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 21st century had all the material goods, but they ate like pigs and probably all died of heart attacks†Who knows?