Mexico - Uxmal & Kabah

After Chichen Itza, we headed on down the road to the bustling provincial capital of Merida. Luckily all the streets are one way in the middle of town as there's a LOT of cars, buses and other miscellaneous things on the road here - at least everything was (generally) heading in the same direction. I think our time in Nigeria helped as it allowed fitting the car into impossibly small spaces feel more normal...

Again, we had a great time and were still suffering the effects of way too much time outside sweating and baking under the Mexican sun, but still managed to take a bunch of photos as we continued through the countryside down to the Mayan sites at Uxmal and Kabah.

Here's a few...

UXMAL (20 photos)



As these places are so bloody big, we took a few panoramas as well. Enjoy...

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A few more miles down the road, the site of Kabah is less visited but also less re-built by archaeologists so it was more of trek through old school ruins - great fun.

KABAH (16 photos)

Mexico - Tulum

After sucessfully avoiding the great herds of tourists that sweep across these parts of Mexico, we had to finally bite the bullet as we hit the so called "mayan riviera" - the carribean coast of Quintaroo famous for the likes of Cancun and Playa Del Carmen...

Back on the road again, we spent the best part of a day driving from Merida back towards the coast and to Tulum. Had a great lunch in a small place we stumbled in to in Valladolid - almost died from eating the wrong chilli... long story


TULUM (11 photos)



Here's a few pics at the hotel - Om Tulum - by the beach...
if you want a place to take a spa, be seen and be supposedly eco-touritsy on an overdeveloped beach, then I recommend Tulum. If, however, you actually want to relax and not see another tourist for days - then you're in the wrong place...





One of the most fun things we did was hire a couple of snorkels and a beach bum and drive around the area doing some cave diving at dos ojos, sea-turtle diving at Akumal and then some reef work later. Very cruisy day - I think at the end, we left our guy at a bar somewhere with the gear and headed back into town for some awesome fish tacos...oooh yeahh

Unfortunately, we didn't have cameras whilst doing all this underwater work, but it was so cool the guy who was showing us around emailed me a few he had...




(you're not allowed to kill the mozzies, coz that's what the bats that live in the caves eat)

We didn't know it at the time, but apparently the hundreds of ceynotes (all linked by miles of under ground rivers and caverns) are the result of a massive meteor impact - the one that killed all the dinosaurs (or so they say) - quite cool. Check it out here.

Antigua Guatemala

I know that this blog thingy puts all this stuff up in reverse date order or whatever, so I've put these up backwards so you can scroll down and it looks kinda right...(maybe)

Anyway while we were back in Oz earlier in the year for my dad's funeral, we created a cunning plan with my sister Sarah to explore Guatemala and Mexico looking for Mayan ruins and whathaveyou... George and I had no idea about any of it and had never been so organised for a trip ever (thank you Sarah...)

Sarah had a few weeks off so she flew over to Houston, then we all went down to Guatemala for Easter, then up to Mexico for a week, before chillin in H-town for further week...

As holy week (semana santa) seems to be the busiest time of the year, we used the old colonial capital of Antigua Guatemala as a base and took a bunch of trips around the place...

Antigua Town (21 photos)

Pacaya Volcano

Before the festivities of Holy Week kicked off in earnest, we decided to take the hour bus ride over to Pacaya volcano - one of the apparently many live volcanoes in central america...

It all seemed like a good idea at the time - "let's climb a volcano" - it was only after half an hour of trudging up the side of this thing in the afternoon heat (Sarah was smart enough to hire a horse...) that I was rethinking the whole thing. Whilst the hike almost killed us - it was heaps of fun (though the freshly set lava was actually almost glass-like and really sharp so you couldn't lean on it without cutting yourself, and our shoes melted a bit from standing too long near the hot stuff). It was also a great chance to use the word "magma" a lot

Sitting on the lava field at sunset - absolutely beautiful[click to enlarge]

PACAYA VOLCANO (29 photos)

Here's a bunch of photos (too many to choose from) - you'll see at the end, that as we were about to start to climb back down, a nearby volcano - the aptly named "fuego" - erupted!! I shit you not, a huge plume of smoke shot miles into the air - it looked pretty cool (glad we were miles away from it though...)

Holy Week - Antigua Guatemala

So this was the reason that we were in this part of the world - Semana Santa!! In fact that's why every hotel in town was bursting to the seams with both foreign tourists and locals...

One of the legacies the Spanish conquistadors left (apart from small pox, coffee and rum) was Catholicism - and not just the go to mass once a week Catholicism, this stuff's old school with the whole hellfire and damnation and "let's re-enact the Crucifixion"...

Each church in the district has it's own set of "floats" which set off around town at all hours, filling the town with huge processions. The celebration begins on Ash Wednesday and reaches its climax on Good Friday. The processions consist of big floats, or 'andas', bearing statues of Christ with a cross, that are carried by hundreds of purple-robed men. A float with the Virgin Mary Follows by women dressed in black clothing. The processions move slowly through. Antigua cobblestone streets, the feet of the bearers cushioned in the sawdust carpets, which are destroyed as the procession passes over.

As a show of devotion, wealth and just good community spirit, families and groups of people slave throughout the night to make Alfombras or "carpets" out of flowers or fruits or intricate coloured saw-dust designs. These were absolutely AMAZING and it was such a pity that they were destroyed. But no sooner had the procession passed and the cleanup crew scoped them up with a back-hoe, the families were out again re-building another one for the next procession...


ALFOMBRAS (67 photos)



The Holy Week parades are definitely something to behold. These floats must weigh tonnes - yet they are carried around town for up to 14hrs per parade (with as many as four parades a day - some starting at 4:00am)

The full "stations of the cross" are demonstrated for all to see, as the\y start with Romans coming out (some on horses) then Jesus carrying the cross, then after his "death" Jesus appears in a plastic coffin, then finally he's resurrected... all backed by dirge-like brass band music (and men carrying generators for the night parades...)

It's impossible to describe and we took hundreds of photos, so here's a few

PARADES (97 photos)




STREET HAWKERS (25 photos)



We also managed a few videos, yo can here the heavy brass band music and the chocking clouds of incense as well as the slow sway of the heavy floats...