Under the Fan in the Yucatan: In closing . . .

Well, seeing as how we’ve been back in “the true north strong and free” for ten days already I guess it’s time to wrap up this harangue.

Merida.  How do I sum up such a rich experience in a few words?  We both highly recommend it as a destination for as little as a week (although you will be hard pressed to see even the basics in seven days) to as long as a retirement home especially for singles and people who want lots to do in a safe peaceful environment.  My first impression was correct – Merida is like “Cuba with stuff”.  It boasts the best of both Mexico and Cuba.  The people are proud but friendly, music and the arts are everywhere and supported by everyone including the government.  The culture is distinct as the architecture which provides hours of fascination and/or photo taking.  The health care and education are excellent.  And there is very little crime.

Must sees/dos:

1.      El Centro – the historic centre of the city

2.      Plaza Grande and the buildings that are adjacent – the centre of the centre

3.      Paseo de Montejo  and the museums and shops sprinkled amongst the many banks that line the avenue

4.      Monumento à la Patria at the north end of the downtown section of Montejo

5.      Haceinda Sotuta de Peon

6.      Hacienda Yaxcopoil

7.      Uxmal, Mayan ruins

8.      Chaya Maya, best place for Yucatecan food

9.      Manglares de Dzinitún ecotour at Celestun when the flamingos are around

10.   The Cuzama  three cenote tour if you like to swim

11.   The free concerts offered in various outdoor locales downtown

12.   The myriad art galleries, museums, shops

Shopping requires its own paragraph.  Souvenir shopping can be very good in Merida.  While the talavera pottery, blankets, leather, etc. many of us know and love from the northwestern Mexico is in short supply here, the Yucatan has its own appealing goods especially clothing.  The guayaberra shirts and the huipil dresses and blouses are beautiful and very affordable as are embroidered households goods.  As well anything that can be made from henequen fibre is, like baskets, coasters, placemats, etc. and at very reasonable cost.  Surprisingly, the best place to buy high quality Yucatan arts and crafts at reasonable prices is at the shops in the museums and boutique hotels like Casa San Angel.  Pottery (as opposed to talavera ceramics) and high quality crafts from all parts of Mexico are also available in Merida.

As far as everyday shopping, trips to Walmart were required for only a few items – gin for Neil’s daily G&T (rum and vodka are available everywhere), butter (from Denmark or New Zealand.  We don’t like Mexican butter.  Must be what they feed the cattle.  Corn maybe.), some baked goods (we northerners take our wonderful high-quality wheat so for granted.)  Electronics are not readily available or inexpensive Mexico.

If you are pressed for time, less than adventurous or just plain lazy like us, the best way to cover a lot of ground painlessly is to hire a driver and guide.  We highly recommend Lawson’s Original Yucatan Excursions.  No worries about renting a car, insurance, getting lost, parking, etc. and a bilingual ex-pat Canadian guide in addition to the bilingual driver if you choose.  Not cheap but worth every penny.

The best way to find out what is happening in Merida is to check out the” Yucatan Today” and “Yucatan Living” websites.  The former also publishes a monthly magazine that is available free of charge and is a MUST for every English-speaking household in the city.

While Merida is a wonderful vacation destination it is not without its drawbacks.  Mostly little things but it’s the little things that drive us nuts in daily living.  This is Mexico and sadly littering is a Mexican way of life.  Remember back forty, fifty years ago when the government first started educating us to not be  “litter bugs”?  Mexico skipped all that.  They had bigger problems then but now litter is one of the bigger problems, especially with regard to tourism, but they are completely oblivious to it.  They have absolutely no idea that this keeps people from coming back to their otherwise beautiful country.

The heat!  Okay, a week or two of plus 35 temperatures with high humidity can be a novelty.  Two months was too long for this well-upholstered northerner.  One gets tired of constantly being soaking wet with perspiration from the slightest exertion.  This February was quite a bit warmer than usual for the time of year there but I sure wouldn’t want to experience Merida in May which is the usual hottest month.

Yucatecan cuisine, like Cuban, is not one of the world’s great eating experiences.  They have a few specialties which are okay to try and yummy to Yucatecans but which I tired of very quickly.  If I NEVER see a corn tortilla again it will be too soon.  Fortunately, their cuisine is quite distinct from the western/northern Mexican and Texmex food we all know and love so I may be able to look sideways at a flour tortilla again someday.  The cuisine is quite bland but always served with a tiny dish of habanera pepper sauce which is ungodly hot.  Very tricky.  On the plus side, Neil and I both lost six pounds while we were there which we attribute to all the walking and sweating albeit other than fruit and the occasional sorbet there was not much in the way of desserts.

So in addition to the litter, the heat and the food, what were the worst aspects of the trip to Merida?

1.       Carnaval – preceding Ash Wednesday may be an interesting spectacle in some Caribbean locales but in Merida it is a week of snarled traffic, confusion and mega litter.  The centre of the city is taken over by grandstands to accommodate viewing of parade that is essential the same every single day and dozens of beer, food and trinket tents.  No one I talked to likes Carnaval and it would be best moved outside the city for those who do.
2.       Collectivos are vans that transport up to twelve people very inexpensively to and from the city as well as in outlying areas. They are one way to get around if you do not have a car but I tired of the long waits, the noise and the crowding very quickly.  Plus I sensed some resentment on the part of the locals having to share their only mode of transport with us gringos who have other options.
3.       La Pigua is a highly rated seafood restaurant in both Merida and Campeche.  We dined at the latter and were very disappointed.  The service was poor, the decor/atmosphere was nonexistent and the food was poor, i.e. excessively salty and/or overcooked.  And expensive!
4.       Also in Campeche the Miramar restaurant across the street from our hotel was just plain horrible.  Over priced skimpy portions of poor food and worse service.
5.       Campeche overall was a bit of a disappointment.  It was the first seaport in the Yucatan but had such a bad time with pirates that the powers that were scouted inland and founded Merida.  It is now a World Heritage site which has meant considerable restoration of its beautiful colonial buildings.  (Merida could greatly benefit from that designation as well.)  The vestiges of the huge wall that once fortified the city are also interesting but there is really not much else to see and I found it very disappointing to see how much land between the old wall and the ocean has been “reclaimed” from the sea.  It completely detracts from imagining the old city as it once was despite the fancy new malacon (seawalk).  The best thing about Campeche other than the buildings and wall is a small Gelateria.  Best gelato I have ever had!
6.       The motorboat tours to see the flamingos at Celestun.  The water was too shallow for the boats to get close enough this year but that didn’t prevent them from trying.  Too noisey and inefficient for good bird viewing.  Highly recommend the Manglares de Dzinitún ecotour instead where you are poled in by canoe.
7.       Port city of Progreso about twenty miles north of Merida and the nearby fishing villages boast beautiful white sand beaches on the Gulf of Mexico.  During the winter months they are very quiet and accommodation is very affordable however you really need a vehicle to see the area with any degree of convenience.  We used collectivos but a car would have made the experience more enjoyable.
8.    The noise.  Urban Mexico is noisy and the high ceilings and concrete walled houses with no insulation situated right on the street do nothing to abate the problem.

As you can see the pros far outweigh the cons.  Merida and the whole Yucatan is a wonderful destination for people who want to experience a distinct culture in a safe and affordable environment.  

Under the Fan in the Yucatan: Seeing the sights

In addition to the colonial beauty of Merida, the two major attractions of Yucatan state are the Mayan ruins and the haciendas.

The Mayans were the indigenous people of this whole area of Mesoamerica from the Yucatan south to Guatemala for over three thousand years.  Mayan ruins and artifacts are everywhere like arrowheads, hammers and buffalo rubbing stones in Saskatchewan.  Because the civilization was very long lived, it was not static and evolved over time.  Not all the famous ruined cities were at their peak at the same time.  e.g. Uxmal declined before Chitchen Itza rose in prominence and Mayapan was the last great city state before the Spanish happened along to make the Mayan's lives Hell.

Ruins are pretty subjective even amongst scholars.  While Chitzen Itza is probably the most well-known it is overrun with tourists and in a dry open inhospitable area as I recall.  Tulum is beautiful set against the Caribbean as it is but otherwise is not terribly significant I understand.  [Tangent: Tulum was the only major Mayan city built near the ocean.  Why?  All over the world, people have been building cities on the sea of millenia.  Did they have some premonition that their conquerors would arrive by sea?  Fat lot of good it did them being inland anyway.  Interesting factoid:  The Mayan could hear and smell the Spanish conquistadores coming long before they saw them.  Tangent 2:  Body odor is not an issue with these folks which is especially fortuitous in a packed little collectivo with no a/c with this heat.  Which is probably more than can be said for the visiting gringos.]

I found Uxmal to be a more aesthetically appealing place than CI.  It is spread over a large area and much more green and "jungley" than Chitzen Itza. Some of the vistas are amazing.  The buildings have a very attractive quilt-like design.  Apparently Uxmal is more Mayan than Chitzen Itza which is Mayan-Toltec I believe.  There are numerous other ruins large and small in the Merida area but Uxmal and a visit to the Anthropology Museum were enough for us.  The museum is housed in the sumptuous Canton Palace on Paseo de Montejo with the top floor devoted to displays related to the building of the house and the Canton Family. 

If there is anything more confusing than Mexican history it is Mayan mythology/religion.  Try to keep all those gods straight at your peril.  Except Chaac, the rain god, who seems to be everybody's favorite.

The Haciendas are more recent history and were much more relevant to me and what I see what one sees around them here in Merida.  After the stinky Spanish finally subjected the poor Mayans (it took them two generations), they divided up the Yucatan into vast parcels of land amongst the conquistadores, cronies, flunkies and whoever else was deemed a worthy son of Spain.  The haciendas were originally operated as feudal style cattle ranches.  However, in the mid-nineteenth century those ingrate Mayans started acting up and revolting against their patrons (prounounced pay TRRROOOON). This was known at the Caste Wars which went on for years and never came to any real conclusion.  Things were getting too hot for the patrons in the south and west so they moved more into the interior of the Yucatan which was not quite as hospitable for farming. 

This is where the henequen agave comes in or as the writer for Lonely Planet calls it "one spikey sonofabitch of a plant".  The Mayan have used the henequen fibre for millenia to make twine, hammocks, baskets, sandals, you name it.  It took the Europeans THREE HUNDRED YEARS (duh!) to twig to the idea that maybe they could use it to make rope for the gazillion ships that plied the world's waterways.  The haciendas started planting the millions of acres of henequen agave that was soon known as "Green Gold".  The plants needed little water or fertilizer and the same Mayan slave labor planted, harvested and processed this new crop.

The countryside outside of Merida is dotted with the remnants of thousands of haciendas, a few restored as private homes or hotels but most in ruin. Beautiful arched gates, usually Moorish style, and smoke stacks for the long-silent steam engines are the sign of a former hacienda.  Often they are still surrounded by a small town where descendants of the hacienda workers still live.

We visited the only “working” hacienda in the Yucatan which is now called Sotuta de Peon.  It was one of several haciendas owned by the wealthy Peon family.  (Note ironic name – peon means peasant in Spanish).  The hacienda was purchased from the Peons in 1985 by a Mexican-born German who spent over twenty years (and a lot of cash) restoring the hacienda to working condition (albeit very limited).  The house, which was always just the country home of the patron who would have had his main residence in the city, is beautifully restored and furnished as well.  The tour includes demonstrations in the steps of cultivating, harvesting and processing henequen fibre.  Visitors travel out to the fields through acres of henequen agave and visit a Mayan workers “home” hosted by a delightful octogenarian former field worker.  The tour also includes a swim in a lovely cenote.  ("See No tay".  Underground pool) and lunch.

The other must-see hacienda in the area is Hacienda Yaxcopoil also south of Merida. It was a huge holding of 22,000 acres in its day.  The grounds are still beautiful and the house is still furnished in decayed splendor and the machine buildings are still accessible. This hacienda has without a doubt the most gorgeous “machine shop” I have ever seen with stone carvings of the four seasons above the doorways. Here also former hacienda employees are now tour guides of the ruins. Large haciendas like Yaxcopoil had their own store, hospital and school and some of these are still in use by villagers there.

As I mentioned in earlier posts, the glory days of "Green Gold" in the Yucatan ended with the land reforms of the 1930s when the large haciendas were divided up with no one being allowed to own more than 300 acres of land (a far cry from Yaxcopoil's once 22,000) and the  invention of nylon during the second world war.  Today Brazil, Tanzania and Kenya supply the market for henequen which is enjoying a bit of a come back because of the demand for natural fibres.  The Yucatan's role is now only as the historical setting for interesting industry that made a few people fabulously wealthy.