A Weekend of Ruins!

This weekend was our first extended excursion with all of us here in Mexico. We all piled into a nice van-bus thing and headed off to see come caves and ruins. Our first stop on Friday was at the cave in Loltun. It was a pretty neat cave. It was huge and had beautiful columns, stalagmites, and stalactites. And the air was nice and cool: free AC is always a plus in Mexico! :)

The cave used to be filled with water, and the floor definitely showed that. There were bumps and ridges all over, which is not great for a stumbling person like myself. It was all ok and I made it through without any accidents. At one point, we walked under some holes in the ceiling, and we heard squeaking above us. The little bats weren't happy that we were making noise, but they we apparently too tired to fly at us! We climbed up the Grand Canyon- in the cave. And we stood in pitch black darkness. Silly me tried to walk around, and I ran into a rock, a big rock! Then we had to climb up a big stairway to get out. Luckily, we got to rest in the van afterwords on our way to Kabah.

Kabah is a Maya ruin site, and it's pretty neat. The area that we visited was all raised up on a platform, so I had to climb some more. It was pretty, and well restored. Since we've been studying Mayan architecture in both my Civilization class and my Art and Architecture class, it was fun to figure out what each space was used for, and who it was built for. Who needs guides when you have the knowledge? (!e also found out that guides like to make stuff up!) We had a short class on the lawn before the big stairs, then we wandered around for a while.

We hopped back into the van and headed to Sayil, another ruin site down the road a ways. At Sayil we saw our first example (I think) of a Sacbeh, which is a raised platform for the rich and influencial to walk on. They usually connected different residential or temple compounds together, and they weren't available for everyone to used. Here, the Sacbeh (don't ask me how it's really spelled) wasn't excavated much, so it was basically a path in the ground. But it was neat to see.

After Sayil, we headed to Labna, which was pretty close by. In Labna, there was an elevated Sacbeh which was fully excavated. It was a few feet higher than the ground, and it connected someone's palace and temple to their extended residential units. Those Maya were rich! In many of the sites we've seen, the temples, even huge ones, have been private alters for a family, not for the whole community. It's amazing to think that one family would build a temple for their use. Although what the definition of a family was is likely different than today's definition.

Each of the 3 sites had similarities, which makes sense since they were all built around the same time period, the same nation inhabited them, and they are in a close radius to each other. However, there were strong differences too. I'm glad I know something about Maya Civ and Architecture because I was able to identify those differences.

We also went to Uxmal on Sunday. We went there a few weeks ago, unplanned, but it was great to go back. I understood so much more than I did the first time. And they had finished restoring the side of one of the big pyramids, so we could climb up it!! It was amazing!

On Friday night we went to Kiuic. I'll talk about this in another post...