Around The Yucatan Peninsula

---

Tuxtla Gutierrez, the state capital of Chiapas, is a lively town fairly unused to tourists.

It is not historic, but they had the good sense to follow the Spanish design of a large plaza flanked by an impressive cathedral which gave the town a centre around which to develop all the other shops and amenities.

Our main reason for stopping there was to terminate a 13 hour bus journey from the coast and to take in the nearby canyon while in the area. So on arrival we were none too impressed to be deposited at a new bus terminal 5km from town rather than the one in the guidebook which was around the corner from the hotels.


The Sumidero Canyon is reached from the nearby town of Chiapas De Corzo, an easy ride from Tuxtla.

The floor of the canyon is filled by the Rio Grijalva which was dammed in 1981 for a massive hydroelectric project.

We waited at the riverbank for about half an hour for a boatload of people to collect and then took our seats in one of the speed boats which shoot up and down the river.

The trip took a couple of hours travelling at high speed up the river through the canyon until the dam was reached.

The driver stopped at various points pointing out various things to his passengers. This was in Spanish, but if we followed the turning heads we could generally see what he was talking about.

Anyway, my Spanish was good enough to know when we were at the base of a towering 1km high vertical rock wall. That’s high.

The river was broad and full of wildlife including basking crocodiles that have to put up with being buzzed all day by floating tourists.


Back in Tuxtla that night we were having a coffee at a cafe near the plaza when an aged beggar man took a table adjacent to us and proceeded to count his takings for the day. It took him ages to prepare numerous piles of small change which must have amassed to about $25, a more than decent whack for a days work in these parts.


From Tuxtla Gutierrez we went higher into the mountains to the town of San Christobel De Las Casas.

Founded in 1528 this was the Spanish regional base preferred because of its coolness due to the altitude.

At that point it was called San Christobel, the 'De La Casas' being added later in honour of a Dominican monk of that name who worked for the interests of indigenous people in those times.

It is an attractive town.

The old Spanish architecture remaining almost entirely intact.

Fanning out from the plaza the narrow lanes house a wealth of churches, civic buildings, shops restaurants and hotels as well as more backpackers hostels than anywhere else we have been in Mexico.

It is possible to wander off in any direction and find something of interest.

Of interest to us were a number of patisseries offering succulent cakes of tempting design. Over the course of a few days we pigged out on Chelsea buns, coconut macaroons, chocolate fondant sponge and mega-dense bread pudding embedded with juicy sultanas.


We took a trip to a couple of the local villages of indigenous people.

The village of San Juan Chamula was particularly fascinating.

The main church is brightly painted on the outside. Inside it is a cavernous space. There are no pews and the floor is strewn with long grass stalks upon which the parishioners sit swaying and chanting and burning incense in front of statues of Christian figures, hundreds of candles along the walls and at their feet.

Wide strips of colourful material hang from the centre of the roof to the tops of the walls.

Light streams in from the high windows in shafts, mixing with the incense smoke to create an otherworldly atmosphere unlike any other I have experienced.

Parents are there with their unwell children and some poultry. If a boy is ill they will slaughter a cock; for a girl a hen. The animals await their fate trussed and uncomplaining. It is killed in the church and then taken home and eaten.

Medicine men are also present, chanting persistently and applying balm to their afflicted subjects.

Pride of place is taken by a statue of John the Baptist who is revered above Jesus Christ in this congregation.

Amid all this activity reams of tourists shuffle between the family groups on the floor. Quite often tourism can seem ungainly and intrusive, but the parishioners didn't seem to mind and it was not an experience I would have wanted to miss.


We were offered a local meal in the next village, which was basically tortillas and stuff.

I was interested to learn that there are at four types of maize grown here (more commonly called sweetcorn in the UK).

We have grown up with yellow sweetcorn at home.
In Africa the main crop is white sweetcorn.
Here in Mexico they also grow red and purple varieties

The lady was a bit perturbed that this foreigner was showing such an interest in the vegetables in her cupboard, she was more concerned with trying to get me to wear some traditional garb, which I declined.


The ancient ruins of Palenque are named after the nearby town of Palenque, or vice-versa.

Nearer to the ruins is the 'legendary' travellers hangout of El Panchan where you can stay in rustic cabanas and palapa shelters.

In San Christobel we had shared the guesthouse with a hippy chick who extolled ones of these called Elementos Naturales. We counted the mossie bites on her legs and headed for the town centre and a traditional hotel room.

Palenque town was fine, having some decent eateries, shops and live music in the plaza at night.

"This is my favourite place so far" said Linda, and we hadn't even got to the ruins.

Minibuses go back and forth from town to the ruins all day so it was easy to get to the site.

Palenque was first occupied around 100 BC, and flourished from around AD 630 to AD 740, abandoned after AD 900 to be reclaimed by the jungle.

Today archeologists have uncovered a substantial area consisting of stone hewn temples, a palace and a ball court in a fairly concentrated site, although there is still loads to go for in the area.

The great thing is that most of the structures are available for clambering so that you can climb to an elevated position on one temple and get a good view of the others in one vista.

The main area is filled with vendors and tour groups, but it is not hard to find a secluded path to some temples where the jungle still predominates.
The bulk of the site is grassed and nicely landscaped.

There are two entrances so we entered at the main entrance and gradually meandered downhill through the site to exit along the road from the site museum.

That took us about 2 hours, after which we were slightly miffed to find that the coffee shop had been closed down and there were no refreshments available.

Still, we went around the museum in a parched state as we had exhausted our own water supplies.

It was a good museum though, with many finds from the site and a splendid recreation of a tomb as it was at the time it was uncovered.

Whilst there we took a day trip out to see some waterfalls, not an unusual travelling activity. However, as usual, it turned out to be a rewarding experience.

The first one, Misol-Ha, was a 35 metre drop into a round pool. As in the movies, we could walk around the back of the cascade, but only a few (fool)hardy souls did the complete circuit.

The other set of waterfalls, Agua Azul, were an extraordinary combination of white frothing water falling into turquoise pools along a 2km stretch.

It is sufficiently touristic to have a wide path built along this length lined by vendors.

We both had an exquisite fried red snapper. I asked the waiter (in Spanish) if it came from this river. Apparently not.

My only gripe about Palenque was the bus timetable. It was just not possible for us to leave during the day.

There are 6 buses daily towards the east coast of the Yucatan peninsula, all of which leave between 8pm and midnight.

I had planned to go to Chetumal next but disembarking there at 4am was unattractive, so we stayed on the bus until it arrived at Tulum at 8am.

We took a taxi from the bus station out to the beach front to find lodgings, but everywhere was both full and ridiculously expensive.

No way was I going to pay forty quid a night for a straw hut with no water or electricity.

There was clearly no shortage of French and Italian tourists, who don't mind discomfort so long as it is expensive.

The taxi-man dropped us off back in town for a nice round trip fee, we had a rubbish breakfast in a cafe and thought 'sod this' and got on the next bus to Cancun.

On the way the bus passed through Playa Del Carmen. This looks nice, we both thought.

Eighty minutes later we were in Cancun town. This looks rather grotty, we both thought, but we got off and stayed the night in a substandard hostel, retuning to Playa Del Carmen first thing the next morning.

Here we quickly found a very nice room in a new hostel with the Hallmark channel on TV, at a reasonable price. (The Hallmark channel has much fewer adverts than any of the other free movie channels though the selection can be a bit drowsy).


Playa Del Carmen has a nice beach with a profusion of sunbeds for hire, a pedestrianised street for restaurants and shopping and thousands of Americans and Canadians on holiday.

The first time we walked along this street I nearly had palpitations. The cost of a meal for two was extortionate by Mexican standards and waay beyond my budgetary boundaries.

The problem was solved rather neatly by going 100% self-catering, aided and abetted by the presence of a couple of mega supermarkets within walking distance.

This all worked rather well, to the extent that we stayed on the beach every day for 5 weeks.

I passed the time between swims by devoting hours to the Michel Thomas language course I have with me and Linda consumed her usual quota of books (one every 48 hours).

With the self-catering, I worked out that our total food bill was about £5 a day - and we were enjoying it.

We spent the evening wandering around the pedestrianised area, looking at the other tourists and the various mariachi bands, legless buskers and human statues trying to make a buck along the way. Sometimes the atmosphere was better absorbed from the sidelines, accompanied by a beer or a coffee.

One day Linda got us talked into a visit to a time share development. I was not too pleased to start with, as I have experienced the hard sell before, but in fact we had a pleasant 4 hours looking around an exceedingly luxurious development and left in possession of a bottle of tequila, a bottle of kahlua, a couple of T-shirts and a beach bag.

They didn't even seem too bothered that I didn't have $100,000 to buy an apartment for one week a year for 50 years (plus the $750 annual management fee, of course) as they are selling like hot cakes.

Our 5 weeks in Playa Del Carmen covered the Easter period, as we didn't want to be moving while all the Mexicans were filling the buses and hotels.

The bus to Valladolid took us back through Cancun town, which confirmed it to be a concrete jungle, started as a support hub for the tourist activities along the beach before taking on a life of its own to become a city of half a million people.

We never did get to see the beach area or the nearby islands, though the postcards looked lovely. From the bus we could see the silhouettes of the grand beachfront hotels on the horizon. Not for backpackers.


Valladolid is a small and easy going town. We used it as a base for a visit to Chichen Itza, the most famous of the Yucatan peninsulas Mayan archaeological sites (and we are finally in the state of Yucatan).

The finest sight here is the Pyramid of Kukulcan, a representation of the Maya calendar in stone, built around AD 800.

This pyramid has 365 steps and is positioned so that the angle of sunlight causes a serpent shaped shadow to move on the steps during the spring and autumn equinoxes.

We were there only 4 days after the spring equinox, but there were no signs of any symbolic shadows then so it must be pretty precise.

The site also has the largest ball court in Mexico and some remaining carvings of decapitated players with blood gushing from their necks - probably the losers.

This site was much more heavily touristed than Palenque - hundreds of bus tours from the beach resorts, and no climbing was allowed on the ruins. In fact, we observed one family who had stepped behind a chain fence being escorted from the site.

The tourist authorities at Chichen Itza were making much of the fact that it has recently been voted as one of the 'new seven wonders of the world' in an internet poll, but I assume that this must be because of the relatively high numbers of visitors as, for me, Palenque is both more beautiful and more absorbing.


We took a local bus to Merida, which passed through lots of small towns on the way to the city, all of which boasted an outsize church against a pleasant looking plaza.

The plaza in Merida is flanked by some of the oldest buildings in the country.

The Casa De Montejo dates from 1549, named after the chief Spaniard who conquered the Mayan settlement on this site in 1542.

Statues on the front of the building depict triumphant conquistadors standing on the wailing heads of the vanquished. Apparently, members of the Montejo family lived in this house until 1970.

We were fortunate to be in Merida on the weekend, when the city centre is closed to traffic and the cultural scene is at its height.

On Saturday night cafes spill into the street and live bands play to the customers and passing strollers. This is for the tourists.

Sunday nights are more for the locals, when a whole street is turned into a dance floor.

This is clearly the highlight of the week for many pensioners, who turn out in their best gear to bob and waltz to an easy-going band. They are joined by those tourists who have brought their dancing shoes and it adds up to quite a sight.


If a Meridian wants to go to the seaside, the town of Progresso is only a bus ride away.

Progresso is noted for having the countries longest pier, stretching 7 km across the shallow sea until the water become deep enough for cruise ships to dock.

Having seen that, with the benefit of a cruise ship at the end to add scale (can that really be 7 km?), there's not much else to the place apart from a reliable wind for kite flying.

Having walked the length of the beach we ate our banana sandwiches and caught the bus back.


Campeche is a city with a tempestuous past.

Originally a Mayan trading village it was taken by the Spanish in 1540, after two decades of resistance.

It flourished and became an important port, attracting pirates who regularly robbed, raped, murdered and looted over the next century or so.

Eventually a large protective wall was built around the city which appears to have solved that problem. Today only the corners of the wall remain, now housing museums and viewing points.

The seafront now has a lengthy promenade, although the lack of shade means that it is barely used during daylight hours.

This is a quaint town of narrow streets and narrower pavements.

The cathedral sits on the edge of a pleasant plaza, from which parallel streets emanate up the hill to create the typical block pattern.

The slope of the roads is less than the slope of the pavements and buildings so, as you progress along them the pavements become raised a couple of feet above the roads and have steps embedded in them at crossing points.

I wondered why but, even if I had sufficient Spanish to ask the question, I knew that I would never understand the answer.

---

Photos

Palenque Regional Waterfalls
Taken From The Rear