Xpujil

Our plan was to head from Mexico City to the coast of Yucatan.  It is a lot of bus hours on rocky roads and from Palenque we had a 6 hour ride to Xpujil which is halfway to the coast and has some nice biosphere parks and mayan ruins.  We had reserved a room in a nice place, it was a cabana with all amenities.  But the problem was we were arriving late at night, 11:30 so the hotel gave us instructions on how to get there.  Well on arrival at the bus station it was a crazy mess of people leaving for the vacations of the "Semana Sainte"  and it was festive.  I couldn't roll my suitcase because of the beer cans on the ground.  We didn't see a taxi anywhere until we went down the street and found a taxi stand.  It worked well and Yves was able to flag down a taxi.  But when we arrived at the location the instructions the hotel gave were not correct and we couldn't find our cabana.  We were at wits end so decided to try to find another hotel room in the town but in a 3 hotel town all was booked, it is not a touristy town.  So we went back to our original location and had the taxi leave us at the reception of the cabana hotel, it is now 1:30 in the morning.  We decided to sleep on some chairs and a sofa outside.  Yves was snoring after 10 minutes.  Me no, and about 3 in the morning a guy on a motorcycle pulls up and I yell to him "Hola".  He seems a bit fuzzy and so I woke Yves to go talk to him.  He was working at the hotel and he said he knew where to find the cabana we were looking for.  So Yves follows him into the jungle on foot.  The guy was drunk but good natured and finally after 10 min.  Yves and he come back to say the cabana was up the road.  I was never so happy to see that bed.  The next morning we had a tour at 7am so we told the hotel that there directions were faulty and they gave us the night for free. After that all went well and we visited the site of Calakmul with a few European visitors that were in a small van tour with us.  

You really have to be ready for the unexpected here, things will close and you deal with it.

A view of the jungle in Calakmul, we are about 30 kilometers from Guatamala.  Tikal is 60 kilometers south.

Yves is up on top of this pyramid.  I only scaled 2.  Enough is enough.  These jungles is were the cichle trees that they score the trunks for the chewing gum that is exudes.  There is a mosquito here that is as big as a small dragonfly and it will cause lots of damage if it bites you.

This is a painting that is in one of the temples here.  The woman in the blue tunique is a high ranking woman and the one holding the large water jug is a slave.  You can see how she is straining as her face is red.  So was mine after climbing the pyramids.

There are four spider monkeys in this tree.  Can you find them?

This is just outside our cabana.  Very isolated but nice and quiet.

I like looking to see how they construct the roofs of these buildings.  Most of them, even the large hotels us this palm frond to do the roofs.  Natural materials.

This site is Becane, near Xpujil, another mayan ruin with corbeled arches that look like Agamemnon's grave. 

Some decoration on this building.  These buildings were apartments for the royalty.  It is interesting to know that the global drought around 1000 to 1200 AD in the Mayan region caused the downfall of the communities and many had to migrate to other regions.  The sad part is they kept sacraficing more and more people to try to appease the gods to send rain but it was all useless bloodshed.  Could have been just global warming.

Another exampe of the palm fronds used in the roofing of the structures.