Yucatecan rubberneckin'

Mérida’s Plaza Grande was a Tippi Hedren nightmare. Swarms of birds blanketed the trees of the square, their individual shapes barely distinguishable in the nebulous mass and their macabre chorus almost deafening. Had the carpet of bird droppings not suggested otherwise, I would have been convinced that the high-pitched screeching was produced by an army of bats, not birds.

Bathed in the glow of several illuminated reindeer, smitten couples, spongy grandmothers and sleepy-eyed children strolled about the town square, defiant in the face of the faecal fusillade and ceaseless squawking from above. Holidaymakers in horse-drawn buggies chased the last wisps of twilight through the crowded streets, waving cameras at clusters of colonial edifices and confettiing the air with squeals of laughter.

Built on the site of a Maya city, Mérida was once considered to have one of the highest concentrations of millionaires in the world. Today the colonial centre gives way to shabby side streets and tatty outskirts. Beyond the gently faded façades of graciously ageing mansions - legacy of the region’s henequen merchants - lie sad, shuttered up structures, their flaking paint work like dead skin. A flaccid Santa from Christmas past drooped from a windowsill. In a doorway an outline rested on the cardboard strata of a life without four walls.

Choose a road out of Mérida and you are rewarded with flamingos, expansive haciendas and - of course - ancient Mayan ruins. To the south, the well-preserved site of Uxmal takes on Chichén Itzá and wins - at least in our minds. To the west, the fishing town of Celestún is home to a biosphere reserve and a seasonal influx of flamingos and octopus hunters. Sharing a boat with a couple from Hamburg, we drifted around the estuary, weaving through the mangroves and past the glow of hyper-coloured flamingos bouncing off the sediment-heavy, effluent-coloured water.

We took the road east, past the bones of one-time dwellings and the tumbledown pueblos baking in the late afternoon sun, and reached Mérida’s Plaza Grande as Saturday night musicians were setting up to do auditory battle with the unremitting twittering.

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