Highlights of Mexico (14): Uxmal and Kabah
Day 11 (Saturday) was spent visiting two small Mayan sites to the south of Merida. As usual, our local guide was keen to leave earlier than the official programme so that we avoided the crowds and the heat, so we departed at 8 am instead of 9 am.
Driving through Merida confirmed just how pretty this colonial city is, with its cobbled streets lined with single-story buildings in all sorts of light, often pastel, colours such as cream, pink, sky blue, russet, lime green, ochre, sun-kissed yellow. There are lots of little squares with trees and love seats (a pair of stones seats connected but facing towards each other).
Before we left Merida, Raul wanted to show us the General Cemetery, the oldest and the largest of the city’s seven cemeteries located on the outskirts near the airport. He explained the local burial traditions. Coffins are buried in a hole, but no soil is put on top, only a capping stone. Then some three-five years later, the grave is opened, the casket is brought out, and the bones are cleaned before being placed in small ossuary which is positioned at ground level. All this is done by the family of the deceased. If this practice seems bizarre to non-Mexicans, then to older Mexicans at least it is quite normal even necessary.
There are plots in the cemetery for various wealthy families or government departments or labour unions and there is a large memorial to a guy called Felipe Carrillo Puerto who is something of a local hero. He was the founder of the first Communist Party in Latin America and a socialist governor of the state of Yucatan before in 1924 he was executed together with three of his brothers.
It was another hour’s drive south before we reached the first of the Mayan sites that we were visiting today. Uxmal (pronounced ‘ush-mal’) is smaller than the other pre-Hispanic sites that we had been to earlier in the tour: Teotihuacan (outside Mexico City), Monte Alban (outside Oaxaca), and Palenque (outside the town of the same name). But it was the best presented with a modern visitors centre built around a courtyard with cafe, shops, and toilets and with descriptions around the site in Spanish, English and French. And, in any event, less than 5% of the site is open to the public.
It was fractionally cooler today with a temperature of ‘only’ 36C/97F! So we all wore hats or used umbrellas, took every opportunity to seek shade, and did not climb the steps of every pyramid. We spotted quite a few iguanas who confirmed to us that it was really, really hot today.
Uxmal means ‘thrice built’ in the Mayan language but it was actually built five times. It was inhabited from around 500 BC and was the seat of Mayan political and economic power in the 9th-12th centuries AD. It is a classic example of one of the five main architectural styles of the Mayan civilisation – the one called ‘puuc’ in which the temples have an elliptical base that emulates the elliptical shape of the thatched roof houses in which ordinary people lived.
Recurrent motifs at the site are zig-zag patterns relating to the the twisting of a snake and diamond patterns relating to the scales of a snake and representations of snakes entwined with one another. For the Mayans, the snake was a sacred animal – which did not go down well with the Catholic Spaniards who viewed the snake as the cause of the fall of mankind in the Garden of Eden. .
The first temple we saw is called the Pyramid of the Dwarf because there is some evidence (which we saw) – including a small stone chair in a theatre and a stone throne decoration on a wall – that the ruler at one time was a person of limited stature. The pyramid rises to 38 metres (125 feet). Next we strolled through the Quadrangle of the Birds, named because there are birds decorating the walls, and the Quadrangle of the Nuns, named because of the 88 cell-like chambers. Other locations included the Ball Court, the Palace of the Governor, and the House of the Turtles and finally the Great Pyramid rising 32 metres (105 feet).
After around two hours walking round Uxmal, the heat was really getting to us and so we were pleased to find that lunch was in a restaurant just by the entrance to the site. The place was called oddly “Coole Chepa Chi”, a reference to a popular woman who served the original explorers if Uxmal. As the latest of the explorers, we enjoyed cool drinks and a three-course meal.
Suitably refreshed and revived, at 1.30 pm we set off to see another, smaller Mayan site which was another half hour’s drive further south. It is called Kabah and we spent an hour there. Like all the pre-Hispanic sites we visited, the origins went way back – in this case to around 500 BC. But, again like all the sites we visited, there was a ‘golden age’ – in this case, from 700-1000 AD.
Many buildings at archaeological sites have more than one name. Here in Kabah, the main building – a long, lowish structure – is known either as Codz Poop’s Altar of Glyphs which is Mayan for rolled-up carpets (because part of the front could be said to look like such carpets) or La Mano Ponderosa which means ‘powerful hand’ (because two statues at the back have out-stretched hands). Another special building is called the Palace of the Masks because it is decorated with 260 ‘masks’ – actually stylised faces with missing noses.
Before leaving the site, Roger and Vee bought a souvenir of the Mexico trip: a hand-carved representation of the face and crown of Pakal, the famous king of Palenque. We purchased it from the carver himself who dated and signed it – he was called Jesus. Close by the site, we drove first through the little town of Santa Elena where some locals still live in ‘housing’ in the Mayan style – a elliptical-shaped structure with a thatched roof, open doors and no windows. We were back at our hotel in Merida at 4.45 pm.
Fortified by his superior geographical knowledge of downtown Merida gained from his meanderings of the previous evening, tonight Roger successfully led Vee to a local square which was the scene of a special Mexican Evening with singing and dancing, before returning to last evening’s venue of “Cafeteria Impala” where he devoured another of those gorgeous banana splits while Vee indulged in a brownie and ice cream.