In this leg of your Yucatan road trip, you leave Hacienda Yaxcopoil and drive in a southerly direction on Highway 261 into Mexico's Puuc region. Destination: the ruins of Uxmal ("ush-MAL"), which are my absolute runaway favorite of the whole Mayan world. Hope you hit the road early, because Uxmal is so big with so much intricate architecture, you will want to spend about 4 hours here. You will forget ALL about Chichén Itzá.
You know you're getting close to Uxmal when the top of its tallest 
structure, The Pyramid of the Magician aka The Pyramid of the Dwarf (maybe he was the Dwarf Magician, I dunno), starts to appear above the jungle canopy. I'm getting excited all over again, just remembering that first glimpse.
The ancient Mayans' monumental structures throughout the Puuc region have an architectural style that's distinct from those further north and east like Ek-Balam and Chichén Itzá. Generally the Puuc style employed far more intricate stonework, such as stone mosaic facades, elaborate roofcomb structures topping pyramids, stone veneers, and detailed stucco. Compared to Uxmal, Chichén Itzá looks like a Mesoamerican McDonald's. Archaeologists guesstimate that the population of the Puuc region numbered in the hundreds of thousands and that the Puuc's broad valleys comprised unbroken settlements linked by series of sacbes (elevated pedestrian causeway-roads). In other words, there was a lot of action back in the day and people stayed on the move.
Uxmal's structures date roughly to the period of 700-900 AD. The first one you reach upon entering the complex is The Pyramid of the Magician (Dwarf). Scholars dispute whether this pyramid was properly restored, since no other Mayan pyramid has an oval base - but that does not detract from its power to impress. Its extremely steep sides are enhanced by its base's rounded edges. Go ahead, climb up. I dare you. I'll just take pictures from down here.
Moving away from the Pyramid, you enter an interior 
courtyard framed by 4 separate rectangular buildings: the Quadrangle of the Birds, named for the carved stone birds on the roof friezes. The roof frieze itself (in the photo to the right) represents the thatched roof of a Mayan hut, with birds flitting to and fro. For comparison, here's a pic of an actual, real-life hut I took while we were on the road. It's built in an oval and is a one-room house of about 300 square feet. These are 
actual homes, still in use - you see them everywhere throughout the Yucatan. As simple a dwelling as this is, its style is repeated everywhere in the Puuc region's monumental stone architecture. Was it just art imitating life? Or a way to appeal politically to the underclass?
From The Birds, you walk to another, much larger quadrangle of buildings: 
The Nunnery (thanks for the judgmental name, 16th-Century Spanish priest guy - according to Coe, these structures are closer to the Puuc version of The Vatican). This is where you really see the power of the Mayan stoneworker: you are surrounded by buildings covered top to bottom with mosaics and friezes. The pic to the right, for example, is a detail view of one of the roofs of one of The Nunnery's four buildings. It depicts a feathered serpent slithering around and on top of a woven straw mat. The pieces of stone mosaic, BTW, measure about 5"x5" on the finished face that you see, but many of them extend back a foot or two into the overall construction for support. They all fit into intricate geometric patterns across the facade of a building that may be, oh, 200 feet long or so. What must the architectural blueprints for this have looked like?
Uxmal goes on and on - and so can I. I'll try to let the stonework do most of the talking but wordy descriptions are certainly in order. Here's a view on the left of what the restoration work of an average Mayan temple entails: piecing back together the intricate stone designs, on top of lots and lots of rubble.
Up next on the left, a photo of one corner of a pyramid sporting a stack of long-snouted stone 
masks of the god Tlaloc (an important god of rain and water), each one about 3' x 2' x 2'. The masks are facing to the left of forward in the photo and the snouts curve upward like elephants' trunks; if it's hard to make out, the stone circles you see are each mask's eyes. They're separately carved and fitted into place in each mask. The upward-curving stone snouts are separate pieces too, each a couple feet long, that 
fit into the rest of the mask and are held in place by the weight of the stones above it. On the right is a shot of Gary examining one of those stone snouts (sadly,a broken one) that was still in the "To-Be-Restored" pile, to give you an idea of the scale of each of these pieces.
Following over there on the right is a shot of a cornice on one 
of The Nunnery's palace buildings. It represents a human head inside a feathered serpent's wide-open jaws, illustrating either a creation myth or an ancient news report of a local guy getting eaten by a big snake.
Sooo, how goes the little rock fence you're building for the backyard vegetable garden? 
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