Tulum Cabanas & an Unexcavated Ruin
TULUM CABANAS
Our guidebook tells us that there are cabanas on the beach in Tulum with a beautiful view of the ocean and gorgeous white sand beaches, so we decided to check them out for possible future lodging.
We found the beaches to be superb. However, the cabanas are not our style. For the most part, there is no electricity, therefore, after dark, generators roar and most places are totally dark after about 11 pm.
They’re also very pricey. We did find one place advertised as $39 USD per night that had small sand-floored bungalows made of sticks, like a typical Mayan home. The sticks let the cool breezes blow through the building.
None of us liked the shared bathrooms. At the Winter Star Party, which is located at a girl scout camp in the Florida Keyes, there is a girls and a boys shower house, so we don’t mind sharing. But these bathrooms afforded very little privacy at all.
EXPLORING AN UNEXCAVATED RUIN
Today, we went with our friend and host at the Flycatcher Inn bed and breakfast in Santa Elena, Santiago Dominges, on an exploration of an unexcavated ruin next to Uxmal.
San drove us into the site which is on farmland where San personally helped his uncle plant corn during San’s younger years. I am so glad we drove in instead of walked in, even though San had to drive very slow over the rocky parts of the tire-track dirt road through the jungle because Miriam had to sit in the cab of the truck. It was a very long way to walk!
Nohpat is one of the many ruins on the Puuc Route, of which Uxmal is the main one. Because Kabah, Labna and Sayil, also on the Puuc route, are not especially large sites, I expected Nohpat to be a relatively small pile of rocks with trees growing out of it.
To my surprise, the site is huge and contains one large pyramid, which is a huge pile of rocks with trees growing out of it, and many smaller piles of rocks with trees growing out of them that look like they are temples.
We felt like Stevens and Catherwood, who had been in Nohpat in the late 1800s, because little has changed since that time. We walked and walked hoping not to get too many ticks on us or to get too many mosquito bites.
Santiago is very excited about Nohpat because this whole area consists of his ancestral lands. We wanted to show us first one pile of rocks then another pile of rocks, cutting through the overgrown path with his machete.
Finally, dragging my video camera and its tripod plus a walking stick to keep my balance over the rocks, I thanked him and told him that we had seen enough.
He would have been glad to take us to many more ruins. He knows them all very well and, even though there are trees in the way, can see in his mind’s eye where the central square would have been.
We took many photographs and a lot of footage. This site is supposed to be the site of the witch that hatched the sorcerer dwarf out of an egg.
Carol Chapman
Coyright (c) 2009 Carol Chapman
