Before 2001, the community of Mahahual was a small village in the south of the Yucatan peninsula with no power and no wifi, with other small villages living independant of each other, but trading various goods among themselves. One village might be farmers growing vegetables and the next would be ranchers raising sheep, goats, cows or chickens. Every Saturday each community sent their produce to the neighbouring villages to barter or sell their products to the other communities. There was a path through the jungle to a small beach on the coast that the young people of the area used to ride their bikes to get to the beach.
All that changed when a Mexican conglomerate decided to develop a purpose-build cruise ship facility to encourage the cruise ships who were stopping at ports up and down the coast bringing hundreds of tourists, and more importantly, tourist dollars, into those ports, to stop here as well. And that they did. It’s called Costa Maya.
Starting in 2001, first one ship a week stopped, and then one a day and now the average number of passengers using the facility each day is between 10,000 and 15,000. Three ships were docked there today including us, the Cunard Queen Elizabeth and the Royal Caribbean, Enchantment of the Seas (which I was on in the late 80s or early 90s). Tomorrow they are expecting 6 of them!
The port facilities are amazing with shops galore, restaurants with all manner of offerings, including seats at the bar which were swings. There are pools with sand around them, and other pools with swim up bars. There is a lagoon full of flamingos, an aviary, a tequila tasting facility and a chocolate exhibit. And of course you need to walk through a maze of all this to leave the terminal to do any activity you have planned for the day. Those activities range from snorkeling on the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef to checking out one of the Mayan Ruins in the area.
Today we made our way through the maze and found the kiosk for a locally run and staffed excursion and guiding company with whom we had a booking. Our guide was Joel who is from a local community. He explained to us that he was sent off as a young boy to a nearby city to stay with relatives while he went to school, because there were no schools in their communities in this area. He was one of the few of his peers who learned to read and write and he’s been guiding tourists since the terminal opened in February of 2001. He was a fabulous guide, full of information, great practical guiding skills and a wicked sense of humour. He started out with 13 of us and ended up with 13 of us after 2 hours of mixing among other groups off the three ships. And, as he pointed out, they were even the same 13 passengers he started with!
We travelled on a great highway from the port, through some swampy areas and jungle, joining the main highway running from Cancun to the Belize border for a while, and then on to another secondary road for an hour or so to get to our destination, the ruins of Chacchoben. The name is Mayan for Red Corn Area.
These ruins were first mapped out in 1972 by an American university archeologist from New Orleans, and then in 1997 Mexican archeologists uncovered just a few of the mounds. Once uncovered they dug a small tunnel into one of the structures and discovered there were 6 temples, each built completely covering the previous one.
The first King had a platform built on which he had a small temple built on which to honour the gods and his body was placed there in burial. When a later generation of King came along who thought he was a more superior king he would have the temple completely covered by another layer and his body would be laid to rest there. This happened 6 times and it wasn’t successive kings but only those with enough power and reach to have the materials and workers to build the next level.
The structures on this site have only their foundations in place. The temples that would have been found on top of these foundations were removed by treasure hunters before the site was mapped out.
It’s believed that this site started around 400 BC and by 600 AD, it was a huge city with more than 10,000 people living there. There were many temples, each built to honour one of the gods to agriculture Sun, Rain, Wind, Moon, or business, or the economy or war.
Immediately around the temples, platforms were built around a courtyard and small block houses for the most important people surrounding the king were built on top of the platforms. This was like the downtown centre of the city. In the courtyard area, they lived communally, with the houses only being used for sleeping.
Beyond this VIP section the regular villagers built their homes mostly out of wood, which have long ago disintegrated with only the platforms remaining.
The smaller temples were where offerings of food were made to the King by the villagers (taxes), and the larger temples were for offerings to the gods of agriculture such as the sun, moon, wind and rain.
Interestingly, the Mayans used quarried lime stone to build with and as you can see from the pictures, they cut the pieces small, so they could be hand carried to the construction site since they had no beasts of burden.
The temples you see are 95% original, with the balance of 5% being restoration or preservation efforts to keep the structures intact.
Over top of the stones, there was stucco applied and the stucco was painted in bright colours. Although there is no evidence of the stucco or colours on the outside of the structures, they were found on the structures that were on the inner layers of the multilayer temple which had been tunnelled into by archeologists.
The last structure we looked at was on a huge platform, measuring 110 meters square and it was their temple to the sun. The Mayans did make blood offerings of humans to the gods during the summer solstice because they believed the gods must be nourished to be able to help them produce good crops in the coming season. They used only the most desirable and highest ranking virgin females, those close to the King and because they didn’t want to use women from their own tribe they apparently fought with surrounding tribes to take away their most desirable women to be sacrificed.
This was my 5th visit to Mayan ruins and I learn something new each time I visit. There is so much more we learned about the skills at math, understanding of the solar system, and how they believe there are gods in the heavens and also underworld gods, all related to agriculture. They believed the underworld is upside down compared to the world above ground since they had seen bats handing upside down in caves. A very interesting people.
But my knees are talking to me after climbing up the very high steps both yesterday and today. So some Tylenol will be making an entrance tonight.
Tonight was sadly the farewell party for many of the guests since tomorrow we dock in Cozumel where they will be disembarking. This cruise itinerary is a combination of several different itineraries and different people are on different legs of it. So tonight we said goodbye to some new friends who we’ve met this week but we are delighted that we’re not yet among those heading back to the great white north.
Lois' Adventures 