h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

We got back from Mexico on Monday, landing around lunchtime and I caught the train back to West Bromwich on Tuesday afternoon. Since then I’ve been trying to get back into writing my thesis, doing heaps of laundry and in the odd spare moment I’ve been putting together this entry.

As I suspected, I didn’t get chance to write much while I was away and just scribbled a few notes each day so that I wouldn’t forget and could keep everything in order. What follows is probably an overly detailed account of our adventures over the last couple of weeks which no one but me is ever likely to read all the way through. But what are holidays for if not for boring the pants of other folks with once you get home?

The Journey There.
June 2nd – 3rd, 2006
Our Journey started in Bath on Friday 2nd June. I’ll ignore the usual train ride from Walsall to Bath as it pales into insignificance compared to the thousands of miles covered subsequently and start with our late afternoon drive to Gatwick, getting to our hotel at around 7:30PM, we ate dinner in the hotel restaurant and got to bed as early as possible because the real travelling began the following day.

We got up before 7:00AM on Saturday and the 7:30AM minibus dropped us off at Gatwick a little before 8:00AM. Theoretically we had a leisurely three hours to check in and grab some breakfast before takeoff at 11:00AM, but on arrival we discovered that our plane was already delayed by an hour and given the nature of these things was only likely to get later. In order to escape the very real possibility of missing our connecting flights to Mexico City and Cancún, Delta offered to fit us in on an earlier flight which was leaving at 9:00AM. Our leisurely three hours and all hope of breakfast evaporated as we rushed to get checked in and get to the departure gate on time. We had a minor emergency when we realised we’d left an item of luggage on the minibus and I had to run back to the drop off point to pick it up, but thankfully we made it in time.

The flight was a little late boarding (aren’t they always?), but then we sat on the runway for more than an hour because a crate of asparagus had broken open in the hold and had to be cleared away before we could take off. In the end we left Gatwick at about 10:30AM, only half an hour earlier than our original flight time. By this time I was absolutely ravenous and was glad when they hauled out the midmorning peanuts soon after takeoff and nothing short of ecstatic when lunch arrived. I’ve never been so happy to see a reheated packet of cheese and spinach pasta in my life.

I’d never flown long haul before, in fact I’d rarely been far enough to warrant a meal on a plane and I’d never seen an in flight movie before so must confess I was strangely excited by all these new experiences. But over the nine hours flight time to Atlanta the novelty quickly wore off. I watched three progressively worse movies during the flight, starting with the fairly good A Time to Kill, followed by a fairly poor thriller with Paul Bettany and Harrison Ford called Firewall and finishing up with A Bug’s Life which was really about all I could handle at that point.

We landed in Atlanta at about 2:30PM local time, but about 7:30PM by our own body clocks and spent a confused hour getting yelled at by humourless American border control guys (do not try joking with these guys or questioning them in any way, it’s really not worth it), wandering around the airport trying to ascertain if we needed to collect our luggage or not and feeling vaguely like we ought to have lunch (again).

The next flight, though only a mere three hours to Mexico City and was just half an hour late taking off, but it was a tough one because we were already exhausted and it was getting pretty late on our own personal timescale. The evening meal was strangely reminiscent of lunch approximately nine hours ago and the in flight movie this time (a dire Disney effort about a group of plucky huskies called Eight Below) was definitely another step down on the ladder.

We touched down in Mexico City at about 7:30PM local time (1:10pm UK time) with around two hours until our flight to Cancún. We went through the same confusion regarding our luggage and whether we ought to collect it or not and then settled down to wait for boarding. This last flight was also delayed and no one seemed to know or care why. Our sense of humour had been completely eroded by endless travel and lack of sleep and we sat in a kind of trance for an hour until we were allowed to board. We eventually took off at 10:30PM local time (4:30AM UK time) so the evening snack felt more like an early breakfast, but perhaps mercifully this time there was no movie. We landed in Cancún at about 12:30AM local time (6:30AM UK time) by the time we collected out luggage (which we hadn’t seen for nearly a day and were amazed had managed to follow us without incident through so many obstacles) and got a taxi to our hotel. It was after 1:00AM local time (7:00AM UK time) and I’d been awake for more than twenty four hours when I gratefully collapsed into bed.

Cancún.
June 4th, 2006
Despite being completely exhausted, we were still on UK time and woke up fairly early on Sunday. We ate breakfast in the hotel restaurant, a lovely little beach hut, before catching a bus into the downtown area. Cancún is an artificial city, by which I mean that is was literally hacked out of the jungle in the late 1960s it’s mostly concrete hotels and shopping plazas. We strolled around downtown Cancún for a couple of hours getting our first taste of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.

None of the buildings are more than thirty years old so there isn’t much in the way of sightseeing, but we wandered round the Parque de las Palapas (the local park/town square) and explored the two markets (Mercados 28 and 23). Mercado 28 was obviously aimed at the tourists and we couldn’t move more than five steps without being greeted with a hopeful “Hey Amigo,” or “Check it out.” But the vendors were never less than polite and friendly. My girlfriend bought a cute little bracelet, originally priced at four hundred and fifty pesos, but after some hard bargaining he agreed to for just one hundred and fifty pesos for “good luck” (one hundred and fifty pesos still sounds like a lot, but works out at about £7.50!). By the time we’d made it to Mercado 23, which was much less touristy and far less pushy the midday heat had begun to wear us down somewhat so we retreated to a little café for a cold Coca-Cola.

We got back to the hotel in the early afternoon and went for a swim in the sea to cool off and a walk on the beach before taking a late siesta and then heading out again for the evening. We wandered around the park again and watched a performance of local folk dancing, ate a couple of snacks and then took a leisurely walk back to the hotel.

Tulum – Xel Há Water Park, Sian Ka’an Biosphere, Cobá and Tulum Ruins.
June 5th – 7th 2006
On Monday 5th June we left Cancún early. We got a taxi into town where we picked up our hire car and headed along the coast to Tulum. On the way we stopped off at the Xel Há Water Park, which is a sort of snorkelling theme park although that doesn’t really do it justice. It’s not really a zoo, it’s build around a series natural lagoons and really all they do is encourage the fish to hang around by feeding them. That said, it’s not exactly a natural habitat either, there are plenty of restaurants, bars, changing rooms, lockers and showers which are all part of the complex. Nevertheless there can’t be many places in the world where you can snorkel so safely and get so close to the fish.

We arrived in Tulum early Monday evening after Xel Há closed and checked into our hotel. We were welcomed by a lovely friendly landlady who gave us a load of advice on where the best places to eat were and what we should see while we were in Tulum. There isn’t really all that much of Tulum to explore. It’s a hippy favourite with lots of cabañas (sand floor and thatch roof huts) on the beach, but the town itself really only consists of two rows of houses, shops, restaurants and a smattering of hotels on either side of the highway, but after a shower and another nap we ventured out in search of a spot of dinner.

But we managed to get an early night because we had a tour booked for the following day round the Sian Ka’an Biosphere reserve. We were collected from our hotel first thing in the morning and taken to the massive 1.3 million acre nature reserve which hugs a sizable portion of the Caribbean coast in Quintana Roo Province. One of the guides, an amiable American chap called Henry took us for a tour round part of the reserve. We got to see some of the wildlife and all sorts of different types of mangroves and had a leisurely float down one of the “canals” through the mangrove swamps. We learnt quite a lot about the local wildlife and about some of the geology in the area. One of the things we learnt was that most of the Yucatán Peninsula doesn’t have rivers or lakes, but it is literally criss-crossed with an enormous network of underground rivers. From time to time there are cave-ins which form a sink hole (or cenote). These cenotes were used by the ancient Maya as a convenient source of fresh water and they almost always build their cities near to or around one or two of them. They bought us back to their base and gave us lunch before taking us to see the local Cenote for a late afternoon dip.

On Tuesday, our last day in Tulum, we got our first real look at some Mayan ruins. We drove out to the sprawling archaeological site of Cobá first thing in the morning. Cobá sits in the uncleared forest and is literally so big that they rent bicycles to visitors so that you can see it all. Being such a big site it didn’t feel crowded even though there were a lot of people there and cycling between the ruins through the shady trees it was easy to pretend that you were discovering them for yourselves. Being our first real experience of Mayan ruins we hired a guide for the first forty-five minutes and we learnt one or two interesting things about the culture of the ancient Maya. For example, the Maya had two calendars, one religious (two hundred and sixty days) and one agricultural (three hundred and sixty five days) which took fifty-two years to repeat and consequently the Maya believed that the world ended every fifty-two years. Also, the Maya had the technology to develop the wheel, but they chose not to use it because their religion, based on worship of the sun and the moon, led them to believe that everything round was sacred.

Later in the afternoon we also visited the Tulum ruins which have been much more restored than those at Cobá. It has much more of a tourist attraction feel to the site than Cobá with neat paths and little fences to keep you from clambering on the ruins. What was most impressive about the Tulum ruins was their location right on the cliffs overlooking the Caribbean Sea. There’s even a little beach as part of the complex, though it was crawling with tourists when we were there in the afternoon sun.

Ticul – Grutas de Loltún, Labná and Sayil Ruins.
June 8th – 9th, 2006
On Thursday 8th June we once again packed our bags into the car and took a long drive to Ticul. Once again we stopped off on the way, this time for an informative tour round the Grutas de Loltún, a massive series of caves which were once inhabited by the ancient Mayans. It was a welcome break from the hot sun and a chance to stretch our legs before driving the last few miles to Ticul.

It’s nearly 300km from Tulum to Ticul, a very long drive, so we were glad to get to our hotel and relax a little. In contrast to Tulum, Ticul is a fairly large colonial town with a Mediterranean style town square, a town hall, a handy grid system and a smattering of distinctive fortress style churches, solid edifices built by the conquistadors which were partly a castle keep and partly a place of worship during colonial times. Ticul, we found, was largely a sleepy little town, that is until about ten o’clock at night when they started letting off fireworks for a couple of hours while I was trying to get to sleep.

We got up early again the following day to visit a couple more Mayan sites. At this point I still don’t think I’d quite adjusted to Mexican time so the early mornings really weren’t such a trial and it was worth it to stay out of the midday sun. This time we took a drive round part of the Ruta Puuc, a tourist trail which takes in many of the Mayan sites and other tourist attractions south of Mérida in the vicinity of Ticul. The whole route comprises five Mayan ruins (including Uxmal which is one of the biggest) as well as the Grutas de Loltún (which we saw the previous day) and at one or two Haciendas as well and we didn’t feel up to covering all of this in a single day so we elected to visit just Labná and Sayil which seemed to be most highly recommended by the guidebooks.

First thing in the morning we visited Labná, a comparatively small Mayan city. Having been misinformed by our guidebooks we arrived about half an hour before it was supposed to be open, but the guy didn’t seem to mind and sold us our tickets nonetheless. The site has been fairly well cleared like Tulum, but had more of an air of an archaeological site like Cobá; wandering just a little way into the uncleared trees we found hundreds of stones lying around which would once have been part of the city. We were delighted to discover that we had the whole site to ourselves sharing it only with one guy who was cutting grass on El Mirador, one of the temples. It was somewhat spooky and haunting being there alone and I took some amazing photos of the eerie views from either end of the site.

Afterwards we drove on to Sayil and although it was later in the day we still managed to get the whole site to ourselves. Sayil was the least restored of all the sites we visited in The Yucatán, except for the Gran Palacio most of the ruins were little more than piles of rocks in the jungle and the legions of hungry mosquito gave us our most authentic archaeological experience of the whole trip.

Mérida – Hacienda Ochil, Paseo De Montejo, Uxmal Ruins.
June 10th – 15th, 2006
On Saturday 10th June we moved on again. This time it was just a short drive north into Mérida where my girlfriend’s conference would be held the following week. On the way we stopped off for lunch at an old farming estate called Hacienda Ochil.

After the Spanish conquest and the defeat of the Maya The Yucatán Peninsula was part of Neuva España (New Spain) and due to its lack of natural resources (such as gold!) it was at first considered less of a prize compared with the rest of Central America. Then the colonists discovered henequen, a type of cactus similar to sisal. The leaves of these plant could be harvested and the fibres extracted by crushing and shredding and used to make ropes, baskets, etc.. This “green gold” brought enormous wealth to the region, the larger haciendas became like self sufficient fiefdoms, landowners were virtually kings and their “employees” little more than serfs paid in company chits only redeemable at the company store where inflated prices kept whole families permanently in debt from one generation to the next.

After the First World War the invention of synthetic fibres such as nylon led to the decline of the henequen business and these days many of the haciendas are derelict old shells. More recently though the tourist industry has begun to renovate some of these grandiose buildings and convert them into luxury hotels and restaurants. These days Hacienda Ochil operates as a mid priced restaurant with an attached museum and a group of workshops and artisan stores where, amongst other things, you can buy products made from henequen.

We arrived in Mérida in the late afternoon and spent the rest of the weekend exploring the city. Mérida is the capital of Yucatán State and was founded by the conquistador Francisco de Montejo the Younger (one of three Francisco Montejos who was instrumental in conquering The Yucatán). It is a fairly typical colonial city, like Ticul it has a main plaze (as well as many other smaller squares) a town hall and a whole host of those fortress churches I mentioned earlier lining its grid of streets.

Apparently when the city was first founded the Spaniards marked the corners and the streets not with written names or numbers as they are today, but with a statue of a given symbol, most commonly an animal and the streets and corners consequently came to be known by the names of these symbols. This was probably to help avoid confusion between the population of the city half of which spoke Spanish and the other half of which spoke Mayan. Some people suggest that the Spanish wrote the names of each of the symbols in Spanish underneath the statue to help “educate” the Mayan speaking locals. These days none of the statues remain, but some have been replaced with plaques depicting the symbol in question although how accurate the recreations are is anyone’s guess. Apparently (though we never managed to find it) there’s a sign of a decapitated man on “headless man street” which commemorates a rather gruesome incident involving a man and a window on the street in question.

The conference began on Monday and I spent the next few days exploring the city while my girlfriend learnt about chemistry. I occasionally popped into the conference venue to scrounge a cup of coffee and even kept her company one afternoon during her poster session (I was pleased to find that I can still at least manage a passable impression of a chemist). I wandered along the Paseo de Montejo a long street lined with elaborate town houses built by the rich landowners around Mérida during the heydays of the haciendas. These days they’re mostly hotels and corporate headquarters for various banks and insurance companies, but it’s not difficult to imagine you’re living in colonial Mérida surrounded by all those splendid buildings.

On Wednesday in the afternoon we went on a coach trip to Uxmal as part of the conference programme (partners paid a few dollars extra). The Uxmal site is quite stunning and was one of the most impressive sites we visited in The Yucatán. It was unfortunate then that our organised tour arrived late afternoon when the site was rather crowded and we were hurried round a somewhat whistle-stop tour. We were then likewise hurried to lunch at a nearby restaurant and then again hurried back to Uxmal for a slightly tacky sound and light show. Though it was nice not to have to worry about finding our way there and back and especially about driving back in the dark on Mexico’s somewhat dubious road network, I think seeing Uxmal the package tour way made me appreciate more how lucky we’d been seeing some of the other sites.

The conference finished on Thursday and my girlfriend and I spent our last evening in Mérida in style. We ate dinner in a lovely little restaurant which we’d had our eye on for a while and were entertained by their regular guitarist a chap called Fito Haron. In broken Spanish I attempted to ask him if he had any CDs for sale and with the help of the waiter he managed to tell me that he didn’t have any with him. I have his email address somewhere on a scrap of paper and hopefully I can get one of the Spanish girls at University to write to him and figure something out. After dinner we caught a bus and found our way to El Cumbanchero, a small salsa bar which is owned by Ruben Gonzalez Jr. the son of the late great Ruben Gonzalez of Buena Vista Social Club fame. We listened to the band, had a few drinks and a few dances and caught a taxi back to our hotel tired and happy at well after midnight.

Chichén Itzá.
June 16th, 2006
After our hectic schedule of historic sites during the first week of our holiday, spending a bit of time staying in one place and relaxing in Mérida was a welcome break, and it was good to get away from all those mosquito as well. But on Friday 16th June we bid farewell to Mérida and once again took an early morning drive to Chichén Itzá.

Chichén Itzá is perhaps the most famous Mayan site and if you see a picture of a Mayan pyramid chances are better than ninety percent it’ll be El Castillo at Chichén Itzá. Our early start really paid off, we arrived soon after the site opened and while I won’t claim we had it to ourselves, it was pretty empty and we managed to get a lot of photos with no people cluttering them up. Later in the day at around eleven o’clock when we were just getting ready to leave the tour buses all arrived and you honestly couldn’t move for people. The difference was amazing.

The two most important things to see at Chichén Itzá are El Castillo (obviously) and the massive ball court there, the biggest example of such a court in The Yucatán. The Mayans (and apparently some of the other Mesoamerican cultures) played a ball game, the rules of which aren’t completely clear, but which seems to have been similar to basketball or netball. The game was not played merely for fun but had a deeper religious importance to the Maya and apparently ended with human sacrifice and/or enslavement of the some of the players, though some archaeologists maintain that the Maya did not sacrifice humans until they were conquered by the more bloodthirsty Toltecs. Whatever the details, it’s a massive arena very much on the scale of a midsized modern football stadium and quite impressive when you consider its age.

When the sun got too much for us again we retreated to our hotel, a lovely little holiday village type of place (but not in a Heidi Hi sort of way) just a short drive away from the site. We took our customary siesta and swam in the pools for a while then had an early dinner in the lovely restaurant. After the sound and light show in Uxmal we weren’t too bothered about going to the Chichén Itzá version, but apparently there isn’t much else to do and it was only five minutes away in the car so we agreed to go along.

While we were settling into our seats and waiting for the show to start I thought I’d take a quick walk around the ball court and take a couple more photos while it was quiet. When I returned to my seat a somewhat argumentative Mexican security guard told me I wasn’t permitted to leave the seating area and that I had to leave the site. I argued with him as best I could, pointed out that there were no signs telling me that I couldn’t go wandering around, but he insisted that it was a health and safety issue. I could have accepted this as a simple jobsworthism (albeit a bit unfair) but when I tried one last time to get him to see reason he asked me how many photos I’d taken and then told me if I gave him the chip from my camera that I could go back and watch the show. A quick bit of mental calculation put my SD card at something like ten times the value of an entry ticket into Chichén Itzá and I told him in no uncertain terms where he could go. He swore back at me in Spanish and I stormed off.

This whole incident was a real shame, not because I missed the, oh so spectacular, sound and light show, in the end I got to keep my photos and I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the show which I’m told was rubbish anyway. What really annoyed me was that despite what everyone says about “cheating damn Mexicans” it was the only example of slightly dodgy behaviour we experienced during the whole of the time we were there. Were it not for that one strange incident I would now be sitting here singing the praises of the Mexicans and their honesty. Like I say, it’s a shame.

Valladolid – Dzitnup and Zací Centoes.
June 17th, 2006
On Friday 17th June, the last full day of our holiday we drove a little further back along the highway to Cancún stopping off at Valladolid. Valladolid is the second city of Yucatán State and was founded by another Francisco de Montejo (the cousin of the chap who founded Mérida) who named it after Valladolid in Spain where the Montejo family originated from. It’s along the same colonial lines as both Mérida and Ticul and about midway between in terms of size.

We got to Valladolid around lunchtime and spent a fairly relaxing afternoon visiting a couple of cenotes there. Cenote Dzitnup is just outside the town and is beautifully picturesque. It’s almost a completely covered cave with just a small whole where a breath taking shaft of sunlight lances down to the clear blue water and Centoe Zací is located within the city itself and is overlooked by a cute little restaurant.

In the early evening we took a walk around the town and visited the Iglesia de San Bernadino, a huge and imposing church incorporating an equally massive monastery and then later we had a lovely dinner in the hotel restaurant which, according to the guidebook, happened to be the best restaurant in town.

Journey Home.
June 18th – 20th, 2006
We got up fairly late on Sunday 18th June, had a nice leisurely breakfast at the hotel and then packed the car for the final time and drove back to Cancún. We had one or two navigational difficulties trying to find the airport because we were heading into Cancún on the wrong highway (the one we wanted was closed so we didn’t really have a choice), but after a couple of wrong turns and a bare minimum of cross country driving we managed to find our way and were only about twenty minutes late for the start of check-in.

The flight back was far simpler than the epic journey out. We left about 5:00PM local time and simply flew from Cancún to Atlanta and then from Atlanta to Gatwick. The stewardesses were rude (I’ve never come across such a phenomenon before), but the border control guy in Atlanta was actually polite and helpful this time around. The food was almost exactly the same as on the way out and they subjected us to that ridiculous husky movie again (though I didn’t bother to watch it this time). I did however, manage to break the habit of a lifetime and actually slept on the plane for a while. Not as well as the lucky devil in the row next to us who had three seats all to himself and made the most of his three pillows and blankets when stretching out in absolute comfort, but I managed about three hours which is three more than on the trip out there.

We landed in Gatwick about 11:00AM UK time and by the time we’d collected our luggage and got the minibus back to the hotel it was about 1:00PM. Then it was just the simple matter of driving back to Bath after just three hours sleep. We got back to Bath late afternoon and had a fairly early night, but slept until about midday Tuesday morning. I caught the train in the late afternoon and eventually got back to West Bromwich about 7:30PM just in time for the football.

Well I guess that’s it. Like I say, I don’t expect anyone else to actually read all that, but maybe I’ll look back at it all myself someday and think fondly of the time I got thrown out of a historical monument.

As for what’s next, well I guess that little lot should be enough for a while and it’s really about time I got my head down and finished my thesis so I might not be writing anything (at least anything on here) for the next few weeks.