Uxmal

On Day 3 of our trip we went on a tour of some ruins about an hour south of Merida.  Our guide drove us together with11 other  folks from Mexico, France and Canada.  He would was a great multi-tasker driving the van in traffic while talking in Spanish and then English! 

On our way south, we started to see some farms growing most noticeably agave.  Then something we haven’t seen here – hills!  Uxmal sits in a relatively dry hill area of the Yucatan.  There are no rivers, lakes or cenotes.

To provide water for its population of over 30,000 people, 100 cisterns were built to collect the rain water.  When these dried up in a drought, the population would move down the sacbe (road) to the next town in a series of 5 towns total.  Then they would repeat the process.  Each time they came back to Uxmal they would build their buildings higher so that they could be closer to the rain god, Chac.  Ed thought he was the Pope for a while but now he’s switched to Chac.

The huge structures here were built between about 500 and 1000 AD.  Reconstruction of the buildings started in the 1920’s.  Our tour guide’s grandfather was one of the first guides.   

All this is probably way too much info!  What’s important is that we loved our day walking through this site with its raised grassy platforms and looking at pyramids in the distance.  The evening light show was amazing – the buildings lit up both up close and on the surrounding hills together with the brilliant starry skies were magic!  We can definitely understand why it is a World Heritage Site.

Can you see how the people are revering their rain god, Ed?

For the light show, we sat on a raised platform in a quadrangle of buildings and looked out at other buildings lit in the distance.