Ruins

We recently ran into a couple who had seen 16 ruins in 20 days, so whatever proclivity I may have had to moan a bit about the ruins we'd been visiting, I'll stifle. And, as it turns out now that we're a couple days beyond ruin-visiting and are luxuriating on the beach in Isla Mujeres, the ruins we saw were actually really cool. First in the set was Palenque, an extremely-touristed, central Mayan site still somewhat in the jungle. This was my least favorite, maybe because the town and accomodations had put a bad taste in my mouth, maybe because the number of vendors of "Mayan" goods was so overwhelming. But the next day, we took a tour-- as, unfortunately, one has basically no option but to do-- to two other Mayan sites, Bonampak and Yaxchilan. Bonampak is famous for painted murals, which were cool, although someone said they'd be redone, which kind of detracts from the experience. Yaxchilan, though, was awesome. It is deep in the jungle, only reachable by boat, about an hour down a large, swiftly moving (and in my imagination, anyway, crocodile-filled) river. The first buildings we looked at were located up a steep path that seemed to be eternally on the point of absorption by the jungle. As we reached the buildings, our ears were accosted by shrieking from above that seemed a strange cross of sick dog and squealing pig. Howler monkeys were dancing through the trees above us, and a male, it seemed, had come to close to the territory of another male, causing the two to shout at each other, while the females and babies swung back away through the canopy. Throughout the visit to Yaxchilan, the monkeys got as much atttention from us and almost everybody else as the buildings did, but those deserved it in their own right-- empty of tourists in comparison to Palenque, and still alive in their jungle setting, still giving room for the imagination to picture a society actually functioning there.

Two days later, we went with some trepidation to Chichen Itza, worried that the swarms of cruise ship tourists bused in there for a day "in Mexico" (buy at the gift shop a celophane-wrapped basket with a shotglass picturing a donkey, a mini bottle of taquila, and a mouse-sized sombrero with "Mexico" printed on top) would take away any magic from the site. With some others from the hostel we were staying at, we took the earliest bus to the ruins, arriving right at opening time (making our mothers proud). And, joy of joys, we found we had done it-- the vendors weren't even set up yet, and the big buses wouldn't arrive until 11, by which time we were on our way out. We grouped up with some other English speakers, hostellers, to hire a guide, also an excellent decision, informative and entertaining, if not necessarily the source of objective scholarship. From him we learned that, like at Salem, the Mayans didn't actually sacrifice young women-- they simply gave them drugs, weighted them down with jewels and gold, and threw them into a fresh-water well, and if they drowned, well, that was an accident, not murder. We also came away with the impression that the Mayans of Chichen Itza, at least, had been quite obsessed with cross-eyed virgins, phallic earrings, and triplet dwarves. So I'm ready to go back and teach a class on the topic-- there are ways to make children interested in history.