up the tarantulas to put them on our arms, while pantomiming picking up the spider and putting it on his arm. We joked about how we were going to pick up the spider and put it on our arms, just as he had shown us how to. The guide picked a stick of grass, poked it down a spider hole, and started twisting it around, while moving it up and down. He said that he was fishing for the spider. It took him a while, and he tried at two different holes. One’s legs poked out for a second, but then it went back in. Finally he teased it out enough so that he could grab it and toss it away from the hole. He blocked it from crawling back down its hole, and then picked it up by its abdomen.

He proceded to put it on various people’s hands, so that they could get a photograph of themselves holding the fierce, deadly tarantula.

He joked about how a woman died in 2004 of a tarantula bite to the hand. After too many photos, he said that the spider was getting tired of all of the flashes, and put it back down next to its hole. It immediately scurried down, out of sight.

The group headed down another trail towards the next exciting sight. We were a little behind the main group, so we hurried to catch up. They seemed to be all looking at something in a tree, with great interest. Probably a bird, we figured. As we got closer, we could hear them talking about the monkeys. There was a family – father, mother and baby – of spider monkeys. Xie and CM were excited to see spider monkeys, as we had seen them in the zoo in Brasilia, but not in the wild. Well, even more exciting, these monkeys were “making the family bigger”, as our guide said. They were copulating right then, way up in the tree above us. You couldn’t see much, except that they were close together, and moving. But if you looked through binoculars, well, things got very explicit. The male (the guide called him the “macho” – that was his english word for male) would stop every now and then, look down at the crowd of us below him, decide that we weren’t a threat, and then get back to business.

Then we climbed Temple V, one of the ones that shows the architectural influence of Mayans from other areas. The top offered a similar view to Temple IV in the morning, but from a different perspective. Jess spotted howler monkeys playing around in a tree. We relaxed for a few minutes, enjoying the view, and headed back down the wooden stairs, which where very steep, but not quite as steep as the original stone stairs, and also featured hand rails. Still, you had to descend backwards, like going down a ladder.

A little bit after that, we reached the Grand Plaza, where the most famous Temple I was, featured on the license plates from Guatemala and just about every travel poster or tour book from the area.

The guide said that you used to be able to climb the steps of Temple I, until last year a woman fell down the steps and died.

The guide stopped in the shade under a tree and reviewed the morning’s tour. “I took you up to the top of Temple IV, where you got to see a good sunrise. Not everybody gets to see a good sunrise.  Maybe 30% of the days we get a good sunbreak. Then I gave you a lecture on the history, plants and birds of the area. Then I woke the monkeys for you. We saw some birds, and then I got the tarantula out for you. And we saw the spider monkeys. Some nature shows, they come in with cameras, and sit, waiting for days and days to see what you saw, but you were lucky. The weather has been good. Last week it rained on people. What more can you ask for. The tip is not included.” He was an awesome guide, and we had already decided to tip him, before he asked for it. Before parting, he went over the bus schedule to get back to Santa Helena / Flores, and gave us some suggestions on how to spend the rest of our visit to Tikal.

We stopped by a stand to get a coke for Colin (who hates coke, but hadn’t had any caffeine yet) and some emergency snacks before spending another hour and a half wandering around the Grand Plaza, looking at the ruins and some birds before heading back. We also saw a sad-looking five legged spider (medium sized).

We looked at a bunch of ruins, including the living quarters, which were easily accessible, and people like Henry and Matthew R. had carved their names into the walls. We disparaged them, and agreed to kick their asses when we saw them again.

We saw Montezuma Oropendola’s again at this site and some of the nests were close enough to the top of ruins to get a good look.

We headed out to the parking lot, not sure about our bus, because there had been a discrepency in the schedules, as told by the tour guide and the guy who sold us the tickets. We stopped by the artificial pond, originally designed and built by the Mayans to hold drinking water for the city, and restored by some archaeologists, and looked for birds. When it was getting closer to potential bus time, we headed over to the tourist information bus where the bus was supposed to meet us. Jess talked to the information people, who confirmed that the bus was coming to get us. We waited around in the hot, hot sun (actually in the tiny bit of shade provided by the information building). A group of birders came by, all with super fancy cameras and action telescopes mounted on tripods. They were looking at the birds in the nearby trees, the same birds that we were looking at with our dorky regular binoculars, regular cameras and unfancy bird book. We were actually pretty disappointed with the bird book that we had, for several reasons, one of them being that several times we’d seen distinctive birds that just were not in the book. This was happening right now, with a turquoise blue, bright, bright bird. It was unlike all of the bluish birds in the book. We never managed to figure out what it was.

The bus came, and we rode the bumpy, hot, dusty hour and a half ride back into town. We were able to nap some of the way. CM felt bad for one of the women napping in front of us, because her head was leaning on the window, and bounced very hard, every time we went over a bump, which was about 40 times per minute.

When we got back into town, we got some lunch on the water. We watched some people swimming, and really felt like getting into the water. Unfortunately, none of us were dressed for swimming. We ate while a couple of young german guys drank beer and talked. Their conversation went from Spanish to German to English (when another traveler joined them). Lunch was pretty decent, but Jess really wanted pizza, so we decided that we’d get pizza for dinner.

We walked around Flores, looking in the little tourist shops for t-shirts, and for traditional Guatemalan shirts that were not too extravagant. The Guatemalan weaving style is wonderful, with all of its bright color combinations, but it is very popular amoung a certain college age hippy crowd in Seattle, which unfortunately prejudiced us against buying clothes like that for ourselves. We got a nice, but small, table cloth at one store and a nice, low key shirt for Xie at another store.

We went back to our room to drop stuff off, grabbed our journals and headed out to find a bar to get drinks and catch up on writing the journals. We chose a bar on the second story, with a nice view of the lake. Jess was writing her travel journal in Spanish, and was a little frustrated at having to keep looking up words, after having lived in Mexico for nearly two years. We countered with that, after speaking English for their whole lifetimes, most writers have a dictinary and thesaurus handy whenever they are writing. CM tried the Brahva beer, and then a Beats, which turned out to be another variety of Brahva, but with less flavor.

We left the bar and walked around, looking at the restaurants that advertised pizza (there were far more than you’d typically expect in a Guatemalan town). Perhaps that was a food that sold well to the tourists.  We chose a restaurant that had Italian themes, but with Picasso prints decorating the walls. The pizza was ok, but not really that great or anything.

Again tired, we headed back to the our room. We had to get up early, although no where near as early as this morning. Our bus to Belize city was to leave at seven something in the morning.

 

Yucatán 2008 Day 9 – Crossing to Guatemala, Bus to Flores (2008-03-24 Monday)

Breakfast at the “Ecological Reserve” was slightly better than dinnerthe night before. It was scrambled eggs (which we joked was the other part of the chicken that we had eaten for dinner the night beefore) with
onions and tomatoes, toast with margarine and strawberry jam, tortillas,
salsa (joy!) and a choice of Nescafe (instant coffee) or tea.

We got back on the bus and headed back towards the Usumacinta River, where we were going to catch a boat to Guatemala. On the way, one of the women, who was in the group headed for Yaxchilan that day, got nauseas, which was no surprise, given the way the driver was handling the curvy roads. The driver pulled over to let her deal with it, but didn’t get out to help, or offer her any paper to clean up with. When she asked for a bag to put the vomity paper in, he told her to throw it on the side of the road.  He didn’t drive any calmer after that episode. What a jerk.

Before getting on the boat, we stopped at the Mexican boarder office, where, thanks to Jess’s interpretation, Xie and CM paid $100 pesos each, to keep their Mexican visas, rather than paying $230 pesos for a new entry visa (their original entry visa fees had been included in the cost of the plane tickets).

The bus left us there while we were still busy at the desk. Fortunately, we knew the way down to the boats from the day before, so we headed down there. When Jess chewed out the driver for leaving us back there, his excuse was, “well, I honked for you twice, but you didn’t want to come.” Jerk. The lousy accommodations and inconsiderate driver wouldn’t be our only problems with the San Juan tour company.

The boat ride up the river was much like the one down the river on the day before.

We sat next to a recent college graduate from Sweden who had studied biology, botany, ecology, and geology. We learned that the limestone based topography of the Yucatán Peninsula was relatively young, only a few million years old, and that the limestone layer is thin, maybe a few hundred meters.

Things were again confusing on the Guatemalan side of the river where we landed. Like at every border crossing, there were money changers, standing around, counting through their several-inch-deep stacks of bills offering to change dollars or pesos for Quetzales (the Guatemalan currency, named after the beautiful Quetzal bird http://images.google.com/images?q=quetzal+bird). Not everyone working for San Juan tour company was a dick. Our driver on this side went around, locating his passengers from the boatload of people, giving us Guatemalan immigration forms and telling us which bus to get on – very helpful.

It was a short ride to the immigration office and then a little longer ride to a gas station, where we had a 15 minute break to use the restrooms and get snacks from the convenience store.

The rest of the bus ride consisted of viewing Guatemalan fields, slash and burn agriculture in progress, some birds, and poor households, varying from cinder-block construction (often with a palapa roof) to various shacks, some built with a mishmash of boards and tin, to those built entirely from non-machine-processed materials.

One of the striking things in Chiapas and Guatemala was the width of the boards used for houses. A shack for a clearly-very-poor family might be built entirely from hardwood boards that were a foot and 1/2 wide. Colin said that in the states, a single board like that might go for $200.

Another striking thing in Guatemala was that many houses were unpainted. In a larger village, there might be a few houses that were painted only on the front side of the house that faced the road.

Limestone mining was common, and we passed a few operations that were basically carving up and trucking away hills.

The very bouncy dirt road eventually became paved, which allowed for some napping.

The bus stopped to let someone on, who went around to each person, offering to change pesos or dollars to quetzales. This was a little odd, but not entirely out of the ordinary for Central America, where often vendors come on to a bus to sell the passengers snacks, drinks, and things. Then he stopped and asked if everyone spoke Spanish or English. Apparently, English was the language for our bus.

He announced himself as a ticket agent for San Juan and proceeded to tell us in great detail about the early morning tour to Tikal. It was a pretty fun recitation. He clearly had done it many times. He repeated information over and over, which was probably a really good idea, since English was a 2nd language for many. The cost of the guided tour and transportation was USD$20 per person. The tour left town at 3:30am, and you could return any time starting from 11am. The reason for the 3:30 departure was that “the best time to see Tikal is EARLY in the MORNING. Why do I say this is early? Because it is early for you and it is early for us.” and because it takes 1.5 hours to get there from where everybody stays. Apparently the tour has special arrangements with the park to be able to go in early, before the park actually opens at 6am. So, they drive you there, then you climb to the top of the highest pyramid, with a great view of the jungle, then you walk around with  guide who knows “80% of the flora and fauna”, which because it is early and there aren’t any people around yet, and he takes you around on a tour of many of the ruins. 3:30 is dang early, but we were really stoked about the tour.

A little while later, we got to Santa Helena, a bustling town opposite the tourist island of Flores, which is the main hub for Tikal visitors. The bus stopped at an ATM so that we could all get out cash, and then we bought our tickets for the Tikal guided tour and for the bus trip to Belize City the next day. The exchange rate was around 8 quetzales / 1 USD.

We had looked through Jessica’s Lonely Planet and picked out a couple of hotels in the budget range with views of the lake to check out before choosing where to stay. The announcer guy recommended one of the ones that we had chosen – Hotel Mirador del Lago, which made us a little nervous that everybody would flock to it and they would run out of rooms. Luckily, they seemed to have plenty. When we got up to the desk, they asked us if we wanted a regular room for 120 quetzales/night, or a room with a view of the lake for 180 quetzales/night. We were wavering, so they told us to go check out the one with the view. As soon as we saw it, we decided to keep it. It was a lovely bright room with a small deck looking  out on the lake. Unfortunately, 3 single beds, but they were by far the most comfortable beds of our trip, so that made up for it. We were also glad to be settling in to a place for 2 nights in a row. We dumped our bags and took showers that felt awesome, sitting out on the deck in between.

Then we went out in search of money and dinner. It seemed that whenever we got out money, carefully calculated to match our expenses, we always had to immediately take out the same amount, because we had underestimated what we needed by half. In this case, it was within an hour of taking out money that we needed the money again, after paying for the tour, the bus ticket, and both nights in the hotel. The announcer had told us that there was an ATM on the island, but that it frequently didn’t work. We hunted it out, and luckily it seemed to work for us. Later, every time we went by, it had an out of order sign on it, so we definitely got lucky.

Jessica had been to Tikal before with Mom. They had stayed on Flores then, so she knew about the layout of the tiny island. She wanted to eat in a restaurant on the water, to watch the sun set. There were several, and we picked one kind of randomly. Jess immediately noticed that the sun seemed to be setting in a really different place than when she had been there before. Luckily, she had some pictures on her iPod, and she could confirm :).

Flores is a tiny island in the middle of a big lake (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flores%2C_El_Pet%C3%A9n). From the restaurant, you could see an even tinier island, with just a couple of houses on it. The whole island is used up – buildings merge to sidewalks, which merge to street. It’s like a tiny New York, but with only tourism for an industry.

The food in Guatemala, of the little bit we had, is definitely not as tasty as Yucatecan food. We don’t remember anymore what we ordered, but we’re pretty sure we got some traditional Guatemalan dishes.

We were tired and getting up early early the next morning, so we went home and went to sleep in the comfy beds.

 

Yucatán 2008 Day 8 – Palenque -> “Ecological Reserve” (2008-03-23, Sunday)

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.

All pics

 

Yucatán 2008 Day 7 – Palenque (2008-03-22, Saturday)

We arrived in the town of Palenque at five in the morning, very tired and fairly grumpy, because we’d barely slept on the freezing-cold bus.

Decision point: should we get coffee in town, or head to El Panchán, the hippy-tourism complex where we were going to be staying? We decided on the complex, hoping to get a room and take a nap. We caught a taxi out there and were dropped off at the first office of the place. This office was closed, so we walked down the driveway toward the other buildings.

The complex was in a jungle setting, with several different sets of cabañas, restaurants and other rooms to stay, joined with concrete paths between them. A stream ran through the area, and it was bridged a few times. Many of the places had hippy art decorations, like shells pressed into the concrete, or murals on the walls.

Nothing was open this early in the morning. Besides us, there were a few other confused tourists wandering around, including one guy with a cricket bat. Jess asked one woman, who was setting things up in a little restaurant that also advertised cabañas, about getting a room. She basically said,  “¿Quién sabe?” (“Who knows?”), and explained that they were full and she didn’t know if anyone would leave today. She recommended that we try at another place, Rakshita’s.

We wandered the paths, trying to find the office. We sat at a table near another sign for cabañas. Soon a French traveler joined us and we talked with him in a mixture of Spanish and English. Xie and Jess wandered back to the office near the entrance and got our name on a “list” for a cabaña. The woman there had told them that nothing was available, but something might open up later. When they asked to get on the list, the woman took out a random piece of paper and put their name on it.

On the way back, they noticed that Don Mucho’s restaurant had opened up. We went for coffee and breakfast. We all got egg varieties with bread or tortillas. Huevos estrellados means eggs sunny side up, and huevos revueltos are scrambled eggs.

While eating, we watched the leader of a large group collecting keys from the folks to turn in. We got all excited at the opportunity of getting a room. Jess spied the name on one of the keys, and it was “Chato’s”, the same place we were on the “list” for. Jess and Xie went back up to get the room, while CM stayed to watch the luggage and enjoy another cup of coffee.

The room had not been cleaned yet, but they gave us the key, so that we could  stash our luggage there. We were stoked to have a place and to be in a beautiful environment.

While we were putting our stuff down, we heard this crazy grunting/screaming sound coming from the forest that sounded like it was a tape being played over and over again. We thought that it might be a tape of a howler monkey. Later, after hearing howler monkeys at the sites, we realized that it had been real howler monkey calls. They do this really rhythmic calling that seems like it couldn’t be natural. There were also a bunch of birds flitting around, beautiful and interesting birds.

We were all tired, but we decided to head for Palenque anyway. Shortly after the driveway was the entrance to the park, where we had to pay $20 pesos each to get a wristband ticket. The archaeological site was one kilometer down the road.

Near the first entrance to the park is a museum; we went inside. It had a bunch of cool statues, stone carvings, glyphs and other paraphenalia pulled from the site, to be studied and protected.

We learned some things about the Mayans at Palenque. The incense burners, made of clay, were statues of several faces on top of each other (vaguely remeniscent of Pacific Northwest totem poles), where the smoke would come out of the ears, noses and mouths of the faces. The incense was made from the sap of the copal tree, mixed with human blood.

The Mayans have a sort of reincarnation theory, so that people came back as (or with?) trees, and that way they reach heaven.

The biggest exhibit was the tomb of Pakal, a major ruler at Palenque, who lived for 80 years. They showed a bunch of videos about the tomb, the ruins and about their discovery and what they had learned about them Pakal was buried with a lot of jewelry, including a jade mask that accurately portrayed his face. The mask had fallen to pieces over the years. The first archaeologists put it together, and later another group made a second mask that more accurately represented his face based on new information they had about Mayan art.

Pakal’s tomb was very elaborate, and the main staircase leading to it had been blocked off, so that he wouldn’t be disturbed during his transformation to a diety and his ascension to heaven. There was a smaller “spirit staircase” next to the big one, so that people would still have spiritual access to Pakal.

After checking out the museum, we headed over to the ruins. The Palenque site is vast, with many different clusters of buildings and pyramids. It was very crowded with people and vendors. There were all kinds of different buildings in different places, used for governmental, residential and religious reasons.

There are a bunch more photos of Palenque on Flickr.

All day we kept hearing howler monkeys, really loud and seemingly close.

Shortly before the park closed, we ran into a guard, and Jessica asked him about the monkeys. He said that we were hearing about four monkeys, and that they were about 500 meters away. This was rather surprising, given how loud they were. He said that we could wander around for another fifteen minutes and then we should head for the exit.

We exited the site and walked the long, hot kilometer back towards our cabaña. Along the road were cows and cattle egrits, poor residences and a few places with cabañas or room for tourists to camp out. We saw a mostly dead tree that was partially fallen over, and had a cactus growing way up and around it, like a vine. Back at the park entrance, on the bridge, we spotted a trail of leaf cutter ants heading back to the nest, that Xie had identified on the way in, that morning. We stopped for a bit to watch them carrying their little leaf chunks. When we moved on to the other side of the nest, we saw another trail, where the ants were scavenging from fallen leaves. We stopped again to watch them doing some cutting.

When we got back to the cabaña, it felt awesome to take a shower. This place had hot water, and it was not heated right at the shower, but rather from an external water heater, so the sink also had hot water.

After we all showered, we headed back over to Don Mucho’s for dinner. Xie and CM got beers, while Jess got a chocolaty shake. While Xie and CM were tasting each other’s beers, CM managed to knock Xie’s over and spill a bunch of it on her. Our waiter was busy, confused and confusing. While taking our order, he was constantly glancing around to other tables, and he kept switching which pad he was writing on, from a handful of four or five. Xie ordered a carne asada, but the waiter was worried that they might be out, so she placed a backup order of mole chicken enchiladas. CM ordered pollo en mole. After a few minutes he came back and told Jess that her original order was unavailable, so she switched to mole enchiladas also.

The whole time that we were there, a band was getting ready to play. It was funny, because different people kept going up on stage and doing sound checks on the mics and drums, then they’d get off the stage and nothing would happen for a while again. By the time that they started playing, we were basically done with our meals. The band started with a couple of traditional Mexican songs, then they played a samba, then they picked up electric instruments and started playing reggae music. Xie left shortly after they started, to go and wash her beer drenched clothes and put them up to dry. She returned to the cabaña (named “Iguana”) to wash her clothes in the sink, and go to bed. Jess and CM returned after listening to some more of the music, then went to bed too.

 

Yucatán 2008 Day 6 – not sunrise, not cenotes, and not Chichen Itza (2008-03-21, Friday)

At the Mayan ruins site of Dzibilchaltún, the sun shines through a special hole in a special building at sunrise on each equinox. This day was spring equinox, and our plan was to get up early and head out to see the event. Beto had gotten us coupons from the tourism department for a free bus ride out to the site, but then later he decided to drive us all out there, even though he had to go in to work at 9, for a short day.

Jess and Xie had some cold frijol con puerco for breakfast at 4:45am while we waited for Beto. When Beto arrived, we went downstairs to get in his car. Beto has a new Ford, a nice car.

The highway and streets were nearly empty, something we’re very unaccustomed to at any hour in Seattle. Dzibilchaltún was not far away. When we got there, we piad our entrance fee and hurried down the path toward the building.

There were not many people there when we arrived. It was raining off and on, chilly, and definitely overcast. We had debated back and forth the previous day about whether to try to go to either of the equinox events – at Dzibilchaltún in the morning and then at Chichen Itza in the afternoon – because of the rain and severe overcast clouds. But we had decided to at least try Dzibilchaltún, so there we were.

As time went on, more and more people arrived. People were taking pictures, many using flashes, whih was silly, because the building was far away. Someone shined a green laser pointer on the building. More people arrived. It got lighter out, but it was still very overcast. A park person made a woman put her candle out. It still drizzled. Some people were wearing disposable plastic raincoats, and some people had umbrellas. We debated about how high the sun was behind the clouds (whether it was above the horizon) and whether there was any chance of the event occurring, or if it was already over.

We kinda started heading back. It had gotten light enought ot see colors, and there wasn’t the same danger of tripping over rocks that we’d had on our way in.  Many more people were on their way in. We were nervous to just give up, because the worst would have been to have gotten up so early, gone all the way out to the site, and left without seeing anything, and then later hearing that we had left too early, and the event happened right after we left. So we lingered for a while, and then we asked a park person what they thought, and they said that the sun would rise in half an hour, but that it was way too overcast to see the sun when it did rise.

We thought that we’d make the most of the trip by visiting the rest of the ruins. But no, they wouldn’t let anyone into the main ruins area for another hour and a half. So, we paid the full entrance fee, but got double skunked.

To the question of take a nap or get coffee, when we got back to Mérida, we opted for nap. Good thing, too. It felt awesome, and we all slept for hours.

When we woke up, it almost felt like morning all over again. We all kept being confused about what day it was and when we had done certain things. Now it was really time for coffee.

In the spirit of trying new things, we went to another shop – K-Fe. We were getting ready to order breakfast and coffee when Jessica’s friend Gaby came in to get a magazine from Jess. She was beautiful and suave, and her younger sister was also gorgeous. With them where several young guys, also suave. The kids chatted and chatted, and the waiter wouldn’t come over while they were all still hanging out, for some reason. After a while, they all left.

As we were about to order, Jess asked how we’d feel about just getting drinks, instead of breakfast, because it’d be quicker. To answer our confusion, she explained that we were going to be joining Gaby’s group to go visit some cenotes today. Beto would pick us up at Jess’s house, and we’d go up to his house and wait for another friend to come over with a car. Beto’s dad was going to be using Beto’s car, so Beto couldn’t drive us.

We slurped down some coffee and headed back to the apartment. On the way back, Xie and CM discussed the possibility of going to Chichen Itza instead of going to the cenotes. The clouds had been clearing a little, and there seemed a decent chance of seeing the equinox snake there. Time was tight to get to the bus pick up zone, so we hurriedly made cheese sandwiches while Beto was on his way. We put some of the onion-habanero-lime condiment on them, which was yummy.

The bus pick up location for the Chichen Itza trip was near Beto’s house, so it wasn’t too far out of the way for them to drop us off. Beto drove quickly and did some smooth passing maneuvers that Jess said reflected his having learned to drive in D.F.

We got to the bus stop and rushed inside. Jess came with us, to make sure that we had not missed the bus, before they took off on their cenotes trip. Nope, we had not missed it. In fact, there was still a long line of people waiting to get on a bus. Jess said hi to yet another friend of hers who was in line, a Mexican guy who was dressed in a cool white Yucatecan suit, that, like the hipils, had nice embroidery around the neck. Having assured that we were ok, Jess headed out.

The line stood still for a really, really long time, with no explanation. After an hour, we finally gathered that they had filled up the buses originally designated for the trip and were making round trips. After about an hour and 1/2, a bus came and filled up with people and left. We were still in line. At this point, we started doing the math on the day and realized that if a bus came now, and we got on it, we’d be spending 4 hours on a bus for about an hour and 1/2 at the site. We also realized that even if we managed to catch the first bus back at 6:30, we’d be severely pressing our luck to get home and pack and make our 10pm bus to Palenque. Worse yet, if the buses back were anything like these lines, we’d miss our Palenque bus for sure.

After some debate, we decided to let go of the almost 2 hours we’d wasted in line and head back to the center to try to catch up on journal. We had also tried to text Jessica, but we weren’t getting through.

On our own for the first time since arriving in Mérida, we went out to the street and looked for a cab. It didn’t take us long to find one, and we negotiated a cost to go to the center. Our request to go to the plaza seemed to work out fine.

At the center, we walked around, intermittently stopping for snacks/food. We ate lunch at a restaurant right on the square, which turned out to not be that good, and we had to ask for the salsa de habenero. Xie got sopa de lima and CM got poc chuc.

We walked around on the south side of town. Jess had explained to us that there is a sharp dividing line in the city between north and south, with the area south of the center being the poor part of the city. Walking around on the south side, it seemed very true. For example, if you walk north of the square, you hit store after store of touristy places, selling Guatemalan and Mexican crafts. If you walk south of the square, there are none of these places at all. Everything was a lot cheaper. In a miscellaneous-stuff store, Xie bought a headband. She’d been using Jess’s headbands for the last few days and was in love with the wispy-control they provided. Wispies of hair tickling you in the face, driving you totally mad? Just whip on a headband, madness begone!

CM had a constant craving for helado de coco. Xie wasn’t hungry yet. As we headed for the sorveteria, we started to get panicked about how we were ever going to communicate with Jessica. When Jessica left us, the plan had been that we would text message her when we got back from Chichen Itza. But we had already texted her a few times and gotten no response. We had no idea if anything was getting through.

Xie tried to call her the same way that had worked when we had first arrived in Cancún, but it wasn’t working. We had printed out a sheet of instructions for how to dial while travelling internationally, and we started trying every permutation of the confusting instructions. Half of the things we tried resulted in the phone just getting disconnected with a message along the lines of “call failed” (in Spanish). The other half resulted in us reaching a message in Spanish that sounded like “Your call could not be completed as dialed.” We thought that one thing that could be happening was that Jessica was out of range. CM called the phone company and talked to them, which ghave us yet more dialing permutations to try.

We wanted to get home at a reasonable hour, pack, take a shower, maybe grab some dinner with Jess and Beto. They had said that they would probably be back from the cenotes by 6 or 6:30. What we were worried about was that they would then wait at Beto’s house near the bus location until 8:30, probably not starting to worry until 9 or so, while all the while we were already back in the cneter with no way to tell them to come home.

We ended up calling dad and Jenni, since we knew that they had both called Jess in Mexico before, and asking them to call her and tell her to call us. In the end, it turned out that the very first number we had tried, the one that had worked from the airport, had been the right one. It was just that Jessica had been out of range, and for some reason her system didn’t take voicemail messages while her phone was out of range. They had ended up at the cenotes longer than she had thought. Finally one of the times we tried to call her we got her voicemail and left her a message. A little while later she called back and then texted back. Of course she had a million messages from everybody by then.

After all that, we ended up being rushed to get ready to go. Beto very nicely went out to get us all tamales while we hurriedly stuffed all of our things into bags, trying to predict what we’d need for the week. Beto drove us to the bus station, bag of tamales in hand. We were at the bus station about a half an hour early, so we ate the tamales there. They were delicious–from the same place that we’d eaten the first night. Apparently Beto had fought his way to the front of the line, saying, “Jessica is going travelling and needs tamales now!” The tamales were a challenge without a table, but Beto helped out by pouring from the big bag of salsa for all of us.

The bus came; we got on, Jessica and Beto saying kissy goodbyes. On the bus, we all fell asleep pretty quickly. Later on, though, it got so cold from the air conditioning that we had a lot of trouble sleeping, even with our warmest clothes on. Xie noticed that she would wake up after the air conditioning had been on for a while. About a minute after it had cycled off, she could get back to sleep, until the same point in the next cycle.

 

Yucatán 2008 Day 5 – Museums closed (2008-03-20, Thursday)

Pizza bagels for breakfast. Went to Cafeteria Pop Coffe (sic) Shop for coffee. Jess got a cappuccino, CM an expresso (doble), Xie café con leche. There was a Picasso mural and some 60s 3-d pop designs on the walls. Jess asked about the mural, and we learned that it had been copied from a record of Central American protest music. The shop had been open since 1971, and our waiter had been there for 35 years.

At some point, we realized that the museums were closed, due to the Semana Santa holiday. We headed down towards the Plaza Mérida, where there was a ticket office for buses, so we could get tickets for the equinox events at Chichen Itza and Dzibilchaltun. Unfortunately, the ticket office was closed, so we decided to do some shopping for gifts. We checked several shops for guayaberas for Lisa and Bru. We found a shirt for mum and looked at some really cute Guatemalan backpacks for babies that were in the shape of different animals. As soon as we left the Guatemalan store, Xie decided that we would return to get a backpack for Flynn.

We went back to Jess’s apartment to drop off the gifts, then left to catch a bus to a city cemetery that Jess liked. We stopped by the tourist info to ask which bus to catch, then walked a few blocks to the stop. We didn’t have to wait long.

The bus cost 5 pesos (about 50 cents), which you paid on entering and got a ticket in exchange. Jess explained that they would occasionally check the passengers to make sure that everyone had a ticket, but she had only seen that happen on one bus line. We watched the neighborhoods go by, and enjoyed the diversity of colors that the cinderblock houses and shops were painted.

The cemetery was fabulous. The first thing we looked at were the graves in the wall around the whole place. These were about one foot square on the front and a little deeper. Many of them had covers, painted different colors, some with names painted and a few with names engraved, but a bunch of them were just open. Of the open ones, some had a metal box for the remains, others had the remains in a sack, usually falling apart with age, and a bunch just had the bones in a pile in the open grave box. It definitely felt odd to be looking at bones of different unidentified people.

There were also tons of regular graves, mostly really crammed together. They were all of them of a very similar style.

First came a long low box, presumably over the body. Sometimes this part had writings on it. The writings usually said something about beloved so and so and how they were only gone in body. Sometimes the bottom of the long stone was broken, and you could look straight down into the grave, which was now filled with weeds and garbage.

Next was a taller box, often with windows into a shrine, which might include photos, Catholic paraphernalia, or plastic bottles of water. One had a gallon of car oil. The tall box could be pretty variable. Sometimes it was shaped like a small palapa or other kind of Mexican house.

In the back was a tall stone, on top of which was usually a figurine or a cross. Most typically, the figurine was Jesus or an angel. The figurines had weak hand connections, so many had missing hands.

Some of the angels were in a pose that we didn’t understand, with one hand pointing up and one hand shushing over the lips.

The graves themselves were all brightly colored, all kinds of different colors. Some of the graves were well cared for, while others were barely standing, with plants and trees growing out from all sides.

Some notable graves:

• an Aladdin figurine and Jesus figurine on the same grave

• a few with Little Bo Peep looking figurines, instead of Catholic ones

• one with human bones, including a skull with a big chunk taken out of it

• a grave with a little walk-in plaza with an East Indian looking figure playing a guitar engraved on the wall

There was a large monument to a populist/socialist leader that advocated for the rights of indigenous Yucatecans. Jess told the story of his gringo fiance, who had come donw to the area as a reporter and had fallen in love with him and had become engaged. She went back to the states and was to be married when she returned to the Yucatan. But he, his 2 brothers, and another man were all assassinated just before she returned. The plaque on the monument was dedicated from his mother. The gringa was buried just across the way, and she had a monument also, but much smaller.

Soon we started to get hungry, so we headed out to catch the bus. Xie was super hungry, so we hopped into the nearest store when we got back to the center of town. She got a packet of some deep fried peanut things called “Hot Nuts” (labeled in English). Jess bought Charritos, which were like small tortilla chips. She asked the guy behind the counter if he had some hot sauce, and he pulled out a bottle of it. She poured hot sauce into the bag, folded the top shut, and shook it up. She explained that this was a popular snack.

It was looking like it was going to be cloudy on the day of the soltice, and like there was no point in going to the crowded solstice events, so we decided to try to leave on our longer trip – through Chiapas state, Guatemala, and Belize – a day early. We thought we would try to leave that night instead of the following night. We stopped by the bus station to see if there were any tickets for that night, but there weren’t. So we bought tickets for Friday night instead, as originally planned.

Xie and CM decided to take Jess and Beto out to dinner, so we asked Jess to pick one of their favorite spots. Jess picked Café Edén, a funky restaurant with a Garden of Eden theme. We met Beto a few blocks from the restaurant and walked the rest of the way together.

The restaurant was decorated with branches hanging from the walls and ceiling. There were several small rooms with four tables. The talbes were roughly constructed. The chairs were wooden crates, padded with pillows made from stuffed burlap coffee sacks. The whole place was dimly lit. Jess and Beto who, as usual, were being very sweet, holding both of each others’ hands, and giving each other many kisses, loved the restaurant for its character.

We looked over the menu, wondering about some of the items – enchiladas suiza (“Swiss enchiladas”) – and the Torta Eden – an undescribed sandwich – which Xie and CM ended up ordering, respectivley. There was a little bell on the table that you were to ring when you wanted service of any sort. Jess got quesadillas with cheese and Beto only got hot tea. He must have already eaten.

After dinner, we walked back to Jess’s apartment. On the way, we stopped at the Guatemalan store to get the backpack. Jess had Beto ask how much it was, since he was a Mexican. Earlier, when Jess had asked, she said 100 pesos, and when Jess said “That much?”, she dropped the price to 90 pesos. For Beto, she said 80 pesos. She looked a little miffed when she recognized us and saw what we were paying.

When we got back, we crashed out pretty quickly – another long day.

 

Yucatán 2008 Day 4 – Uxmal and Mérida (2008-03-19 Wednesday)

When we woke up, Jess was out. We took a shower and she was back when we got out. We were too late for the 10:40 bus to Uxmal, so we went to the station and got tickets for the noon bus.

After we bought the tickets, we went across the street to get some breakfast. The man who served us was old and had trouble moving. He did everything very slowly. Any time he did anything, Jess said, “Ay, mi vida!” He wrote really slowly and carried things one at a time. He was friendly. Colin got black coffee, Xie and Jess got café con leche. Colin got tacos de carne asada, Xie got quesadillas, and Jess got a panucho. The quesadillas were really simple — cheese inside and a dollop of a thin sour cream on top. There was also a delicious habenero salsa on the table that Xie and CM kept feeling compelled to eat, even though it made the coffee taste weird.

Uxmal was an awesome site. The buildings were a mixture of pretty renovated and pretty run down. They were somewhat spaced out, so we could just wander and see a lot of different things.

It rained a couple of times and we scrambled for shelter. After a while, we just walked around in the drizzle. At one rainy point, we ended up at the top of a really run-down and overgrown pyramid with great views out to all sides. It was fun hiding in the weedy partially-standing buildings.

It was there that Jessica spotted this gorgeous turquoise bird for the first time. Xie and CM barely saw it, but eventually we all got good glimpses. It turns out that the bird is called a Toh, or a Turquoise-Browed Motmot. The primary colors were green and turquoise, with a rusty breast and striking markings on the eyes, wings and chin. The coolest thing was the pair of feathers at the end of the tail, connected by a thin, featherless strand.

Apparently these birds are often associated with Mayan ruins, because they nest in the underground cisterns that the Mayans used to collect water. Not all sites have these cisterns. They tend to be at sites in places without access to cenotes (lakes in underground cave), like Uxmal.

There’s also a myth about how they used to be really vain about their beautiful and delicate tail, so they never shared in the work that had to be done. But then one day they were sleeping and their tail got ruined and now they have to hide out in the cisterns, ashamed.

The ruins were pretty elaborate in a lot of places with masks and serpents and lots of XXXX patterns carved in the stones that the buildings were made from. We saw a ball court with a stone hoop. Jess said that the winners of the game would be sacrificed to the gods. Although CM heard somewhere else that it was the losers who were sacrificed. The game is a kind of like soccer, in that you could move the ball with any part of your body except for your hands, and kind of like basketball with the elevated hoop that you have to get the ball through.

We learned that the rain god had big round eyes. The masks had crazy long noses that stuck out at the corners.

We had gotten conflicting information about when the bus was returning to Mérida, and we were afraid we’d be stranded. But we got lucky, and the bus did come after a nervous wait.

It was frijol con puerco night, and Jess and Beto made us a delicious dinner. Frijol con puerco was cooked pork chunks, which were added to a simmering pot of beans, along with a unique herb, _______ (we can’t remember what it was called). The herb was a little minty (and had squarish stems, but more lobed leaves) with a volatile, nosy flavor.

Beto made the salsa, which was very much like the salsa that CM’s friend Nando used to cook at his house, with seared tomatoes, garlic and onions blended with cilantro and plenty of salt. Jess had to ask him to stop adding salt, and explained that she thought that something was wrong with his taste buds, because he adds so much salt to everything. He also made a yummy, spicy condiment, which was chopped onion and habenero peppers, with salt and lime.

We sat down to eat. Each person got a dish of beans, to which we added rice, avocado, salsa and the spicy condiment. We ate the food with tortillas and drank horchata, which came from a concentrate. Super yums!

After that, we were very tired, and went to bed.

(more photos)

 

Yucatán 2008 Day 3 – Mérida & Celestún (2008-03-18 Tuesday)

We slept and slept in as long as we wanted. When we got up, Jess cooked us some delicious omelets, the real kind that is folded over instead of scrambled.

We packed up and caught a bus to Celestún, which is on the Gulf of Mexico.  As soon as we got onto the beach, Xie remembered that she is prone to seasickness on boats. She was very nervous to try the two and a half hour boat ride. But she did want to see the flamingoes and other birds. While we debated what to do, we watched the amazing birds right off the shore that were swimming and diving. There were brown pelicans, cormorants and magnificent frigate birds. The pelicans were the most striking — huge and doing crazy fish-diving maneuvers. Eventually Xie decided to risk the possibility of being trapped, nauseous, on the boat, in trade for the possibility of having a great time boating around and seeing birds.

The boat had eight passenger seats (two columns of four), permanently fixed, but slightly rotatable. There was a canvas cover, tied to a welded frame.  The driver sat in the back, controlling the large outboard motor. We had nine passengers, so they brought on a regular wooden chair and put it in between the rear two regular passenger seats. Xie and CM sat in the second row from the front. In front of them were a young, hip Mexican couple (versace sunglasses, etc) that we later learned were from D. F.  (Districto Federal, another name for Mexico City, pronounced as “de effe”, similar to calling the U. S. capitol D. C.). In row three was a French Canadian couple, and in the last row were Jess and another young Mexican couple that seemed to be freshly in love.

The boat drove really fast. The wind was intense, and according to Jess, the people in the back of the boat got wet from splashing waves. We passed long stretches of beach and unoccupied forest land, stopping for gas on the way. It was a nice ride, fast and bumpy, but good weather and beautiful land, water and birds. Frigate birds flew around in swarms overhead. Xie was super stoked to not be sick. There were two areas with piles of burning trash that we passed — very stinky.

Shortly after we turned the corner and started heading back east into the inlet where the flamingoes hung out, we stopped at a dead forest that was slowly being taken over by mangroves. It used to have cedar and oaks, but they died when the area was flooded by a hurricane. Many of the dead trees were still standing. (We now think that the swaths of dead trees we saw when we flew over near Cancún were probably hurricane damage as well.) We got out of the boat or a few minutes to take photos and wander around. The couple from D. F. forgot their camera, so they asked CM to take a photo of them and email it.

After getting back into the boat, we continued heading east. We slowed down to get a close look at some cormorants, who were sitting on some sticks that poked out of the water.

Then we continued on to look at the flock of flamemcos (flamingos). The flock was standing in shallow water. We had read about this being the largest flock in the world, so even though there were probably more than fifty birds, it seemed like a small group. Maybe the others were off somewhere else. We hovered about, taking lots of photos and getting good views through the binoculars. There were a few lighter birds, including at least one that had no pink at all.

(On this trip, we realized where the words for many kinds of dance come from. “Flamenco” means flamingo. “Merengue” means merange. “Salsa” means sauce.)

The people in the back of the boat kept egging the driver on to get closer, even though you were *not* supposed to get too close. Finally we scared the flock, and they all took off flying. It was magnificent to see, but by scaring them we were robbing them of precious eating time, and risking them damaging or even breaking their delicate necks.

After chasing the flamencos off, we boated on a path through the mangroves, which was pretty neat. There were signs telling that cutting the mangroves was prohibited.

Next, headed over to a “cenote”, scaring a large flock of coots on the way.

The cenote wasn’t really in a cave (literally, cenote means underground lake), but it was a large pool of fresh water, in a stream that was fed from an underground spring. Most people, including Jess, were having a refreshing swim. CM and Xie did not, because Xie did not have a place to change into her swim suit and CM because he had a hurt finger that he was being cautious to not get infected, so he hadn’t even brought a pair of swimming trunks that day.

There was a vendor selling cacahuetes (peanuts) with chili and lime on them. The couple from D.F. bought a little cup of them and passed them around on the boat for everyone to try. They were quite yummy and pica (spicy).

On the way back, we saw a fisherman in a small boat, pushing it along with a long pole. Our driver must have been a friend of his (or was just being a good samaritan), because he threw the fisherman a rope, which he tied to his boat. Then our boat went tearing off with him in tow, though not quite as fast as before (but nearly so). We were worried for the small fisherman’s rowboat, but they seemed to know what they were doing. Shortly after we slowed down to pass under the bridge, we noticed that the fisherman’s boat was gone.

The woman from the French Canadian couple was weird, in a super-friendly way. She had ok Spanish but wanted to talk to everybody. She was especially into the hip young couple up front. On the way back, she hobbled her way up to the front (it was hard to move at all on the bouncy, speedy boat) and said, “Now we are all going to sing a song.” She started with “Frere Jacques”, in French, English, Italian and Spanish. Xie didn’t know the English as well as she did the French. When she moved on to Alouette, we realized that we learned French songs in grade school, without really thinking about it. It was really hard to sing and next to impossible to hear above the roar of the boat racing along.

When we got back, we were hungry, so we looked for a place to eat. We picked a random restaurant from the several look-alike places along the beach. Interestingly, the couple from D.F. and then the French Canadian couple ended up at the same restaurant. We got coctel de camarones (CM), pescado con mojo de ajo (Xie) and another fish filet (Jess). Both fish dishes were excellent and the shrimp cocktail was ok.

We sat around for a bit, watching the different vendors come in to sell their desserts or cigars or wooden bowls to the restaurant patrons.

After that, we went for a walk up the beach and to take pictures of the sunset and its reflection, a rich golden orange against the turquoise green ocean and tawny sand.

When the sun had disappeared, we went to buy bus tickets and wait for the bus.

When we got back to Mérida, Beto met us to get helado de coco. We sat and played cards (hearts) for a while, then headed back to Jess’ apartment. On the way back, Beto and Jess made a detour to get some beans to put on to soak for making frijol con puerco the next day.