Pictures here

Dad and I made our way to a little beach town north of Merida called Progresso.  It’s a quiet port town; one of its specialties being the mangrove and red tide.  When I visited the keys, I saw a whole bunch of mangrove down there too.  In Florida, people hate mangrove.  They prevent the rich people from building nice docks behind their homes.  Mangroves are vegetation that grow thickly together and protect the shoreline from being eroded away.  When we did a walk through, the mosquitoes ate me raw.  The guide gave me a tree branch to smack my legs with.  I beat myself silly and still came away with bunch of bites.

We went to the grocery store and I found this.  Who knew Ramen Noodles were a popular breakfast item?  Apparently they come with Kellogg’s Corn Flakes!

So my dad came to Mexico to attend the ASPB annual meeting, basically lots of professors get together and talk about how to make bigger and better plants that can survive another ice age or a nuke.  One of the award winners from previous year showed how her team figured out genetically why a leaf on one side of a corn grows faster than the leaf on the other side.  I am glad someone is dedicated to solving these mysteries.  Now, next, how do we get cheap energy?  Knock on my door when that problem is solved, so I can buy back my 6 cylinder.

So after the conference and a delicious Argentinean steak dinner together, my dad went on his way to Cuba while I headed south through Palenque and back to San Cristobal.  On the way, I visited Agua Azul, another beautiful natural waterfall and also another river that runs through a grand valley.  However, what I will remember the most is my visit to a local village called Chamutla.  This is probably the biggest cultural shock of my trip.

“Are you there?”

“Yes I am”

That’s the literal translation of the local Mayan greeting.  Really what they are asking is if the spiritual being is there because obviously, the physical body is there.

The locals watch TV just like we do.  When we watch the Discovery channel and see indigenous people live in clay huts and we think to ourselves that we are much more advanced.  In the similar way, the local Mayans watch TV and see modern tiled floors in houses.  They don’t think that they are any inferior because they have dirt floors.  Dirt floors have worked for them for centuries; they feel no need to change.

For them, a whole family lives under one roof.  It’s perfectly normal for parents to be having sex and the kids to be in the same room.  If you grew up with that, then the idea would seem normal and natural.  For the rest of us who did not grow up that way, that idea is far out.  Also as a subsistent community, the Mayans think of the family more of a unit since everyone work and produce together to grow crops or whatever the family business is.

They drive cars.  They have cell phones.  They believe in Jesus Christ, but for them Jesus is not the same as the Jesus in Christianity.  Jesus is simply the name for another deity.  In their mixed religion of Christianity and Mayan religion, there are no demons, only gods, but gods can be good or bad.  They make offerings to the Gods with whatever they have, such as fruits, food or even coke, in hopes of keeping a good relationship with their gods.  They ask nothing for their offering, but one day when they do need help, they will already be in good relations with their higher beings.

They have hospitals and then they have healers.  Hospitals are for emergencies, but for general illness, they go to their healers.  Their healers provide care for them in the traditional Mayan methods via prayers, burning candles, and herbs.

Economically, they could be involved in many jobs other than growing corn.  For example, the family I visited produces flowers on their farm behind the house and exports them.  On Monday morning, they don’t all rush to the office.  Pace of life is slower and simpler than in the cities.

Culturally, they have managed to preserve their way of life and thinking amongst the growing modern society around them.  They know about capitalism, the internet and materialism.  They desire little and are more satisfied.  Such is a rarity in today’s world.

In San Cristobal, I also visited the Mayan medicine museum where I picked up a book of Mayan herbs and applications.  On a quick flip through, I happened to see the herb Ruta Graveleon.  I recall this is the herb used by the Indian father and son doctor team to treat brain tumors in India.  What a coincidence that Mayans also use the same herb, except that Mayans don’t use it for pains of the head.

Pictures here

My trip from Xela up to Merida Mexico to meet my dad would be my first long bus trip, including 3.5 hours from Xela to the border, 3.5 hours from Mexico border to San Cristobol, a few hours wait there, 5 hours to Palenque, a few more hours wait and then another 7 hours to Merida. Buses in Mexico are actually very comfortable; the seats recline far back and come with plenty of leg room. If it had a wet bar, it could definitely used as a party bus.

It’s been almost a year since I saw my dad. We were supposed to meet at the hotel, but by chance we ran into one another on the streets of Merida. We were both very happy to finally meet again. He was wearing one of the Carnegie Mellon robotics t-shirts I had given him a few years back. We found ourselves a street BBQ buffet and gorged on skewers of fish, chicken and pork. Half way through dinner, rain came pouring down. Not deterred, we finished our meals inside the restaurant.

Over the next two days, we visited Uxmal and Chichen Itza, both Maya ruins. The road there took us on a lonely road cutting through the vast forests of the Yucatan peninsula. The forests stretched as far as the eye can see. Undeveloped and protected, the forest reserve showed the incredible rich natural resources of Mexico. The land has never been cultivated before. Just imagine what could be produced when one day we find a bio-renewable energy source – besides corn. Converting corn to feed automobiles carries a very negative connotation, especially outside of the US, because the people ask why we should feed corn to cars when corn is a food for people.

Uxmal is about 1500 years old, abandoned in the 1200’s. Most of the buildings there are for ceremonial purposes, such as one for priests to pray to the rain god. Mayans have their own calendar of 20 day months, 18 of these months make up one year. Many of the symbolic numbers are built into the temples themselves such as the number of steps up to a temple, the number of doors on a building. I think a lot of the ruin is reconstructed because just by looking at the different colors on the building, it’s obviously that the higher parts of the buildings tarnished in black and gray contrast deeply with the skin color stones on the lower parts of the buildings. The buildings were all painted colorfully at one point, using a mixture of colors from plants and fine mud.

There is also a ball court with two rings sticking out sideways from the wall. There were games often for entertainment, but every 52 years, a sacrifice of one of the captains of the team is made after the game. No one really knows whether the winning or the losing team captain was sacrificed, but either way, it was great for the family of sacrificed as they get lots of material good as well as respect from the community. Mayan culture center on farming and since are no rivers around, they relied on natural rainfall to water their vegetation. Civilization without water nearby or irrigation system to bring water from far is like standing on a thin ice layer on top of a lake. Maybe the Mayans encountered a drought here and the people moved to other Mayan cities in the 1200’s – the most logical explanation.

The guide said the Mayans here also didn’t use wheels for transportation. If true, that would make the constructions of the temples here amazing feats. These temples have a solid core. Imagine trying to move all the heavy stones by manual labor!

Civilizations come and go. The Mayans had observatories to see the skies centuries before Galileo was born, but now their buildings lay in piles of stones. I wonder what the people will say after us if one day our civilization was destroyed and people manage to find a McDonalds’s yellow M next to a 1000 meter tall skyscraper in modern day New York. They would probably say something like “Those people in the 21^st century had all the material goods, but they ate like pigs and probably all died of heart attacks” Who knows?