We drove to a little restaurant near the access road for Calakmul, a set of ruins deep in jungle. The access road is about 60 kilometres and we had read that it could take about 2 hours, so we wanted to spend the night close and then head in early in the morning. We started to set up, then immediately had to move to another spot, as Derek noticed a tarantula escaping into its hole right beside our camper steps!
Chichen Itza is maybe one of the busiest archeological sites in Mexico, so we knew we wanted to get there early. We found a great little spot for the night camped in the parking lot of a small hotel and restaurant a few kilometres from the site. Hotel Delores Alba had two nice swimming pools. We were able to camp next to a large palapa beside this cool pool. It had a natural floor that consisted of sand and limestone that was lit up at night with lights that cycled through different colours.
Uxmal, an archeological zone in the state of Campeche, allows trucks to overnight in a grassy field near the main entrance of the ruins for a fee of 131 pesos per night, not 130, not 135…131 pesos. Not sure how they came up with the number, but that is the price, less than $10 Canadian.
The closer we got to Palenque, the more roadside vendors we saw. Every time there was a tope in a small town forcing the truck to almost come to a stop, we were approached by locals trying to sell oranges, nuts, dried bananas, coconut water, etc. At one point several small children jumped onto our running boards trying to sell us food items, and when we said “No, gracious”, they asked for pesos instead. Derek tried his tactic of chatting them up, which we have found often distracts them from trying to get something from us, but they were pretty insistent that we should give them some money. All the while they hung from windows on the running boards in the middle of the highway. We, generally, don’t give kids money. Others ,wiser than us, have told us that it promotes a begging society and discourages them from going to school. So, eventually, Derek had to start inching the truck ahead to get the kids to let go of our truck…it felt yucky, neither of us liked having to do that, but it was the only way we could figure out how to get them off of our running boards.
The Usumacinta River forms part of the border between Guatemala and Mexico. Yaxchilan is a ruin along the river that you can only get to by boat from the Mexican border town of Frontera Corozal.
Oaxaca (pronounced Wa-ha-ka) is both a state in Mexico and the capital city of the state. We drove through some beautiful high mountain terrain to Oaxaca city. The roads were quite good, if not all the drivers. I have dash cam video of two cars, a semi and a pickup truck, all shoulder to shoulder trying to pass each other, going up hill and around a corner…..again, wish I had the internet power to upload the video, maybe one day.
We hadn’t planned on visiting Cholula, but we needed to break up our drive to Oaxaca and Cholula was about halfway. It turned out to be one of our favourite stops.
We drove into the town of Tula and there were police everywhere! Six police cars in a cluster here, eight in a cluster there….what the heck? Almost as thick as monarch butterflies! Was there something “going down”, or is Tula such a bad place that it needs such a police presence?