“I spent an afternoon in this watery underworld, surrounded by rock formations and curtains of trailing vegetation, floating on my back among wavering channels of sunlight.”
On his recent trip to Mexico with Plan South America, award-winning British travel journalist Stanley Stewart explored the ancient treasures of the Yucatán Peninsula for the Financial Times.
His route took him along the Ruta Puuc and the Ruta de los Conventos, from the ruined Mayan city of Uxmal to Belle Époque mansions in Merida, craft collectives in small villages and cenotes deep in the Yucatán jungle.
Words by Stanley Stewart
“I took the Puuc Route to the ruins of the city of Uxmal. With its monumental structures, Chichén Itzá may be the most spectacular of Mayan ruins, but its proximity to Cancún means that its atmosphere is undermined by crowds of visitors. Uxmal is more peaceful — less shopping arcades and turnstiles, more quiet contemplation. Architecturally and aesthetically, it is arguably the greatest of Mayan cities. The Mayan were the most sophisticated of the cultures of the ancient Americas. They had a complete writing system — something that seems to have escaped the Inca and the Aztec — and were obsessive about mathematics and the measurement of time. Not for the Mayan the excitement of a five-year diary planner. They developed a calendar known as the Long Count, recognised as an extraordinary exercise in mathematics. A stela at Cobá, for instance, places it in a calendric cycle of some 41 thousand billion billion billion years.
Part of the beauty of these Mayan ruins is their sylvan setting — the swaths of green, the old trees, the birdsong, the shadows, the butterflies, the drone of cicadas, the wild flowers sprouting among ancient stones. The art at Uxmal is gorgeous, surfaces swarming with closely knit interlocking figures. The architecture is exquisite. The first building to confront the traveller is the soaring Magician’s Pyramid, with its thrilling inclines. On the far side of the site, past the deadly ball court and the House of the Turtles, is the Governor’s Palace, the rhythms of light and shade along its facade broken by diagonal bands of mosaic decoration. Behind the Magician’s Pyramid is the Quadrangle of the Nuns — these are all names given by the Spanish — where one theory suggests sacrificial victims, not nuns, could spend a few months in debauchery before the big send-off.”
“On my last day, I went to a cenote. There are almost no rivers or lakes on the northern part of the peninsula. But cracks in the limestone crust caused by the asteroid impact that spelt the demise of the dinosaurs — it landed on the Yucatán 66mn years ago — have created sinkholes that reveal a vast subterranean water world of lakes and rivers in labyrinthine caves and caverns. For the Mayan these cenotes were sacred, portals to the underworld of Xibalba.
For the modern visitor, it is like floating in air. At Los 7 Cenotes, a collection of cenotes on a private reserve just outside the town of Sotuta, I climbed down steep ladders, jumped from platforms, abseiled from a cenote rim into a strange watery purity. Sometimes the cenotes are in darkness, sometimes open to the sky, holding the reflections of clouds across their pristine surfaces. Cenotes affect people. Some laugh, others cry. Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, is reputed to have said that diving in them was the nearest thing on Earth to being in outer space.
I spent an afternoon in this watery underworld, surrounded by rock formations and curtains of trailing vegetation, floating on my back among wavering channels of sunlight. Tiny Melipona bees came to drink. Swallows danced above the surface. Stalactites hung from the rock, measuring millions of patient years, drip by drip, as accurately as a Mayan calendar.”
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