Uxmal

Ball court in foreground where the losers literally lose their heads.



Main temple at Uxmal

Our plan was to head to Uxmal (pronounced Ishmal), go to a campground recommended in the guide, tour the ruins, and spend the night. That’s pretty much how it went, with the exception being that the campground recommended in the guide has had the jungle grow up around it, and it no longer has room for RVs or travel trailers. However, the owner of that establishment was very helpful, and recommended a place north of the Uxmal ruins, which we found and which turned out to be completely adequate. It’s a hotel and restaurant which allows RVs to park in front and plug in for only 100 pesos (about $10US), and since we could plug in the fridge which was starting to warm up after more than 24 hours, it was good enough for us.

We spent the day touring the Uxmal ruins. These ruins are even more set up for tourists than Palenque, and they are much more rebuilt which helped us see more how things probably looked in the times of the Mayans. The Uxmal city is a few hundred years younger than Palenque or the ruins we’ve seen in Belize and Guatemala, and Tom commented how you could tell that people have always strived for bigger and better since these newer ruins are bigger and better than the older ones we’ve toured. The buildings at Uxmal seem bigger, and the city seems much less organic; it’s arranged all in quadrangles, rather than around the lay of the land. This may have been because the lay of the land didn’t have as much impact on the city design because there are fewer natural water sources, but it may also have been that as time passed, the ancient city planners had a better idea of what they wanted. And the “bigger” part of that may be because the city has been reconstructed more extensively by archeologists, but we don’t know. We bought a book on Mayan civilization in this area that covers a number of the ancient Mayan cities; we hope that the book will answer some of our questions, and let us know if our observations and conclusions are valid, or if they’re based on too little for us to even be commenting.

We got back to the hotel/RV lot around 3:30, and decided to do some catching up. The people are very nice, like everyone we’ve met in Mexico, and invited us to spend the afternoon on the porch of their restaurant. So, we brought the dogs in and tied them to our chair legs, whipped out the laptops, ordered margaritas, and started catching up on writing stuff for this blog, logging expenses, and all the other paperwork that we seem to feel compelled to do despite the lack of real jobs. We talked to one of their guests, a man from Honduras who has lived in Nevada for seven years, and who was acting as our interpreter with the owners. He assures us that within two years we will be fluent in Spanish. I guess that’s a good thing, although at the moment spending two years communicating with hand signals and smiles seems like a long time. We ended up having dinner in their restaurant and a couple of more cervasas, which was the first we’ve eaten out because we’ve been doing all of our cooking in the camper. We logged up a total bill of 300 pesos (about $30US) for the entire afternoon and evening, including tip. Traveling in Mexico is not only fun, it’s relatively inexpensive.



Hotel restaurant, we sat in the veranda in the front (open on all sides) to work on blog stuff with dogs.

The guest from Honduras/Nevada also explained how to use our cell phone, and we get reception here, so we got our voice mail and returned a few phone calls. It turns out that we weren’t doing much wrong with the phone, but apparently we haven’t had reception at the times when we’ve tried it or when people have tried to call us. We’re just about to take a look at the guide book and map and figure out what we are doing for the next couple of days, since we’ve decided that we’re going to try to cross into Belize on Sunday, since the customs agent says that Fridays and Mondays are the busiest days, and we don’t think we’ll make it there by Saturday. So, two more days in Mexico, then on to Belize.