Campin´in Campeche

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Xpujil (pronounces Shpuheel) is the name of a town, not exactly that I was in the whole weekend (not exactly weekend, as it´s over and it´s only Saturday night. Yes, we came back way early, I´ll get to that), I stayed there last night, but mostly we were there to see Calakmul. That´s just not a choice on the list. Why not? I have no idea, cause it´s one of the four most important Classic Mayan sites. Probably because it´s in the middle of a nature reserve and 60 miles from the closest highway. Ridiculous. Taxi drivers in Xpujil are probably the best paid guys in town. Again, I´ll get to that.
So, we left Merida on Wednesday evening and headed off to the city of Campeche, which I´ve already been to (remember, pedestrians have right of way, forts, and whatnot), to spend the night because the bus to Xpujil left too early in the morning not to. So we stayed in this place called the Pirate Hostal. Which seemed all ok because it´s a hostal and they´re all about the same (dorm rooms. This one had four bunk beds per room and a locker for each bed. There were also fans, which was nice cause it´s crazy hot here, but didn´t help too much. Anyway, so we went out and had some horchata (tasty white drink made from rice and almonds. This one had coconut in it too) and then went back to the hostal to go to bed. We go to bed. Everything is all fine. Wake up in the morning, go downstairs to turn in our sheets and pillows and get the fifty peso deposit we paid for them, only there´s no one there. We wait a bit, but since we´re worried about missing the bus, we decide maybe we should just leave, because afterall, it´s only five dollars. So we go to leave. Only the front door is locked and we can´t get out. So we shake it trying to open, and the guy who works there, who was apparently sleeping in the back room wakes up and comes out to help us. We stole a bit of water from them (refilling our water bottles from theirs. Apparently they charge a peso a liter, but they weren´t there, so we didn´t pay), but they locked us inside, so I say it´s a fair tradeoff.
After that we went off to find the second class bus terminal, because first class busses apparently don´t go to Xpujil. So we head off in the direction they say it´s in until we find it and buy our tickets. All is well. We had hoped to get off at the road to Calakmul so we could walk to our campsite (7 km) but we slept the whole way and past it (we didn´t realize it was almost an hour before Xpujil), so we ended up in Xpujil with the only way to get to our campsite being taking a taxi. So we asked the taxi driver to take us, and he had no idea where it was and asked around and figured it out. So he did, and said it would be 250 pesos, which isn´t really that bad considering it´s only twenty five dollars for an hour taxi ride. On the way he picked up his girlfriend so they could chat since he basically had two hours of driving ahead of them. That made me sad, because I wished that Luke do something like that, you know, want to spend time with me instead of not loving me anymore. Because, really, I love him. And what kind of guy decides to dump a girl because she wants to talk to him and be around him and (yes, he actually said this) because I´m too romantic and I try too hard to make him happy. But anyway, it surprised me too, because picking up your girlfriend during the job is not something taxi drivers in the states would EVER do. But we´re a lot more professional than Mexicans. To Mexicans the job is something to get money, and they don´t work all the time unless they have to, and they don´t worry so much about being professional while they´re at it. So anyway, we finally got to the campground, which is 7 kilometers inside the bioreserve of Calakmul. On the way I saw a blue morphus butterfly. You know those big blue ones everyone always has in their butterfly collection? Apparently they´re from the semi-tropics of Mexico. Anyway, once we got to the campsite, the owners´ son showed us our tent, and pointed out the howler monkeys who lived there, and we had a chat with the owner who said it was a project to teach the people of the area that they can live without damaging the forest like they normally do. So the place has composting toilets and they filter rainwater for washing and has no electricity. Which is really pretty darn awesome. It just sucked that we were there during the hottest part of the year (yes, here in the Yucatan the hottest months are April and May, and since we´re right smack in the middle of those two, it really doesn´t get much hotter than it is right now) so it sucked because there were no fans and it was crazy hot. After eating a bit (tasty tortillas. All the food there is organic and handmade. Mmmm....)we saw the family of howler monkeys that live in the area, and a whole bunch more of the butterflies, then went walking on this trail to an observation tower where we sat for an hour or so but didn´t see any animals. Then we went back and I went to sleep even though it was only 6, but I was really hot and tired. Then we woke up the next morning to go to Calakmul, and we had arranged with the people who own the place for them to take us to the site, but they were busy with their beekeeping (they make their own organic honey there too. Impressive place.) they just lent us their car to take to the site. So I got to drive an old stick shift that used to be a taxi down a biosphere road for sixty kilometers (that´s over an hour) without my passport, which is technically the only way I could legally drive in Mexico. So, yes, I illegally drove for over two hours in a borrowed car in Mexico. The guy was crazy trusting too, he left his wallet with a bunch of money in it inside the car, a fact which I only noticed when I was getting out. Anyway, the drive to the park was really nice, if long. On the way we saw more of the butterflies, a whole lot of blue turkeys (they looked like a cross between turkeys and peacocks. The¡r heads were blue and their feathers looked like a peacock´s if you cut them shorter). There were a lot of them, and they were really stupid, just standing around in the road the whole time. We also saw a puma, which is WAY COOL. Apparently the park also has jaguars, but we didn´t see any of them. After the long drive we got to the site and went around climbing pyramids and whatnot (my legs and bottom are SO sore now). The site has two really, really tall pyramids which are basically the same height, only not quite. Anyway, the taller one is either the first or second tallest pyramid in Mexico, depending on who you ask. So now I´ve climbed two of the three highest pyramids in Mexico. I have to go to Mexico City sometime so I can go to Teotihuacan and climb the pyramid of the sun if I want to get the third of the top three. Anyway, from the top of both of the tall pyramids at Calakmul you can see Guatemala. So yay! Now I´ve see Guatemala from both Mexico and Honduras! Maybe one day I´ll see it from inside. That would be cool. But right now it´s pretty politically unstable and it´s not the best idea ever. And (in contrary to what you´re going to think later) I´m not COMPLETELY against using common sense, so I´m not going to Guatemala to get mugged at the border. Anyway, after seeing the site, which was WAY beautiful, we headed back in the car to the campsite, sat there a bit drinking water, since we were really dehydrated (this site doesn´t sell water either. Why?) then started walking up the 7 km road to the main road where we´d heard we could take a bus at 4. So we started walking, and it was really hot, and these two guys on motorcycles drove up and offered to drive us to the main road, so we agreed and headed off. They dropped us off at the road and we stayed there waiting for the bus, which didn´t come. All the truck drivers who drove by were offering to drive us, which we definitely didn´t want to hitch a ride with a truck driver. There was no phone service, so we couldn´t call a taxi to take us, and we had no idea when the next bus was coming. Anyway, this old man came out of the Calakmul road in his cute little car and offered to drive us, and as we really didn´t have many options, we took the ride from him (I know, I know, bad, bad, bad, but it ended up working out). Anyway, he was a mormon and had possibly the most interesting life story ever. His family was from Jalisco, but his parents came out to Southern Campeche right after he was born to teach people there to farm (this area wasn´t colonized by the Spanish, because there was really nothing there, so people didn´t really know anything apparently), but then his parents died, so he got raised by a Maya family. When he was older, he got some professor to teach him to read and write, so he got a job working for a farming company and was thus able to retire and buy a car. He said he reads a lot and wishes he were able to go to school, but that he never got that chance because there wasn´t a school where he grew up and when they finally got one he already had his own land and had to work it. But he wants to study geology, and he´s writing a book on medicinal plants, because he thinks there needs to be one that has pictures of the plants so people can go out and pick the plants themselves. Anyway, he said he decided to convert to Mormonism because what the book of Mormon says is the same thing he learned from the Mayans growing up. I don´t know how much I believe that, but then I´m not exactly certain what modern Mayans believe, or Mormons for that matter. Anyway, he was a really nice guy and let us off at our hotel for the next night.
We were staying the next night in a hotel that looked like a boy scout camp. I´m not kidding. The rooms were little log cabins. It was totally adorable. We had made reservations for the next night, but since we finished Calakmul early decided to move on to the next hotel (mostly because howler monkeys don´t really make good sleeping mates. They scream all night.) We asked at the hotel if it was ok if we stayed a night early, but they said that there was a problem, which is that there was going to be a party and a lot of noise in the restaurant. We figured it couldn´t be worse than howler monkeys and agreed. So we sad outside out cabin for a while, watching the European guys in the cabin in front of us. There were three of them, one was blonde, and looked like a teenager, but was cute, so Rachel and I kept joking that I should make out with him, except that he looked about 14, and then two older guys, one who was bald and one who was a brunette. So we basically spent the evening making up lives for these three guys and trying to figure out their relationship. After a while we went out to get dinner. I ordered a double hamburger with french fries, and the lady looked at me like I was crazy. It turned out I wasn´t crazy, but that they were, because my hamburger had ham on it. I AM SO TIRED OF EATING HAM!!! I took it off, but it had obviously been fried with the patty, so the whole thing tasted like ham. Eeew, gross. But at least the french fries were good. We headed back to the hotel and sat outside some more, watching to teenaged european guy smoke like a chimney, when all of a sudden he headed over to talk to us. So he comes over and says "Speak English?" and we said yes and he said "Drinking beers?" and we weren´t sure if he was offering or if he was asking if we were drinking beers, but we decided he was offering and went over to their cabin to have a beer with them. Turned out blondy was 17 and had taken english for 10 years, but speaks it really badly and that they´re from the Czech republic. The brunnette dude was sleeping, but the bald guy had pretty passable spanish, so we spent the evening having this really awkward conversation and lots of translation going on. It was pretty interesting though. The party that they were so worried about though, turned out to be a bust. We could hear some music, but there was barely anyone there. Though I suppose that´s what you get for having a party in Xpujil. So we went to sleep and this morning woke up to go to three more smaller sites in the area. The only way to get to the first two was taxi (the second one was a block away from the hotel, so we walked.) The first, Chicanná was pretty interesting. There were some pyramids and great signage. (I know I´m lame, but it was nice becauset here were arrows pointing to where everythig was). Anyway, there was some pretty cool buildings, and a pyramid or two. There were stairs all over the place, and a really cool passageway that had a roof. The second, Becan (after which Río Bec, an architectural style, is named) which, besides having awesome signage, also had some super awesome examples of art. One of the building facades was a really good example of a monster´s mouth being the door to a building. There weren´t really any pyramids there though, which was a little disappointing. Anyway, we returned to the hotel (the whole morning cost us $10 for the taxi, and since we don´t have to pay for the sites since we´re national students, that´s it. Yeah, ten dollars for a whole morning´s entertainment) We got back to the hotel, and headed to town to find out when the bus left for Campeche since we realized we´d run out of fun for the town, then stopped by the site of Xpujil on our way back to the hotel. That site turned out to be pretty lame, except for one building that was kind of cool. It had an impossible staircase on it. You know how I always complain about how steep Mayan staircases are? This one was so steep it was impossible to climb. The stairs are about two inches wide and about a foot high. Oh well, just there for appearances apparently. Anyway, that was it for our trip down Mayan pyramids, but we still had to get back to Merida. So we went and sat in the bus station for two hours while I knit, then picked up the bus to Campeche, and after that the whole trip was pretty uneventful. Besides the fact that the bus had awful tv we´d already seen on other busses, so during one of the particularly awful movies we had to make sure to keep coversation going so we didn´t hear the movie (which unfortunately was subtitled, so we heard the English.) It was bad. Anyway, that´s about it, and now I´m back in Merida. Tomorrow we´re going to Merida in Domingo, which isn´t new, as I´ve been there before, but it should be ok. That´s really about it.

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