On The Road

While I’m waiting for that passport to arrive, I’ve been traveling on the web instead of on an airplane or train. Which, if you are like me, gets a little old after awhile. Sure, I want people to come to my virtual web space and read my stories to research their next adventure, but as a writer, it is sometimes painful to read about other people’s trips. I’m always critiquing the grammar, the sentence structure, the cropping of the photographs, and sometimes even the experiences.

Last night I did something different. I traveled, through a lecture, to the Mirador Basin in Guatamala given by the archaeologist who has been directing the work and excavation in the area for over twenty years, Richard Hansen, PhD. I’ve sat through many art history slide shows and lectures in my life, but it is really a wonderful experience to sit through those given by someone who is actually working on site and excited about the work they doing. I brought my notebook so that I could take notes for this posting, but he talked so fast I just wanted to listen.

For those of you familiar with this web site, you already know that I got hooked on Maya antiquities while chasing myself around The Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico a few years ago. So it’s no wonder that I want to do some more exploring and expand my quest for lost culture that area.

So, where is it, you may ask? The Mirador Basin sits in the Petén region of Guatamala in an area that now holds the last existing virgin rainforest in Central America. Tikal is to the south and Mirador extends north, over the border and into Mexico. Currently, the only way into the area is by hiking for two or more days through mud, jungle, snakes, and mosquitoes, or to take a very expensive helicopter ride.

Besides rainforest and wildlife, there is one other spectacular find in the Mirador Basin. More than one ancient Maya city and by far the largest collection of them in one single area. While the ancient sites on The Yucatan Peninsula range from the beginning of the Classic period, around 300AD to about 900AD, to the end of the Post-Classic period, around 900AD to 1500AD, the sites being uncovered in Mirador are much older, and in an archaeological way of speaking, they are from a period of time, centuries in fact, before Christ.

It takes a minute or two to get used to Dr. Hansen’s pace of speaking. But after getting in the flow, I get caught up in his unflinching excitement about the place. He showed us slides and talked of the wildlife that live in the area and in the rainforest, including jaguars, reptiles, and birds. Then his talk moved toward the archaeology, the buildings and the artwork within them. I can picture the place, unkempt jungle, rugged in comparison to the sites already developed for tourism in The Yucatan - like the smaller and newer sites of Chichen or Uxmal, which as massive as those sites are, only give a hint at what lies underneath a layer of dirt in the Mirador Basin.

I picture in my over imaginative head a kind of Indiana Jones appeal to visiting the area. The last place of archaeological jungle adventure. Me and my camera, photographing every inch of every new find. Or just hand me a trowel and a dusting brush and I’ll sit for hours in the jungle heat and humidity, dusting off the past … For Dr. Hansen, it’s more about politics and economics than it is about adventure. It’s about gaining people’s interest in the area, to save the cultural heritage and ecosystem. Because of the location of The Mirador Basin, this area, the ancient sites, and the wildlife in it are, as he points out, threatened by advancing development (to put it nicely), artifact looters and poachers that do not have Mirador’s best interests at heart.

After the lecture I went up to ask him a question, leading in with a description of my interest … about how even though I studied art and photography, and art history, I had never been held captive by the Maya, or had never really known anything about them until that trip to The Yucatan a few years back and that I now found them fascinating. He laughed. A genuine laugh, the kind of laugh that meant he knew exactly what it is like to get hooked.

The wind is blowing and the rain falling down. It’s even really cold. Winter has arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area and as beautiful as this place is, there are times when daydreams of warmer climes are at the forefront of my thinking process.

There are times of the year when I daydream about traveling to particular places. October, I think about Day of the Dead and Mexican towns that celebrate it. In November I’m thinking about car camping in Big Sur. In mid-February I think about the trip I took to hang out with the grey whales in The Baja and yearn to go back. My birthday in the spring makes me want to hightail it to Rome or Paris, or some other romantic European city.

And about this time of year (January) I think about planning a trip to The Yucatan before the end of March, before it gets too hot to want to go.

So today I put a photo in the header of this blog (the blog has been changing, so this part of the post may not always be relevant) that makes me think of walking down a jungle road in The Yucatan. The photo was taken at Ik-Kil. It began to sprinkle as I walked into the park and towards the cenote.

It also resembles my daydreams.

A shocking bit of news from The Yucatan which is making the discussion board rounds over on Thorntree and at LocoGringo, is that there have been three ADO bus robberies made in a matter of 30 hours. Two of the robberies were made out of Valladolid. Three armed men got onto the Cancun-Merida first class bus as passengers and once the bus was out on the highway, they pulled out their guns and took the passengers money. The three men then get off of the bus and into a waiting vehicle to escape. There were about 40 passengers on each of the buses at the time. At this time the thieves are still at large.

This is not news for travelers in Mexico, but it is for travelers who know and love The Yucatan where bus travel has been extremely safe. While in other parts of Mexico, this type of robbery could take place at any time of day, they usually take place on the long haul overnight lines. These incidents in The Yucatan happened in the late afternoon, early evening, so they are considered to be even more brazen.

Here is the Por Esto! article dated January 10th, in Spanish. It appears that the robberies happened earlier in the week.

At times when the weather turns bad, like really bad, I have to sit down and reflect for a moment.

There is a hurricane bearing down on The Yucatan peninsula tonight. I can only sit on my comfortable couch in San Francisco and think about what that means. It’s not that we have a shortage of natural disasters here in SF, they just usually don’t announce themselves a week ahead of time. Earthquakes and windstorms are rather be here now that way.

Hurricanes on the other hand are different. We can track them now. Know where they might go. Know if they will build in strength or just peter out before hitting one of the most interesting places on the planet. Although I’m not talking about that Babylon called Cancun. I’m talking about all that is beautiful and interesting along the long shore of the peninsula, the jungle inland and the people, some of them magical, who live there. It looks like tonight is going to be a full on storm hitting the peninsula dead center.

The water of the Caribbean coast of the peninsula is the most incredible color of blue. As a painter, I can say that it’s a blue that can never be painted, although many have tried, because it can only exist in nature, and in that one place. The water kind of glows, as if it is actually back lit, or as if it is lit from underneath, rather than from the sun above. Palm trees line the beach, a beach made of white fluffy sand. Pangas rock gently on the small waves of the sea.

The stone ruins of Tulum that drop over the cliff and into the sea have survived a eight-hundred or so years of storms, I’m sure they will survive this hurricane too.

It’s hard to know that this special place may be hit hard. I take comfort in the knowledge that, as all things in nature do, the area will actually survive the storm.