If you can find more than 3 days to tour Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, 
have I got the 2-week trip for you. The roads are all still in good shape, it's just as easy to get around, and you'll be seeing a wide range of cities and towns, museums, ruins, and cenotes. You can even find some artisans who specialize in pre-Columbian ceramics and sculpture. We met a brother and sister who each reproduce artifacts for some of Mexico's archaeological musuems when they're not selling to tourists like us.
I'll start where my previous post left off: Valladolid. We will now be touring westward, aiming for the city of Mérida in the northwestern portion of the state of Yucatan. But first we'll stop for lunch and a tour of the ruins of Kinich Kakmó in the city of Izamal.
These ruins are truly immense - they engulf the whole town. You think you're climbing up a standard Mayan pyramid, unitl you get to the top and realize that you're just at the top of the first of three giant platforms. Long story short, the structures built during Kinich Kakmó's heyday date to 400-900 AD and cover a large part of the modern city's center. They're believed to have been built upon several older structures (going back to, oh, 300 BC or so). The platform's base rests upon some of the largest carved stones we've seen so far. According to Coe, archaeologists have identified sacbes raditating out from the temple complex in several directions, showing that Kinich Kakmó was a city-state that controlled the surrounding region as well as a very lucrative salt trade, long before Chichén Itzá got going.
When the Spanish arrived they did their best to destroy every structure they could and build Christian structures on top of the rubble. One of their bishops, 
Diego de Landa, took it upon himself to destroy 5000 Mayan carvings and 97 written codices he'd found here - sort of like vaporizing the library of Congress and the Smithsonian Museum all at once. Nice going, Diego. In 1648 the Spanish erected a church and convent up high on one of the secondary Mayan platforms (that's it on the skyline in the pic on the right), but those extensive structures are still dwarfed by Kinich Kakmó's ruined main platform.
Despite what has been lost, Izamal town, itself, is visually appealing: most of the buildings throughout the old Colonial section are painted a delightful shade of yellow with white trim. Makes you happy just to be there. The homeowners association here must be a tough bunch.
Now, on to Mérida, a large, busy, intense city with great restaurants, 
interesting souvenir opportunities, and neighborhoods full of Colonial and 19th-Century architecture. The Mayan population still dominates after so many centuries -- as can be seen at this entrance to an OXXO mini-mart, Latin America's answer to a 7-11. The white-on-red sign on the entrance door with all the vowels and apostrophes is Mayan, and I have no idea what it says. Many if not most of the interpretive plaques at the ruins we've visited also include a Mayan translation with Spanish and sometimes English, and I just think it's cool that such respect is shown the region's oldest tenants.
Mérida has an outstanding regional archaeological museum which houses artifacts from Chichén Itzá and the other Mayan sites throughout the Yucatan peninsula. I won't bore you with all the cool sculpture, masks and ceramics this former 19th-century mansion contains, but you might recognize this fellow from the Mexico tourism brochures you see. He's a chac-mool (sacrifical altar) from one of the platforms at Chichén Itzá that nobody's allowed to climb on any more. He'd love for you to visit:
m
Comments