Monday 2nd September.
We decided to go and see uxmal today which is a mayan ruin about an hour and a half away from here. We could have gone on a tour but wanted to save money so ended up going on the public bus and doing it ourselves. We were sat near a man who was staying in the same hostel as us who we spoke to for the whole journey, and a little bit through the ruins but he mainly wandered off to explore on his own.
Uxmal was the first set of maya ruins we had seen and they blew me away. You walk up some steps and you're greeted by a massive pyramid of rock with lots of steps leading up (which you can't use), and wonderful detail in the stonework. Its so well preserved that it was easy to imagine how it was all those years ago. I don't know too much about the whole thing because we didn't have a guide, I just know from things I read and overheard. The buildings all date from around 700ad and even before they began restoration works on it it was one of the best preserved sites. There's a ceremonial centre with the pyramid in the centre with carvings of gods. The stone work is just amazing, the amount of detail still there after all these years just makes it hard to imagine how beautiful it all must have looked when it was first done. Its amazing how much of the layout is built out of a knowledge astronomy, thinking to how long ago it was they really were amazingly talented and clever.
It used to be the capital of the region and was well inhabited, but as the maya dynasty expanded Uxmals population dispersed but remained an important location for a long time.
There were loads of massive lizards wandering about the place, and the sun was so so hot that we spent a lot of time finding shade. Probably a main reason why we wernt more tanned when we came back, the sun in these places gets so much that you rarely let it touch your skin after a while.
We finished walking around quite a while before the next bus back was due so we sat around waiting, staying out of the sun. I had my first corndog which looked disgusting but actually tasted quite nice.
On the walk back to the bus you could see the storm making its way in. It was mid afternoon and the rain always starts then. The rain came belting down, it was so much water the roads started flooding a bit in only a matter of minutes. Then came the thunder. The thunder in these places are just beyond imagining really when compared to our thunder back home. Its so so loud, a deep rumbling which makes you feel it vibrating inside your body and sets your adrenaline pumping. We were originally stood under a tree but when that started we found a cement outhouse to find shelter along with a few others waiting for buses.
Once we had got the bus and back to Merida it took forever to get back because the rain was coming down so hard. The bus station was flooding from the water, but because the rain was coming down so hard a lot of people including us just stood to try and wait it out. When there was a slight lull liam and I decided to make a run for it, we ended up getting absolutely drenched just running across the street. We found shelter in a pet store and stood in there for about 20 minutes just watching, Liam also helped the shop keepers get water out of their store. The roads were completely flooded, with people walking in there pushing trolleys around in shin deep water. The cars and buses were causing big waves of water going all over the pavements whenever they came past. In the end we were waiting with no sign of the rain stopping so just made small dashes from shop to shop, to end up getting soaking wet anyway because all the roads were flooded that we had to walk over. A lot of people had taken their shoes off and were just walking around like that, we should have done really to save our shoes but godknows what was floating about in it all.
I cant remember the rest of the evening really, only that it rained a lot and whenever we went out in the evening it involved lots of dashing and jumping around!
