El Perrito Come El Burrito
Dec. 7th, 2014 12:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lupestripeSo after our stay in Cancun, we headed for the border city of Chetumal, which was around four hours' drive away. On the way, we opted to stop at Tulum to see our seventh set of Maya ruins on this trip, with the main purpose of coming here to explore the pre-Hispanic cultures which developed here. The drive to Tulum, like most of the driving here, was largely long and uneventful and if I were planning this trip again I would probably have reduced the driving by staying in the Cancun area for the final three days instead of going to Chetumal but you live and learn with these things and not much time was wasted all told, particularly because we got to drive through some rural towns on the Yucatan where you get to experience real traditional Mexican life away from the cities and tourist resorts. I'll be honest and admit I don't think I could live in a rural Mexican town - the connecting roads are generally good but single lane while the houses are a little ramshackle, either concrete blocks painted with pastel colours or advertisements, or actual wooden huts which seem to have few basic amenities. The people in these villages look happy enough but we rarely saw a bar or more than a couple of convenience stores in most of them. The wildlife would also get me - fortunately on the trip we didn't see that many snakes but we saw a dead squished one on the road on Saturday before we spied another black and white one slithering across the road later on. This shocked me a little, as I have a phobia, but driving away at 80km/h does help alleviate it somewhat, although spying how fast the snake got across the road when it sensed our car has transfixed itself in my mind and I can't shake it free.
Snakes were also a theme in Tulum, a beach-side Mayan city to which you get by walking through some pretty dense tropical jungle. We had a guide with us and he told us about the 12 different types of snake in the forest with accompanying pictures, even pointing one out with his pointy walking stick. Fortunately I didn't see it and he told me that his pointy stick, which he used to hit the ground with every step, was used to drive the snakes away. That filled me with less confidence and I was a little on edge throughout the visit although fortunately we didn't see another one. We saw a few iguanas again, which as usual bounced around scaring the shit out of me, but the actual city is rather open plan and there were enough tourists there to feel pretty much at ease. When the Spaniards arrived in the 1520s, Tulum was a successful trading post with a fortification overlooking the turquoise Caribbean Sea, which was looking particularly beautiful in the late afternoon sun. There was a little beach to which we could go too so I climbed down the steps to get a closer look at the astonishing rock formations of the cliffs as they plunged into this rather inviting ocean. We also had a look around the ruins of the city, which was also an important astronomical centre, with sunlight shining through holes in the main temple - The Temple of the Descending God - on the equinoxes to cast its light over other buildings in the city and ultimately to the cemetery, illuminating the dead's resting place and thus reaffirming the circle of life. On the way it illuminated one corner of another building which had a carving in the shape of a man's face, casting an imposing shadow down the Main Street. In this building, we also saw a couple of carvings with the original bright colours largely intact, which aided the imagination in determining just how brightly coloured and stunning this place would have looked in its hayday. Tulum's original name was Zama, meaning dawn, as it is one of the most easterly of the Mayan cities on the peninsula. Tulum is a massive walled city and the wall still survives, with cut-throughs demonstrating just how small the Maya were, their descendants are still around six inches shorter than other groups. The wall protected the nobles inside against invaders, with everyone else (largely farmers) living unprotected outside the wall. As I mentioned before, Tulum was also a huge commercial port used to distribute foreign goods across the peninsula through a network of roads which connected it to places like Uxmal and Chichen Itza. This meant it was a thriving area due to the importation and exportation of goods. Tulum was also an important stronghold in the War of the Castes, when the Maya rose up against their Hispanic masters in 1847. This war endured for over half a century and Tulum was the base of military command and religious hierarchy. When the original capital of the rebels fell, Tulum increased in importance and they recognised the sanctity of the sure by putting a cross on the temple. This cult of the cross has since been maintained.
At Tulum we had the option of a boat ride and snorkelling in the sea after our visit to the ruins in order to see the turtles. Ordinarily, I would have jumped at this opportunity but Taneli was feeling tired and had a headache, and as he had a three hour drive ahead of him, we opted just to see the ruins. In the end, the ruins were so interesting and the guide so engaging, even if his accent was at hard to decipher, that we ended up staying longer than intended and we couldn't have gone anyway. He introduced us to some of the local birds, whose voice he can mimic, and they followed him along the trail as if in a Disney movie while he also highlighted some of the key flora in the forest including the rubber tree from which the Maya got the rubber for the ball for their ball game and a tree with rough green and black pitted leaves like sandpaper used to grind the stones. All of this was fascinating but we had to press on, driving through the darkness to the city of Chetumal, the capital of the state of Quintana Roo and on the border with Belize. The drive itself was uneventful although I felt a little antsy driving at night such is the narrowness of Mexican roads as well as some of their drivers, which borderline on the insane. We were also driving through unspoilt wilderness, past the Sian Ka'an reserve which unfortunately we didn't have time to see (and couldn't see anyway due to the darkness). There were a couple of small towns on the way, largely competing with themselves to have the largest Christmas tree, while the songs on the radio were either mariachi classics or bizarre hypnotic Christmas songs sung by kids which sounded more like Japanese than Spanish. Most strange.
There's not a lot in Chetumal if I were being honest. It's a city of around 150,000 people sat on the Bay of Chetumal, an inlet of the Caribbean Sea into which the River Hondo disgorges. This river makes the border between Mexico and Belize and like with most border towns, it seems to suffer from a certain edge you may not get elsewhere. On Friday night, while walking through the centre of the city, we were propositioned by four prostitutes while there is a big gambling area very near the border crossing. Improvements are being made though - most of the main road, Avenida del Heroes, is currently being dug up and as this is where our hotel was, we initially struggled to get to it. However, with the car park off another road, the receptionist soon directed us to where we needed to be and we were soon settled into a rather excellent hotel, the Crown Plaza, which was a step above the ibis hotels in which we had stayed in Merida and Cancun. There was no real bar to speak of though - both in the hotel and in the city itself - while the restaurant area turned out to be the road running along the bay which had about eight eateries on it. The city centre itself was pretty lively though, with shops open late, while there was a range of mobile food stands on the streets and by the bay selling a range of hot food including tacos, churros and papas. Many of them had signage denoting popular characters such as Spongebob Squarepants or Minions, much like little stands at fairgrounds back home. In addition to this, there were quite a few people selling products from tricycles which they cycled around the city. The restaurant options when were particularly poor so on Thursday night we opted to go to a diner called Winner's, where there was only one other couple and us dining. This was a sports bar and restaurant, typical American really without the girls with big hooters, and I was soon enjoying a massive plate of creamy guacamole followed by a burger, which was surprisingly tasty. We also got to watch some of the live football on the big screens from the Mexican playoff matches, which was of very high quality and very exciting. We enjoyed this place so much that we opted to go back here on the Friday night for drinks in lieu of anything else. We had driven around earlier in the day looking for some more bars but all we could see were a few more restaurants and very little else. The atmosphere on Friday night was a lot different to that from the Thursday although the place suffered again from having a limited number of people. Taneli had some of the nicest sangrias he had ever tasted though and they were deliciously full of flavour while I stuck with the local beer. On the TV this time was an odd telenovela called My Heart Is Yours, a soap opera set in an idealised Mexican town with very few actual Mexicans in it (as Cryn told me, Caucasian people are looked at more favourably here particularly on advertising, where nearly everyone is white). The plot seemed to lurch a fair bit between a range of unrelated stories, I suppose not to dissimilar to Coronation Street or the like, but the pace seemed to be rather quicker. Not understanding enough Spanish to get the jist of what was going on, it was hard to tell but this did emphasise some of the hilarious overacting going on, particularly in two scenes - one in a caravan cafe where a woman I think was admitting to her mother she was going to become a pole dancer and another where a man tired to woo a woman with a magical romantic lunch on a bandstand before the entire town serenaded her. There was also a storyline where a geeky guy got with an attractive goth girl. All seemed a tad unlikely. After this, the bar went a little weird as the proprietor put on some footage of a trance event somewhere with accompanying loud music. There was a pyramid which kept lighting up and everyone was dressed in white, even the DJs. I think it was in a stadium of some sort in the US but everyone looked incredibly douchy as they were dancing away in pure white, with shades on. Very much a case of the beautiful ones and something which generally turns me off. This however descended into a really weird procession of obscure dance music tracks from the late eighties and early nineties, including one about everyone still having sex. It was most bizarre and yet quite entrancing really, interspersed with really odd pop hits from the Eighties including one about some model called Shantay. It was a rather bizarre yet eclectic evening and I admit that although it's not really my kind of music, I kinda got engrossed in it and ended up having a fantastic evening, even forgetting about my bloatedness after the three cheese soup and heavy pizza which seemed to have a crust made of chewy Riveta we had had in a trattoria and grill earlier on. I would have preferred something Mexican myself but Taneli fancied the place and I accepted upon noticing they had craft beer for sale. I think it was a dark beer called Curvate from a Mexican brewery. Either way it was pretty awful and Taneli commented that he had never seen me drink a beer so slowly.
Aside from this, there was little else to do in Chetumal. There were many dogs to see, just wandering about, and before we had been propositioned by the prostitutes we heard a man in a car demanding that his roaming dog got back to the house before driving off. I don't think it worked. Unfortunately there are quite a few roaming dogs in Mexico, particularly in the villages, some of them strays and some probably owned. They wander with impunity, often oblivious to the traffic, and we had to slow down quite a few times to avoid hitting them. Sadly we did see three dead dogs on the side of the road as a result of this very problem. It was here that we saw a really odd model village adjacent to a small whitewashed local church. It was a little Swiss in style but painted bright red like the Mayan buildings. There was a fountain in the middle with a statue that was quite Mayan-esque too. A sign nearby said the area was commemorating the 59th (odd number I know) anniversary of a devastating hurricane that swept through the area. I'm not sure of much more beyond that but the Google machine could tell me. This was one of the premier (read only) sights in Chetumal aside from the beautiful sunset over the bay, which we fortunately managed to glimpse on the Friday evening. The government building, more concrete than impressive, looks out over the bay while in front of it stands the Monument to the Flag, a grey obelisk with a clock face on all four sides. Down the way there was an impressively large Christmas tree which changed colour frequently, sometimes projecting baubles and other decorations onto itself and at other times just lights. Watching the changes was quite hypnotic. Opposite our hotel, across the dug up road that everyone was just walking across oblivious to the ongoing work, there was the museum of Mayan Culture and next to it, the impressive statue 'Monumento al Meztizaje' depicting Mayan people in a more modernist style. Health and safety is not really a thing in Mexico, as evidenced by the building work. The roads may have been cordoned off but the footpaths weren't and many of the manhole covers were missing, not to mention the pavements having huge wedges cut out of them. In the dark it was actually quite dangerous but no one seemed to mind as they clambered over the rubble to get to the shops, which were still trading. While this was going on, the pharmacy down the road was even installing a new front window. Madness, but quite a fun sense of madness I guess.
Snakes were also a theme in Tulum, a beach-side Mayan city to which you get by walking through some pretty dense tropical jungle. We had a guide with us and he told us about the 12 different types of snake in the forest with accompanying pictures, even pointing one out with his pointy walking stick. Fortunately I didn't see it and he told me that his pointy stick, which he used to hit the ground with every step, was used to drive the snakes away. That filled me with less confidence and I was a little on edge throughout the visit although fortunately we didn't see another one. We saw a few iguanas again, which as usual bounced around scaring the shit out of me, but the actual city is rather open plan and there were enough tourists there to feel pretty much at ease. When the Spaniards arrived in the 1520s, Tulum was a successful trading post with a fortification overlooking the turquoise Caribbean Sea, which was looking particularly beautiful in the late afternoon sun. There was a little beach to which we could go too so I climbed down the steps to get a closer look at the astonishing rock formations of the cliffs as they plunged into this rather inviting ocean. We also had a look around the ruins of the city, which was also an important astronomical centre, with sunlight shining through holes in the main temple - The Temple of the Descending God - on the equinoxes to cast its light over other buildings in the city and ultimately to the cemetery, illuminating the dead's resting place and thus reaffirming the circle of life. On the way it illuminated one corner of another building which had a carving in the shape of a man's face, casting an imposing shadow down the Main Street. In this building, we also saw a couple of carvings with the original bright colours largely intact, which aided the imagination in determining just how brightly coloured and stunning this place would have looked in its hayday. Tulum's original name was Zama, meaning dawn, as it is one of the most easterly of the Mayan cities on the peninsula. Tulum is a massive walled city and the wall still survives, with cut-throughs demonstrating just how small the Maya were, their descendants are still around six inches shorter than other groups. The wall protected the nobles inside against invaders, with everyone else (largely farmers) living unprotected outside the wall. As I mentioned before, Tulum was also a huge commercial port used to distribute foreign goods across the peninsula through a network of roads which connected it to places like Uxmal and Chichen Itza. This meant it was a thriving area due to the importation and exportation of goods. Tulum was also an important stronghold in the War of the Castes, when the Maya rose up against their Hispanic masters in 1847. This war endured for over half a century and Tulum was the base of military command and religious hierarchy. When the original capital of the rebels fell, Tulum increased in importance and they recognised the sanctity of the sure by putting a cross on the temple. This cult of the cross has since been maintained.
At Tulum we had the option of a boat ride and snorkelling in the sea after our visit to the ruins in order to see the turtles. Ordinarily, I would have jumped at this opportunity but Taneli was feeling tired and had a headache, and as he had a three hour drive ahead of him, we opted just to see the ruins. In the end, the ruins were so interesting and the guide so engaging, even if his accent was at hard to decipher, that we ended up staying longer than intended and we couldn't have gone anyway. He introduced us to some of the local birds, whose voice he can mimic, and they followed him along the trail as if in a Disney movie while he also highlighted some of the key flora in the forest including the rubber tree from which the Maya got the rubber for the ball for their ball game and a tree with rough green and black pitted leaves like sandpaper used to grind the stones. All of this was fascinating but we had to press on, driving through the darkness to the city of Chetumal, the capital of the state of Quintana Roo and on the border with Belize. The drive itself was uneventful although I felt a little antsy driving at night such is the narrowness of Mexican roads as well as some of their drivers, which borderline on the insane. We were also driving through unspoilt wilderness, past the Sian Ka'an reserve which unfortunately we didn't have time to see (and couldn't see anyway due to the darkness). There were a couple of small towns on the way, largely competing with themselves to have the largest Christmas tree, while the songs on the radio were either mariachi classics or bizarre hypnotic Christmas songs sung by kids which sounded more like Japanese than Spanish. Most strange.
There's not a lot in Chetumal if I were being honest. It's a city of around 150,000 people sat on the Bay of Chetumal, an inlet of the Caribbean Sea into which the River Hondo disgorges. This river makes the border between Mexico and Belize and like with most border towns, it seems to suffer from a certain edge you may not get elsewhere. On Friday night, while walking through the centre of the city, we were propositioned by four prostitutes while there is a big gambling area very near the border crossing. Improvements are being made though - most of the main road, Avenida del Heroes, is currently being dug up and as this is where our hotel was, we initially struggled to get to it. However, with the car park off another road, the receptionist soon directed us to where we needed to be and we were soon settled into a rather excellent hotel, the Crown Plaza, which was a step above the ibis hotels in which we had stayed in Merida and Cancun. There was no real bar to speak of though - both in the hotel and in the city itself - while the restaurant area turned out to be the road running along the bay which had about eight eateries on it. The city centre itself was pretty lively though, with shops open late, while there was a range of mobile food stands on the streets and by the bay selling a range of hot food including tacos, churros and papas. Many of them had signage denoting popular characters such as Spongebob Squarepants or Minions, much like little stands at fairgrounds back home. In addition to this, there were quite a few people selling products from tricycles which they cycled around the city. The restaurant options when were particularly poor so on Thursday night we opted to go to a diner called Winner's, where there was only one other couple and us dining. This was a sports bar and restaurant, typical American really without the girls with big hooters, and I was soon enjoying a massive plate of creamy guacamole followed by a burger, which was surprisingly tasty. We also got to watch some of the live football on the big screens from the Mexican playoff matches, which was of very high quality and very exciting. We enjoyed this place so much that we opted to go back here on the Friday night for drinks in lieu of anything else. We had driven around earlier in the day looking for some more bars but all we could see were a few more restaurants and very little else. The atmosphere on Friday night was a lot different to that from the Thursday although the place suffered again from having a limited number of people. Taneli had some of the nicest sangrias he had ever tasted though and they were deliciously full of flavour while I stuck with the local beer. On the TV this time was an odd telenovela called My Heart Is Yours, a soap opera set in an idealised Mexican town with very few actual Mexicans in it (as Cryn told me, Caucasian people are looked at more favourably here particularly on advertising, where nearly everyone is white). The plot seemed to lurch a fair bit between a range of unrelated stories, I suppose not to dissimilar to Coronation Street or the like, but the pace seemed to be rather quicker. Not understanding enough Spanish to get the jist of what was going on, it was hard to tell but this did emphasise some of the hilarious overacting going on, particularly in two scenes - one in a caravan cafe where a woman I think was admitting to her mother she was going to become a pole dancer and another where a man tired to woo a woman with a magical romantic lunch on a bandstand before the entire town serenaded her. There was also a storyline where a geeky guy got with an attractive goth girl. All seemed a tad unlikely. After this, the bar went a little weird as the proprietor put on some footage of a trance event somewhere with accompanying loud music. There was a pyramid which kept lighting up and everyone was dressed in white, even the DJs. I think it was in a stadium of some sort in the US but everyone looked incredibly douchy as they were dancing away in pure white, with shades on. Very much a case of the beautiful ones and something which generally turns me off. This however descended into a really weird procession of obscure dance music tracks from the late eighties and early nineties, including one about everyone still having sex. It was most bizarre and yet quite entrancing really, interspersed with really odd pop hits from the Eighties including one about some model called Shantay. It was a rather bizarre yet eclectic evening and I admit that although it's not really my kind of music, I kinda got engrossed in it and ended up having a fantastic evening, even forgetting about my bloatedness after the three cheese soup and heavy pizza which seemed to have a crust made of chewy Riveta we had had in a trattoria and grill earlier on. I would have preferred something Mexican myself but Taneli fancied the place and I accepted upon noticing they had craft beer for sale. I think it was a dark beer called Curvate from a Mexican brewery. Either way it was pretty awful and Taneli commented that he had never seen me drink a beer so slowly.
Aside from this, there was little else to do in Chetumal. There were many dogs to see, just wandering about, and before we had been propositioned by the prostitutes we heard a man in a car demanding that his roaming dog got back to the house before driving off. I don't think it worked. Unfortunately there are quite a few roaming dogs in Mexico, particularly in the villages, some of them strays and some probably owned. They wander with impunity, often oblivious to the traffic, and we had to slow down quite a few times to avoid hitting them. Sadly we did see three dead dogs on the side of the road as a result of this very problem. It was here that we saw a really odd model village adjacent to a small whitewashed local church. It was a little Swiss in style but painted bright red like the Mayan buildings. There was a fountain in the middle with a statue that was quite Mayan-esque too. A sign nearby said the area was commemorating the 59th (odd number I know) anniversary of a devastating hurricane that swept through the area. I'm not sure of much more beyond that but the Google machine could tell me. This was one of the premier (read only) sights in Chetumal aside from the beautiful sunset over the bay, which we fortunately managed to glimpse on the Friday evening. The government building, more concrete than impressive, looks out over the bay while in front of it stands the Monument to the Flag, a grey obelisk with a clock face on all four sides. Down the way there was an impressively large Christmas tree which changed colour frequently, sometimes projecting baubles and other decorations onto itself and at other times just lights. Watching the changes was quite hypnotic. Opposite our hotel, across the dug up road that everyone was just walking across oblivious to the ongoing work, there was the museum of Mayan Culture and next to it, the impressive statue 'Monumento al Meztizaje' depicting Mayan people in a more modernist style. Health and safety is not really a thing in Mexico, as evidenced by the building work. The roads may have been cordoned off but the footpaths weren't and many of the manhole covers were missing, not to mention the pavements having huge wedges cut out of them. In the dark it was actually quite dangerous but no one seemed to mind as they clambered over the rubble to get to the shops, which were still trading. While this was going on, the pharmacy down the road was even installing a new front window. Madness, but quite a fun sense of madness I guess.
