Early morning flight to Dallas

On our last full day in La Antigua, Kelly and I walked over to the church, ruins, and museum of San Francisco, dedicated to Brother Hermano, Guatemala's only native born saint. Lots of miracles are attributed to him and in the museum (where photography is not permitted) are walls of crutches, artificial limbs, letters, and other things. Presumably these are testimony to the healing properties of the saint, and the adjoining church is clearly a play of devotion for today's Antigua Catholics.

Interestingly the Catholic church is no longer completely dominant in Guatemala - there have been large influxes of various Protestant evangelical orders. Our friend who lives in Antigua and is involved in many projects there is not very impressed with these newer churches, since they don't provide schools, hospitals, clinics, etc.

For our "last supper" we went out to have dinner with our friend Deet and ended up at a nice Indian restaurant. Just as we ordered our food, the power went out and stayed out for about 20 minutes, but came on again in time for our food to be served, which was much better than eating in the dark!


The next morning, we got up at 5am and our taxi drove us to Guatemala City airport, making what had been a one hour journey the other way in less than forty minutes. If Guatemala ever needs a formula one driver, they might have some candidates in their taxi drivers.

Just as we neared the airport, we noticed one of the mountains puffing smoke - the volcano was erupting! Thankfully, unlike the Icelandic volcanoes, this did not seem to interrupt any flights so we made it out on time, flying to Dallas where we connected for our last leg to Austin.

In the airport, I still have some Guatemalan Quetzals in my wallet so I did something I haven't done in a long time - bought some duty free booze, which was very reasonable. Guatemala apparently makes some good rum and we bought what we hope are some good samples. Since flights to the US must clear customs at the port of entry (Dallas for us), then go through airport security again, the rule limiting you to 3oz of carry on liquids applies (or it is re-applies?). This means that they give us the duty free on the way onto the plane, but once we arrived in Dallas and cleared customs, we had to pack the rum in our bags for the connecting flight to Austin. Thankfully they told us this, so we knew we had room, and they also packed the bottles pretty well, so they made it in one piece.



Now we are back in Austin (getting ready to go to Los Angeles this weekend to visit family). Time to deal with the insurance company about the lost bag...

Les Gusta La Antigua

La Antgua is the third colonial capital of Guatemala and at one point the most important colonial town between Mexico and Peru.  Abandoned in the late 1700s after an earthquake, the capital was moved to the current big, sprawling city of Guatemala City, which we are not visiting. 

Antigua became a backwater, which ironically is why it is such a gem today.  Left undisturbed and undeveloped it remained relatively small and intact.  Today it is a charming city of cobbled stones, restored colonial buildings, and the leading location for learning Spanish.  The Antiguenos are relaxed and used to hosting a wide variety of people from all over the world.  The city is compact and easy to walk around, with interesting buildings, museums, great markets, and incredibly beautiful hotels and restaurants.  Part of the charm of visiting this town is to walk through an open gateway and see what is inside.  Often it is a small hotel and/or restaurant situated in a restored building with a beautiful garden.   Typically the restorations leave at least part of the facility with exposed stonework and woodwork and it is incredibly atmospheric and charming.

Even the McDonalds fits in - it is the nicest McDonald's we've seen anywhere  For starters the view from their patio is incredible - the Volcan Aqua is in the background.  There are no garrish golden arches, just a subtle McDonalds logo in the wrought ironwork on the windows.  Their coffee and pastries were pretty good too - we stopped here to use the free WiFi.

There is everything from super budget accommodations through super luxury hotels.  You can eat as expensively or as cheaply as you like.  This is certainly one of the nicest towns that I think we have visited.

Of course all the architecture makes this incredibly photogenic, so it is hard to choose just a few images to post here.

La Antigua, Guatemala - one bag down.

Got up early, had breakfast and drove to Cancun airport, just south of the eponymous town.  As we drove north, we passed the luxury resorts of Playa Del Carmen with their huge gateways off the main highway.  Seemed like a different Mexico to what we had experienced the rest of the trip.

Once we got to the airport and returned the car, we checked in for our Mexicana flight to Guatemala City.  With some time to kill at the airport, I wandered around a bit and was amazed at how expensive everything was there.  Having been in a lot of international airports all over the world, I am used to seeing inflated prices, but this seemed crazy.  A bottle of coke was about 5-6 times more than what it cost in a normal Mexican shop and seemed more than at a US airport.  Looking at the prices in duty free, they seemed worse than what we get at a local liquor shop in Austin.  Very strange.

The flight to Guatemala City was uneventful - the plane was a CRJ200, a commuter jet.  We exited the airport and took an official taxi for the one hour ride to La Antigua to meet up with our friend Deet Lewis, who had been our SERVAS guest in Austin about two years ago.   In the confusion of exiting the taxi, meeting our hosts, and paying the cab driver we realized that we only had two of our suitcases after he had driven off!  We had repacked our bags the previous night so Kelly and I had almost all our stuff in one bag, Aaron had his bag, and in the third we put our diving gear, some of the things we had bought and other stuff we didn't need.  That was the bag that we lost and if we had to loose one bag, that's the one we would choose.   We gave the taxi driver a couple of days to bring back the bag in case it was a mistake, but no luck.  Luckily we have insurance, so hopefully no major harm done.

Cenote Diving at Xel Ha

(Note:  these are images off the internet and not my own photos).

I decided to travel "light" in terms of camera gear this trip, and so I am using my Powershot G9 compact camera.   I have an underwater housing for my DSLRs, but since I chose not to haul all my gear with us, that wouldn't do me any use.   I ordered up a housing for the G9 before we left and it arrived two days before we departed.  Unfortunately the housing was damaged and this particular model wasn't very good, so I had to send it back.   They had a Canon underwater housing at our local photo store in Austin, but only for the G10, which is just different enough to not work for my camera.   On the day before we left, I miraculously found someone on Craigs List in Austin selling the exact housing I needed for a good price.  I called him and he was on his way to a meeting, but agreed to call me when the meeting was over so we could meet and I could get the housing.  He never called and despite my repeated calls to him, he never answered  He also took the item off Craigs List, so I can only assume he sold it to someone else.  I was amazingly disappointed and so I've not been able to do any underwater photos in Belize or Mexico.

But I wanted to give you some idea of the fantastic sites we saw today as we went cenote diving.  Cave diving is a highly technical discipline and involves a lot of risk.  TO become a cave diver, one has to have about 100 previous open water dives and technical training before you can take a course than involves 17 additional dives.   We were not cave diving!

Instead we were cavern diving, which may sound like a technicality, but has very strict rules.  For one thing, it must be lead by a qualified cave diver and our divemaster was Budgie, a retired British Navy diver with tons of experience.  You can also only dive with a maximum of 4 people under the dive master's care, and you are restricted to staying within a set distance of open water.  Although parts of the dive are enclosed in caverns, there is always space to surface just a little further up, or a little behind you, and you have to stay close to areas lit by daylight.  As it was cloudy, overcast and very rainy, our cavern Dos Ojos in the Xel Ha park) was very dim.   Each of us had underwater flashlights and Budgie and I had high powered primary lights.

The caves are fantastic - full of stalagmites, stalactites, columns and other cave features, but all submerged.  There are also some fish in the cave, including cyclids and neons.  The cave is part of a huge freshwater underground river system that intereconnects with other caves and goes on for at leave 60 miles underground.  The dives themselves aren' very deep - our maximum depth was only about 30' and we did two dives, each about 45 minutes long.  By contrast, some of the cave dives are extremely deep - as much as 400' or more.

Our 2nd dive took us inside a cave area that is populated by bats who enter and exit through a small hole in the roof.  A fun day's diving, although Aaron prefers the open ocean and playing with sharks!

Tomorrow we fly from Cancun to Guatemala for the final leg of our journey in La Antigua.

Last of the Mexican Ruins, Ek Balam and Tulum

As we approach the end of the Mexican portion of our journey, today we drove from Chichen Itza to Tulum, on the Caribbean coast, about an hour south of Playa Del Carmen and the big beach resorts.

Our guide at Chichen Itza yesterday, Abel, had recommended visiting the site of Ek Balam, about 12 miles north of Vallodolid, which was on our way to Tulum.  Ek Balam was opened to the public relatively recently.  It is a small site and not on the main tourist track, so it was nice not to have to deal with large crowds.  Set in the jungle where it was nice and hot and humid, even by mid morning, this was the only Mexican site where we were able to climb the largest ruins.  The highlight of Ek Balam is that about 1/2 way up the main structure there is a terrace with lots of ornate carvings, some pristine frescoes, and most unusually a plinth/doorway which is the mouth of a jaguar including teeth above and below that were probably about 2' long.

After we sweat our way back to the car, we drove on to Tulum, a fairly monotonous drive through scrubby jungle.  Tulum has a couple of claims to fame.  One of them is its proximity to dozens of cenotes and so it is a base for cavern and cave diving, which we did the next day (more in a separate post).  The other claim to fame is the Mayan ruins of Tulum, which have the distinction of being right on the coast.  In fact, if you so wish, you can swim from the beach within the ruins site.  Unfortunately because of its relative proximity to the big resorts, it is also a very popular site, so lots of people, and no climbing the structures.  The site is well kept with neat, rope lined paths to direct you around the ruins. Unfortunately this has the effect of making the site come off a little Disneylandish. Still the views of the structures next to the sea, and some of the unique carvings made it interesting, including a god that looked like a man diving.

Once we left the site, we decided to visit the beach side branch of our hotel.  We are staying at the Don Diego de la Selva (forest), and they also have a Don Diego de la Playa (beach), a few KM away.  Our hotel is a quaint boutique place on the edge of town and its a pleasant place to stay, with a/c, 24 hour electricity, etc.   The beach property is right on the beach, but the accommodations are cabanas and tents with no a/c and power for only part of the evening.  Thankfully it is much cooler here by the ocean, but the a/c is still nice!  One benefit of staying at our hotel is that it gives us access to their beach property, so we hung out there for a little while as Aaron build a sand castle/race track in the very fine white sand.

Chicken at Chichen Itza

Well, in Piste, the nearby town.  Dinner was one of the simplest and least expensive meals we've had, but wonderfully delicious.  A small restaurant (I had to go across the street to buy some drinks) that only serves one dish, but does it very well - Pollo asada al carbon, or grilled chicken over charcoal.  Served with rice, grilled onion, lime, fresh tortillas and home made salsa, this was (literally) simply delicious.  It is amazing how good food so simple can be when done well.

We had begun the day by leaving Merida and driving about an hour and a half to the sister hotel of where we had just stayed.  This one was just outside perhaps the most famous of Mayan ruins, Chichen Itza in northern Yucatan province.   Actually Chichen Itza isn't exactly a classic Mayan site as there is much evidence of influence from other cultures, most likely the Toltecs, who used to live around today's Mexico City.  The site however, is spectacular - the ruins have amazing details and unusual features with more statuary and carvings that we've seen at most other sites.  The main pyramid, or El Castillo as the Spaniards called it, was an observatory.  Mayan buildings have incredible geometric and mathematical symbolism.  For example, each of the four sides has 91 steps, 4x91=364 + 1 for the platform on top = the number of days in a year.  The Mayans used two different calendars, one of which worked on cycles of 20 days (the base of their number system, and the number of digits on a human body) that came together once every 52 years.  Back at El Castillo, the steps have balustrades with serpent heads at the base and at dawn on the equinoxes the shadows from the corners of the pyramids form a zigzag pattern on the balustrades, bringing them to life.

Other buildings were observatories and temples laid out to match Orion's belt, Venus, sunrise and sunset on special days and so on.  Also of interest was the temple of a thousand columns, something that looked almost Roman, and the sacred cenote (sinkhole) which was dredged at different times over the last century and yielded many artifacts, some of which we had seen in Merida.

The site itself is hot and humid and there are lots of people.  But with plenty of room for them to move around, it did not feel too crowded.  Unfortunately, like at the other premiere Mexican sites, you can't climb any of the temples anymore, something that was possible until just a few years ago.  On one hand, this makes for clear views of the monuments, but deprives you of the amazing views we know are there from our experience at the top of Guatemalan and Belizean sites.

After dinner we came back for the Son and Lumiere show, which was just awful.  The simultaneous English translation was not available for some reason, but from the 50% or so of the Spanish that I understood, it was the same history we had heard several times previously.  The light show dragged on and got more and more boring.   The fun light show was watching the lighting bugs flying around and the lighting from a far off storm that lit up the sky every so often.

Merida, capital of Yucatan state

Many historians consider Merida to be the oldest continuously occupied city in the Americas. The colonial city was begun in 1542, but it was built on the site of a Mayan city and many of the buildings were erected using stones taken from the earlier Mayan edifices.

Today it is a bustling city of some 750,000 people. The roads are busy with cars and buses all day long and the sidewalks were built in a time of horse and cart, that is to say they are very narrow, so it is often hard to walk along the street without needing to hop into the road to get past a thong of people. There are some interesting museums here, especially the Anthropology museum, housed in a mansion built in the turn of the century for a hennaquin (sisal) baron and designed by an Italian architect in classical style.

The museum itself houses a good array of artifacts, including many jade and other pieces recovered from cenotes, or fresh water ponds that dot the region. Except for the very south, the Yucatan has no natural surface level rivers. This being a limestone area, there are however many subterranean caverns and these were the principal fresh water sources for the Maya (along with artificial reservoirs they dug and lined themselves). The cenotes were also places of veneration and sacrifice and so archaeologists have recovered human bones, jade pieces, pottery, and even carbonized fabric scraps from them. Much of this was on display for us to see along with good explanations in English of the way of life and day to day activities of the Maya.

One of my favorite pieces was a mask (pictured here) that was made from some large seashells and reminded me somewhat of a hockey mask.

We've now visited several Mayan museums and they have all been different, each adding to our understanding of the Maya way of life.

The Mayans had surprisingly large trading networks and even warehouses and remote agents, not too dissimilar from modern import/export business. Essentially trading networks were broken down into relatively local trading which was well established between communities, and long distance networks that might pass through several hands and reach as far as the southwest of today's United States for turquoise, or as far south as Honduras and El Salvador.

Merida has a very large market which we explored over several hours. The variety of goods on sale is huge. We enjoyed watching the making of fresh corn tortillas starting from large bags of fresh corn, then milling it into masa, rolling it into balls, feeding it into a machine which flattened them and dropped them on a rotating hot plate from which they made one circuit then popped off in a stack. Elsewhere we say them selling large balls of masa dough which looked like giant matzo balls (maybe them sell them as masa balls?)

Habanero peppers are a stable of the diet here and virutally ubiquitous. Every restaurant has a bottle of hot sauce made with habanero, one of the hottest peppers in the world. At one stall, a vendor offered me one to try (obviously wanting to have some fun with a gringo), but thankfully I knew better! Not sure I'd want to shake the hand of this guy in the market bagging all those habaneros!

Campeche, Mexico, Kabah & Uxmal

The Yucatan Peninsula is comprised of three Mexican states - Yucatan in the north, Quintana Roo in the east, and Campeche in the west. Chetumal, our first stop in Mexico is the state capital of Quintana Roo. The capital of Campeche is, believe it or not, Campeche. This is an old colonial town and it was the subject of numerous pirate raids for many years until the Spanish decided to wall it in, making it one of only a handful of completely barricaded American cities.

As with most Latin American towns, the cathedral marks the city center
fronted by a plaza called the zoloco. The old city walls are mostly still in place, as are the city gates and many of the garrison towers. We stayed in the heart of the old city which has a lot of charm to it - the buildings are painted in a multitude of colors and many have been turned into hotels with open courtyards in their center.

Out hotel, the Hotel America was one such place. Unfortunately the rain poured down the afternoon we arrived and copious amounts of water came into our room. They mopped it up, but when it rained again later, we had another small flood. Also our room faced onto the street, so it was pretty noisy, especially when some car alarms went off at 2 a.m.

We love to visit markets when we travel. There is lots going on and you get to see the local people, what they eat, what they buy, etc. Often there are great bargains to be had and unique foods to try. Campeche has a good sized, bustling market and we enjoyed walking around it for a while and picked up some fruits for lunch. We bought a mamey sapote fruit and some saramoyo (custard apples). We also bought some of the Mexican cinnamon that Kelly really likes. What you may not know is that in the US (and probably Europe too), what is sold as cinnamon is actually cassia, a closely related, but different spice. True cinnamon is lighter in color and has a sweeter more floral scent. Although you can get true cinnamon in the US, it is hard to find and much more expensive.

I also like markets because there are usually some interesting images to be had. I decided to leave out the photo of the cow's head (might be a bit too gruesome for some readers!) but the nearby butcher was an interesting study. Also where else are you going to find the chicken vendors setup right next to the flower sellers? Requiem for a pullet, maybe.

We left Campeche and drove for about an hour and a half to Kabah, a small Mayan ruins site which has some wonderfully intricate decorations and long wall of masks, many of them of Chac, the long nosed god of rain, lightning and thunder.

We had a picnic lunch outside the ruins and tried our fruit. The mamey is supposed to be very sweet with the flavors of sweet potato, pumpkin, and cherry. I don't think ours was fully ripe as it really didn't taste sweet at all. However, the saramoyos have a beautiful floral flavor and sweet custardy flesh, but they are full of hard seeds that you need to spit out.

Once we had finished lunch it was on to the main stop of the day, the major Mayan site of Uxmal, which has a number of splendid ruins, including the Governor's Palace, over 100M long and considered perhaps the finest pre-Coloumbian building in Mesoamerica, the nunnery, a quadrangle of buildings with cell like openings, the sorcerer's pyramid, a very tall and unusual rounded temple, the cemetery and several others. There were lots of interesting carvings including many animal forms such as birds, turtles, and jaguar. The cemetery carvings looked very similar to some 16th century gravestones we had seen in Malacca, Malaysia two years ago.

From Uxmal, we drove on to the capital of Yucatan state, Merida, where we are staying for three nights.

Palenque, Mexico

As James Taylor (Kelly's favorite artist) sang, "Mexico - I never really been but I'd sure like to go."  Aside from a quick hop over the border to Tijuana when I was in San Diego on business about 18 months ago, this is my first real visit to Mexico.  And in one day we managed to cross into four of Mexico's 31 states - Quintana Roo, Campeche, Tabasco, and Chiapas.  Sunday was a loooong drive - some 495 KM (or more than 300 miles) from Chetumal to Palenque, the town next to some famous Mexican Mayan ruins.

The drive was mostly uneventful and the roads were surprisingly good-excellent, except for one patch which is under construction.  The drive was quite picturesque as we passed through a number of different landscapes.   We did the drive in about 6 1/2 hours and might have been a tad quicker except for a wrong turn we made looking for a road that did not seem to exist.

Had dinner at Don Muchos, an interesting joint just outside the Palenque park.  It was a very busy restaurant outside in the jungle, and they had really good live music.   Most of the place is covered by thatch or awning, but we had a table in the open, which was fine until the heavens opened (there is a reason they call it the rain forest!).  Luckily we were able to move our table under cover and continue our meal.   I had chicken with a fantastic mole sauce.

The next day we had a slow start and headed over to the Palenque ruins mid morning.  First you pay a small entry fee to get into the ecological park and then drive up to the ruins and buy a ticket to see them.  There were so many cars and buses that we ended up parking at the side of the road and could have had our car washed while we toured the ruins, but since it's a rental, that seemed unnecessary.

The ruins of Palenque were perhaps the best and worst experience we've had at a Mayan site so far.  The best, in that the ruins themselves are spectacular.  Perhaps not as large a site as some of the others like Tikal, but the buildings were in a much better state of preservation and restoration.  There were lots of places with glyphs, stucco, and carvings still to be seen and it was perhaps a bit easier to understand how the buildings must have looked and functioned in their heyday.  But the place is incredibly popular - tons of visitors, mostly Mexican, but also foreign tourists.   A number of times we had to stop in order to go with the flow of people and it is impossible to get a photo of any of the key buildings without people in the way.  Visiting the more remote ruins of Belize and Guatemala was really a very different, quieter, and even occasionally, solitary experience.

We stopped by the museum on our way out, but it turned out to be closed on Mondays.  We decided to come back the next day and headed over to the town where we had a great late lunch (superb mole enchiladas) and walked around and bought a few gifts and souvenirs.

The next morning we checked out of the hotel and drove back to the museum.  Frankly I had half thought of giving it a skip so we could get on our way as we had another fairly lengthy day of driving.   I am so glad we did not.  The museum has been the highlight of our Mayan experiences so far.  Although we have seen a few original pieces, much of what has been on display in the other museums are replicas, photos, etc. 

The collection in the Palenque museum is all original pieces from the site and they are spectacular.  The explanations were all in Spanish and English and had first rate illustrations making the information very user friendly.   Firstly one sees the incense censers which are about 3' tall pottery pieces and are incredibly detailed and colorful.  Next there are funerary pieces such as jewelry and jade masks.  Several thrones and other stone pieces have carvings that are so detailed and fresh looking you might think they had just been created.

But the piece-de-resistance is the tomb of King Pakal which was discovered in 1952 buried in a perfectly intact crypt deep inside one of the pyramids.  The exhibit included several short movies that not only explained the tomb, its iconography, architecture, etc. but also gave a strong sense of the experience the archaeologist must have had when he made the discovery.

This was absolutely first rate and it is not possible to look at these Mayan ziggurats, hieroglyphs, jewelry, etc. and not make comparisons to the Egyptians.  The level of detail and artistry in the carvings makes contemporary European stonework seem crude by comparison.