Let's talk about ruins
Enough about food poisonings for now (even though we have suffered a couple more), time to focus on serious stuff – ruins. Pyramids, temples, houses, ancient privy systems and did Mayans really disappear into space?
Each continent or country offers one or two typical activities for travelers and after a while you feel like you have seen them all. "Them" being:
- Waterfalls (South-East Asia)
- Temples (South-East Asia)
- Gorges (Western Australia)
- Ruins (Mexico, Central America)
But to my surprise, I got more excited the more ruins we saw and could have continued forever. I even considered booking a 6 day trek through the jungle to see the biggest Mayan city, El Mirador, that is mostly still uncovered. It’s not a surprise though that my travel companion has had enough ruins so I’m not sure if I could’ve stomached a cranky Irishman for six days in addition to all the mosquitos and not showering. One day, I’ll be back for El Mirador..
After weeks have passed I do have a bit of trouble telling all the ruins apart and there’s really not that much to tell about them that Wikipedia can’t help with so I will save you from millions of photos and explanations similar to the very informative signs at the ruins (“Here is a building. It might have been a temple or a house or a palace. It faces west and it has five stories.”) We stopped reading the signs after a while.
Here is a quick summary from best to “worst” experience to help you choose if you need to!
1. Tikal, Guatemala. Mayan.
2. Xunantunich , San Ignacio, Belize. Mayan.
3. Palenque, Mexico. Mayan.
4. Tulum, Mexico. Mayan.
5. Teotihuacan, Mexico. Not known.
6. Chichen Itza, Mexico. Mayan.
1. Tikal, Guatemala.
Best. Ruins. Ever. Massive area in the jungle, a lot of it is still covered in hills and trees. Has the tallest pyramid (70m) after El Mirador. And a Star Wars scene was filmed from the top of that pyramid! The experience is so much better than any other ruin because there are no souvenir sellers inside the area. The guided tour was also excellent, it lasted almost 4 hours, the guide knew everything from animals and nature to the actual history of Mayans and Tikal. Also, we got to see toucans!
The ruler here was unusually tall -almost 2 meters. Thus for once only Richie could see out the windows from the master bedroom!
Cost: 34 USD including transportation, entrance and a guide
2. Xunantunich , San Ignacio, Belize.
This was not on our “to-do” list but as we were in San Ignacio and the owner of our hostel was the best ever and offered a drive to these ruins, why not see them?
This place is also very much in the jungle and a lot of is not restored yet. There was almost no-one there and we got to explore the pyramids on our own. Climbing the highest pyramid was a bit nerve-wrecking as it was pouring down rain which made all the rocks very slippery.
Cost: 6 USD including entrance, bus back to town
3. Palenque, Mexico.
Same story as with the previous ones, it’s good because it’s in the middle of the jungle. You can climb some of the buildings. Our tour guide was not the greatest through and there are souvenir sellers here inside the area.
Also if you have ever heard of stories about Mayans and aliens or Mayan disappearing to space, this is one of the places where “evidence” of this was found. And by evidence, I mean that some self-trained pseudoscientist Erich Anton Paul von Däniken told everyone that a decoration of the Mayan ruler K'inich Janaab Pakal, found in his tomb in Palenque, depicts him riding a spaceship.
See, it's clearly a spaceship!
Cost: 4.40 USD entrance only, we did it as a part of a wider tour and added a guide for 10.50 USD each.
4. Tulum, Mexico.
The ruins here are not that impressive, it’s more about the setting next to the beach. I do remember studying Mayan culture a lot during upper secondary school but I can’t remember us learning about the culture being a naval one.
There are no souvenir sellers here inside the area either which is a bonus but then a huge minus is hordes of American tourists everywhere. Go very early or very late to avoid this (we went very late).
Cost: 3.6 USD entrance only
5. Teotihuacan, Mexico.
This was the only non-Mayan place we visited. And to my surprise it’s still not known which culture built Teotihuacan.
You can climb the Pyramid of the Sun (biggest one) and half-way to the Pyramid of the Moon.
Bonus fact: The Pyramid of the Sun was destroyed with dynamite in the hopes of finding gold. Thus majority of it as of today is not original but restored. And during the restoration they build one terrace too much.. talk about making mistakes at your job!
Cost: 8 USD including entrance and round-trip bus from Mexico City
6. ...and the last place goes to Chichen Itza!
Maybe the most famous Mayan ruins and thus also the most touristic one. Souvenir sellers fill all the paths and areas and you can’t walk anywhere without hearing a sales pitch. Massive tourist busses coming from Cancun multiple times a day, people posing for photos (and boyfriends going above and beyond trying to take the perfect pyramid photo of their girlfriends). We also heard that the guided tours offered by hostels & hotels were pretty average, guides abandoning the groups after 1 hour of basic stories and cliché’s.
We opted for self-organised bus trip there and eaves-dropping on other groups here and there.
Coolest part was the biggest ball-game field and knowing that during the Spring and Autum Equinox light hitting the main pyramid staircase forms a serpent.
I don’t know if I would skip this as it is “a 7th Wonder of the World” but also those lists change every year and Chichen Itza got into the list through a corporate sponsoring. Definitely the worst overall experience.
Cost: About 25 USD entrance + round-trip bus from Tulum to Chichen Itza
Now we'll be ruin-free for a while and have to fill our days with something else. That has lately been waterfalls, laying on the beach or pool and re-reading Game of Thrones books (god I forgot how boring the fourth book is).
“I’m too old for this shit – “ Danny Glover (Heini Ulmanen)
..is a thought I’ve had couple of times during the past few days. I guess there is a good reason why the majority of backpackers are in their early twenties (which age group Richie still claims to belong to). Who else can endure all the seven layers of hell one goes through in a 15 hour bus trip while suffering from food poisoning? Who else can survive with 5 hours of sleep and a throbbing hangover before jumping into a 9 hour trip in the smallest chicken bus you can imagine? And who else can drink 8 days straight and still smile, joke and continue being friends with everyone else around you?
The other option is that I grew up to be an especially cranky thirty-year-old and I’d say it’s “fifty-sixty” (as a famous Finnish ski jumper used to say) towards either outcome.
As I once wrote, when I was still in my early twenties, it’s not interesting or gripping to describe all the awesome things you have done or to tell people every day of your life is full of epic shit. That’s something Americans do so much better.
Thus bare with me as I paint a picture of our latest adventures in Mexico. As the Lego Movie song goes, everything is as awesome as you’d imagine a 1.5 year break from regular life to be, and today even more awesome as I spent more than I should have on the first proper, Bondi-style avocado-heaven brekkie. Mind you, I have not had almost anything decent to eat in the last 48 hours.
Our route so far has been Mexico City – San Cristobal de las Casas – Palenque (El Panchan village in the middle of the jungle) – Isla Holbox through Merida.
Long journey would take us to this paradise called Isla Holbox
The “suffering” really happened during our tedious transportation from Palenque to Isla Holbox. Since we are trying to be backbackers on a budget, or to put it better I am trying as I think Richie was born as an Uncle Scrooge type of penny guardian, it means catching the cheapest busses wherever possible. What’s funny though is that there are even cheaper means of transportation available here, called collectivos, but I honestly think my better half could not fit in those. Alas, I guess we are not strictly backpackers after all since we use the more expensive Ado-buses wherever we go..
Almost the cheapest option now meant a 9 hour wait at the bus station followed by a 9 hour bus followed by an almost 6 hour bus and a water taxi to get to Isla Holbox. Buses were overnight which in theory means you could do a teleportation trick by sleeping the whole way and wake up at your next destination. Being cheap meant that we could not store our things at the bus station (20 pesos for an hour, who can afford that!) and Richie was running around the town getting us food and supplies. I managed to convince him it’s for his own good, for once he can practice his Spanish without me being around taking care of everything.
And then he brought back the evil, evil tacos…
We did not know these were evil tacos until 6 hours later, middle of the night, in the bus. They looked like normal tacos, though a bit tired and lukewarm. Evil evil tacos.
Long disgusting story short, the evil tacos gave us food poisoning. Some say we oughta know as these were from a stall but stalls have been good to us so far. I slept probably 1,5-2 hours during the whole 15 hours of traveling. Other time was spent, ahem, you know where.
Arrival to Isla Holbox in the middle of the day could have been a nice one, heading straight to the beach and to explore the sandy narrow paths but after all this torment the only thing to do was to take a long shower and a long nap, only to wake up to fever and a feeling “I can’t ever eat anything again”.
So, there you have it, the thing that makes me go “I am too old for this shit”. Then you sleep 12 hours in an air-conditioned room with a king-size bed where you don’t have to fight over space (you barely know there’s someone else next to you, what else can you ask for!), get some breakfast and suddenly it’s all good again.
Until the mosquito-swarm attack, constant sweat and stickiness, layer of salt on your skin, ant infested ground around your thin sarong and 200 pesos for a beach chair make you question things again.. but more of that later!
Around Mexico City, Spanish word number 2: Basura
I never would have thought I would spend a weekend in one of the liveliest cities in the world by sleeping 9-12 hours every night. Afterwards we heard about after parties lasting until 8 am, people dancing all of the rhythms of Mexico and felt kind of old until we remember why we were so tired – spending 8 days in a desert partying every day until late and all the preparations before and after did not leave a lot of room for sleep. Both of us have been a bit sick as well, Richie more and he’s mainly running around the city looking for a trash-can to put the tissues to – thus the Spanish lesson number 2, trash = Basura.
Thus, for us Mexico City has been all about daytime exploring in a very relaxed phase. And late starts. During our second day here we were able to see Parque Mexico and La Condesa area with millions of dogs (and dog poop), avoided the rain for an hour in a café, ate tacos and a burrito from a stall making new friends and getting a free taste of La Birria- soup (tender goat meat) and cow’s stomach- soup. You can guess which was our favourite.
I also really wanted to climb on top of a hill to see the Castle Chapultepec but by the time we were there, the whole park with museums was closing. I don’t know how many kilometers we have been walking around trying to find the places, metro stops or bus stops without a prepaid internet connection and keeping your phone in your purse as much as possible. The final adventure for the day was to catch the metro to the wrong direction, luckily it was only for two stops, and then we got home to cook a “shit load of vegetables” as Richie would say. Eating tacos with mainly meat and cheese and a burger-filler stint in America truly made one crave for something green and red.
Richie enjoying the rainy park walks
Third day, waking up from another 12 hour beauty-sleep, we opted in for an Uber to the Anthropology Museum. Most interesting displays were the Mayan and Aztec ones and albeit I enjoy looking at these amazing artifacts, about 20% of the texts were in English and you surely miss a lot of the finer details of the history. I was fascinated by small face- figures in each different culture though. Highly recommend visiting this museum!
Spanish word number 1: Terremoto (Location Mexico City, Mexico)
“Guys, we have to get out! It’s an earthquake!” (Earthquake = Terremoto or sismo)
Waking up to this yell in pitch black dark was quite the start for our travels in Mexico. We had gone to bed early trying to catch up with all the sleep we lost during Burning Man. I was already part awake as people had been yelling loudly in Spanish and I just cursed them off as drunken idiots. Next thing I noticed was my bed shaking violently but as I was at the top bunk again I thought a drunken person just couldn’t get into their bed. Little did I know it was an earthquake shaking the whole building.
Running downstairs in our pajamas/underwear, barefoot, without any lights was a scary experience as the building was still shaking. Imagine walking down the stairs of a boat thats sailing over small waves, in the dark when you have only seen the exit route once briefly. Outside we gathered together with other hostel quests and people from nearby buildings and waited for any news. From other people we heard that this was a very strong earthquake and that was proved right later in the news – the strongest earthquake in a century. Electricity was gone and as was internet and it was challenging to get the news back home that we were ok. This earthquake didn’t cause destruction like the 1985 one and I learnt that for example our hostel is partly built with the same materials as bridges are. That makes the buildings sway instead of breaking into tiny pieces.
The hostel we are staying is super nice and in a good area (La Roma Norte) and next morning we set out to explore the historical center of Mexico City. Moving around with the Metrobus is quite easy after you have managed to buy the rechargeable card from the machine that has instructions only in Spanish. Our intention during our whole stay in Australia was to learn Spanish but we ended up with 1 month’s irregular practice with Duolingo which taught us only how to say “a turtle drinks water”. Luckily, I can still remember some of my school Spanish and we have been able to get food and travel around. No risk of starving or getting lost – yet. We also managed to purchase a book with English to Spanish phrases so we are all set for countries where English is even less common than here.
So far after two days here I can say the food is delicious (although you don’t always know what you are eating), architecture beautiful and interesting and you are safe as long as you are smart. I am still being cautious on taking my camera out, thus we have way less pictures than from our previous destinations but that might only be a good thing. No more going through hundreds of exact same photos of buildings and scenery..
