Costa Rica and travelling through Central America: 9: Mexico

Unfortunately I haven't been able to update recently since we've been moving around a bit too much! At the moment we are in Tulum, on the Caribbean coast of Mexico.

Since Guatemala, this is what we've done:

San Cristobal de las Casas

This is a really nice colonial town which was sort of similar to Antigua in Guatemala and Granada in Nicaragua. The town was perhaps the nicest of the three, although also the most expensive! Refreshingly, due to the altitude the weather was lovely, in fact a bit chilly at times.

We spent most of our time looking around town, exploring the market, and seeing the sites, including the cathedral and the church of Santo Domingo. We also visited the amber museum which was pretty interesting - did you know that real amber is very light (in weight) and never cold?

Street in San Cristobal

Mexican skeleton drinking tequila

View from above of San Cristobal

After a couple of days enjoying the town, we moved on to:

Palenque

Palenque is the site of some pretty important Mayan ruins, and according to trusty wikipedia: "By 2005, the discovered area covered up to 2.5 km² (1 sq mi), but it is estimated that less than 10% of the total area of the city is explored, leaving more than a thousand structures still covered by jungle."

This is pretty amazing considering how many ruins we saw! The ruins involved a main temple, the Temple of the Inscriptions, where K'inich Janaab' Pakal (a great Mayan King) was buried in a huge tomb. Unfortunately we were not allowed inside, but the temple itself was pretty impressive, as were all the other temples; Johnny of course took it upon himself to climb up each and every one of them.

We camped and had a bonfire near Palenque

Temple of the Inscriptions at Palenque

Chichen Itzá

After Palenque, we moved on to a more well-known Mayan site, Chichen Itzá, which also happens to be one of the seven modern wonders of the world. Actually, we visited it today, so this has been a few full days of Mayan ruins!

The 'Castillo', which is the famous pyramid of Chichen Itzá that you may have seen pictures of, was in the middle of the site, with lots of other smaller temples and things around it. The castillo was pretty amazing, very much intact considering how old it is.

Chichen Itzá certainly had something about it, but I think I preferred walking around the ruins of Palenque, where you could get up a lot closer to the ruins (and climb them if you wished). Tomorrow we should be visiting Tulum, so more Mayan ruins to come!