November 2019 If you do due diligence in your travel planning for a jaunt around the Yucatan Peninsula, you'll come across Izamal as one of the biggies. It's known as the "Yellow City" because most of the buildings are painted in the same shade of yellow. This isn't something that dates back very far, however. It was a response to the visit by the Pope in 1993. There's some scuttlebutt afoot that it also [...]
November 2019 In the course of my research for my two-week trip to the Yucatan Peninsula I came across the news that Campeche has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Them's pretty big potatoes. So in my planning I put in a side jaunt to Campeche from Uxmal, which is about 2 hours northeast. There's a main highway -- we'd call it a freeway in the States -- going between Merida and Campeche [...]
November 2019 Following hard on the heels of the last post on Labna comes this one on Sayil, just a few kilometers down the road from Labna. Though they are a stone's throw from each other on the ground, they're completely different and if you're in the area both sites should be on your bucket list. Don't think for a moment that if you've seen one Mayan archeological site you've seen them all, not [...]
November 2019 The Ruta Puuc -- "the Puuc route" in plain English -- was a fuzzy concept in my mind until I was actually on the ground in the Puuc region, at which point all was revealed. So let me clear it up for you if there's any doubt in your mind. The Puuc region is an area in the northeast of the Yucatan Peninsula. It's crammed full of Mayan ruins, including Uxmal, one [...]
October 2019 In this second part of the post on Uxmal I'll focus on the archeological site itself, which is the second most visited site in Yucatan after Chichen Itza -- and with good reason. It's immensely impressive and gave me for the first time a clear sense of just why places like Uxmal deserve to be called cities. When one considers that the excavated structures at Uxmal represent only a fraction of the [...]
October 2019 Uxmal, together with Chichen Itza, is one of the major Mayan archeological sites on the Yucatan Peninsula. It also has in its vicinity two other major attractions, the Museo del Chocolate (Chocolate Museum) and the three principal Mayan sites of the Ruta Puuc: Kabah, Sayil and Labnah. I was so entranced by the Puuc region that I visited one full day and then went back for two more days. As a result [...]
October 2019 What, you may ask, is a cenote? Since it's an object of primary interest to us in this post, allow me to explain. Here's the dope from the Wikipedia page (here): Cenotes are surface connections to subterranean water bodies. While the best-known cenotes are large open water pools measuring tens of meters in diameter, such as those at Chichén Itzá in Mexico, the greatest number of cenotes are smaller sheltered sites and do not necessarily have [...]
October 2019 With a base in Merida you have any number of easy day trips available to sites in the vicinity. That's the reason I based myself in Merida for the first five days of my two-week trip to the Yucatan Peninsula. I had wheels the whole trip so I was free to go in any direction I chose. After going north to Dzibilchaltun I decided on a lark it was time to go [...]
September 2019 I've been in Merida less than a week but I already feel like an expert. There's a good reason for that: there's not much there there. That may seem to some a summary dismissal of The White City, but after driving through it from one end to the other for nearly a week I have the evidence of my own eyes as corroboration. My experience leads me to wonder what controlled substance [...]