Mexico - Day Two - Tulum & the ocean

Tulum

First wake-up in Mexico.  The water’s back on, which is a plus, but there’ll be no breakfast (offered free for the inconvenience) for Sandy because the tour will pick me up downstairs at 7.
       We head north to collect other tourists along The Strip that is Cancun-by-the-Sea (my name).  Although I’ve never been there, I imagine this is a bit like Miami Beach as compared to Miami proper, hotel after hotel built on what was once a narrow, sandy shoal 14 miles long (22 km) between lagoon and ocean.  Our guide is Ana, our driver, Ernesto.  After all are collected, we head down the main drag south toward Tulum.
       Along this road we see evidence of the war against the drug culture that invaded Cancun after the arrival of the tourists.  The policía militár are stopping cars, searching for drugs.  (Along the way, I will see the policía federál and the policía municipál as well.) Throughout my travels here, I’m told that Cancun is about the only place drugs are such a problem.  Cancun, in Maya, means “serpent’s nest”, which I guess is fitting then.  As a tourist destination, it’s only 49 years old really, growing from a mere 200 people then to 1.5 million now.  That’s enough to turn any town into a serpent’s nest!

       Along the road there are also topes, something I will experience a lot of in Mexico, rural or urban.  Topes are speed bumps used to slow traffic without all the infrastructure needed for stoplights.  The word makes me laugh because a tope looks like the raised furrow made by moles in my lawn back home, or as the French call them taupes.  Ah, the joys of being multilingual!
       We make a pit stop, to use the facilities, which is where signs tell me not to put the toilet paper in the toilet but rather in a wastebasket conveniently located next to the john (called an inodoro here, because it flushes away odorous matter, I guess).  That was also the case in Cuba as well... and maybe in Peru and Jordan (I don’t remember).  The sanitation system here isn’t built to handle toilet paper.  As a Yankee, it’s something you have to get used to.
       On either side of the road I see signs of American economic colonialism:  Sam’s Club, Office Depot, even Krispi Kreme.  There are also Circle K gas stations (a Canadian company) and some of them have little goodies shops attached with signs announcing them to be Ty-Coz... which is a term from France’s Brittany region.  (Ty in Breton means house and coz means old.)  Could some Breton sailor have landed in Cancun and decided never to leave, seduced by some Yucatán siren?
       Houses are either painted in neon pastel colors (if that’s not an oxymoron) or, when neglected, show black mold stigmata running down their walls.  All are small, but with weather like this, you’re probably outdoors anyway much of the time.  Graffiti is a problem here, as it is everywhere, and one tagger has chosen the unflattering moniker SUSYOS.  Again, multilingualism comes in handy because sucio in Spanish means dirty... which is appropriate for what graffiti does to buildings.  But I’m sure there’s more to that moniker.

Tulum on the Gulf

Before we reach Tulum, Ana gives us a bit of background.  The Yucatán Peninsula is a place of great variety, with 68 different ethnic groups in Mexico.  (Or was it in Yucatán alone?)  The Maya are but one of them.
      I chose to visit Tulum because it’s the only Mayan vestige on the ocean, at least in the Yucatán.  It served as the port and trading post for Coba and other Mayan cities farther inland.  Its name means “stone fence”, but its old Maya name was Zama, which means “sunrise”.  An appropriate name, as it faces east, out over the vastness of the Caribbean Sea, with the nearest landfall being Cuba far beyond the horizon.

Honeybee god

       The main problem in Tulum has always been water.  Elsewhere in this dry region, there’s water in underground rivers and the many cenotes, deep natural wells or sinkholes formed by the collapse of surface limestone to expose the groundwater below.  Here there are none, so the Maya carved cisterns out of the limestone to catch the meager rainfall.  Being a porous stone, the cisterns had to be lined with a sort of waterproof stucco, an ingenious invention that involved honey as a binder, a new use of honey to me!  The water was for human use almost exclusively because the soil here is only 12 inches deep (30 cm), making it useless for most farm crops that would need to be irrigated.
       In addition to the use of honey to make stucco, the Maya invented many things during the Splendor Period, Ana proudly tells us (and I’m assuming she’s at least part Maya herself, judging from her facial features).  The Maya were astronomers, mathematicians, agronomists, philosophers, artists, architects, sculptors and warriors... a rich, complex society.  They were the first to cultivate chocolate, chili peppers, vanilla, papayas and pineapples.  They built causeways to connect cities.  They developed highly accurate calendars.  Their artists carved amazing jade masks and wove colorful textiles.  They invented the zero, and devised a binary system like the one used in today’s computers.  They also had the only writing in America.  All this while Europe remained in the Dark Ages.
       But Tulum was already abandoned when the Conquistadors arrived.  I can just imagine what they wondered when they saw the buildings, probably not yet ruins, from the sea.  The town remained “lost” from 1550 until 1841.

Veladores

       Everywhere among the ruins are what Ana calls jacaranda trees, or flamboyants in the French West Indies.  These orange-flowered trees have leaves so rough they were used by the natives for scouring.  The original Brillo pad.
       And then there are the buildings themselves, with their sculptures.  On several are depictions of the jaguar, the god of the underworld here.  There’s also Ixchel, or Lady Rainbow, the goddess of love according to Ana, but also known for childbirth and by extension for medicine in general... but what an off-putting old woman face she has for a goddess of love!  And then there’s the honeybee god, very important because there was no sugar cane in the Yucatán and the only sweetener the Mayas had was honey.
       Ana sets us loose to poke around as we want.  Her warning to us is adorable:  “Always take your values with you.”  Meaning “valuables”, but I like her version better.  I poke all around the ruins, and especially near the coast, and catch a glimpse of fishing boats off the coast and a family of bathers almost hidden directly below the cliffs.
       On the way back to meet up with the others, I watch the velador dancers.  Those are four men, one for each season, who climb up a tall pole with nothing to keep them from falling.  Once up there, they attach themselves by the ankles to ropes and then launch themselves into the void, circling down slowly to the ground, as if they were flying (which accounts for the name).  It’s quite spectacular.  After that, it’s lunch on our own and then back to Cancun.