There are a lot of cenotes in the Yucatan peninsula, and after our first experience we knew we wanted to visit more, but we were not so interested in sharing cenotes with bus loads of cruise ship people. We decided to visit the lesser known, but still touristy, Three Cenotes of Cuzama.
We headed back to the coast for a couple of days of beach time, staying at a place called Balenario Zac-Ha. There were flush toilets and outdoor showers, and we had the place almost to ourselves, save for when a bus of cruise ship people came in for a few hours. The beach was not perfect, there was a lot of sea grass washed up on the beach and a fair bit of plastic litter, but our camping spot was awesome…..We read, we lay in the hammock, we walked on the beach…
Just 45 or so kilometres from Uxmal is a small cenote on private land owned by a local family. I had read that for a small fee you could camp there and enjoy the cenote.
For those that may be unfamiliar with cenotes, here is the official definition that I found on line (thank you wikipedia):
Uxmal, an archeological zone in the state of Campeche, allows trucks to overnight in a grassy field near the main entrance of the ruins for a fee of 131 pesos per night, not 130, not 135…131 pesos. Not sure how they came up with the number, but that is the price, less than $10 Canadian.
Campeche is the capital city of the Mexican state by the same name. The city was founded by the Spanish in the 1500’s on top of an existing Maya village, but they kept getting attacked by pirates and buccaneers (familiar names like Francis Drake, Henry Morgan and Jean Lafitte are just a few of the sea captains and privateers who attacked the city) so in the late 1600’s they built a wall to surround the city. Much of the original wall is still intact, and the rest has been restored.
The closer we got to Palenque, the more roadside vendors we saw. Every time there was a tope in a small town forcing the truck to almost come to a stop, we were approached by locals trying to sell oranges, nuts, dried bananas, coconut water, etc. At one point several small children jumped onto our running boards trying to sell us food items, and when we said “No, gracious”, they asked for pesos instead. Derek tried his tactic of chatting them up, which we have found often distracts them from trying to get something from us, but they were pretty insistent that we should give them some money. All the while they hung from windows on the running boards in the middle of the highway. We, generally, don’t give kids money. Others ,wiser than us, have told us that it promotes a begging society and discourages them from going to school. So, eventually, Derek had to start inching the truck ahead to get the kids to let go of our truck…it felt yucky, neither of us liked having to do that, but it was the only way we could figure out how to get them off of our running boards.
The Usumacinta River forms part of the border between Guatemala and Mexico. Yaxchilan is a ruin along the river that you can only get to by boat from the Mexican border town of Frontera Corozal.
The road to Guacamaya took us through some of the most spectacular jungle we have ever driven through. The wide valley below us was cultivated, every inch covered in a different colour of green. Above us the cliffs became almost vertical but were dripping with an astounding variety of vegetation…palms, vines, plants with leaves the size of beach umbrellas… At one point I looked below us to see a scarlet macaw soaring, silhouetted against the vibrant green of the valley below. It was breath taking. And we only have theses pictures, as we had an epic dash cam fail that day…very disappointed. I didn’t take photos in the most pristine places we drove through, foolishly relying on the dash cam, so these photos really do not do it justice, but it gives you a bit of an idea of what we were seeing.
We headed along a highway, toward the border of Mexico and Guatemala, to Parques Nacional de Lagunas de Montebello. There are a series of lakes here. On a sunny day each lake has its own remarkable shade of blue or green, sometimes both. But when we arrived, it was raining, so we made our way to where we were going to camp for the night and thought we would drive to visit the various lakes the next day.
We stayed a night in the small town of Punta Arista to break up the drive into the state of Chiapas. Someone had recommended a campground called Jose’s, so we had checked in to the campground and cabanas. The owners’ were nice and welcoming but the campground had probably seen better days…maybe it had been hit hard by recent tropical storms? There was quite a bit of debris everywhere, many of the brick grilling stations were beat up and broken down and the cabins didn’t even come close to enticing us out of our little camper for the evening. The showers and toilets were however well maintained and clean.