Bakalar, Quintana Roo

Doesn’t that sound like a nice spot for Winnie ther Poo? Back in Laguna Bakalar but this time Jamie is enjoying it without typhoid. Last time we were here he was suffering from yet undiagnosed typhoid and it was, well, very different. Oh and it was SO hot. I remember laying down with Ellen that night and the sweat just rolling off me. The guy at the campground here will NOT, for any reason whatsoever, allow you to connect to electricity. He is absolutely RABID on the subject. At least this time he is in much better humour.

We spent three balneario-filled days in Villahermosa; no-one but me left the balneario until we left and I only left to get groceries. I’d remembered the route from Palenque (only 150km or so from Villahermosa) as very good road and was terribly surprised this time to find that I’d forgotten that the road from Villahermosa to the Paleneque cutoff to be absolutely awful. MX180 is absolutely The Worst Road Surface in All of Mexico. After all the travel we’ve done in Mexico, I feel rather qualified to make that statement. It took us three hours to go those 150km. Fortunately the next 250km (we were really pushing it that day) went by just as I’d remembered; quite easily. We could have stopped in Escareaga (as Jonna calls it, the armpit of the Yucatan) at a very large Pemex, but we really wanted to get to La Selva, a restaurant just north of the Calakmul turnofff so we could spend the next day at Calakmul. I had been wanting to visit Calakmul ever since we drove by in 2005 and was astounded that this year we were able to manage it. While it is only 60km from the main road, it is a very narrow and slow moving road; we managed only 30km/hr the last 40km in the park.

Calakmul turned out to be even better than we’d anticipated. The ruins were fantabulous, the stellea were amazing (and we’d not anticipated those), the SPIDER MONKEYS watched us watching them during their dinner and we were accompanied by group after group of amazing colors of birds. Calakmul was a rival to Tikal and one of the largest city-states in its time. Jamie and I have been delving into Maya history and were astounded that we were able to see El Mirador, accesible only by a 2-6 day burro walk, from the top of Structure II at Calakmul. At the site, we were only some 30km from the border with Guatemala. Calakmul was discovered by a man working for the Mexican chicle company and we found many chicle trees; Jamie absolutely HAD to try some of the gum oozing from the tree and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to spit the taste out of his mouth. The ruins have been uncovered on at least one side, but many of the 6500-7000 structures are still unrestored and not one structure has been completely restored. Structure II is supposed to be 50m high and I can’t determine if Coba (which we have been to also) is 55m or not, but at any rate, it is DAMN high. You are completely above the treetops and with time and binoculars you’d be able to watch the monkeys from above. Simply, there are no words.

We lucked out on the weather; it was warm but not stifling and we had great cloud cover. Great for heat but not so good for pictures. Almost all the pictures I took of the spider monkeys were silouhette but at least we saw them. I have to say that I am so glad the kids got to see monkeys in the wild instead of a zoo. I have never taken them to a zoo and refuse to patronize them; just one of my many idiosyncracies (why can’t spell check simply FIX the damn word instead of telling me it is wrong???) and another penny in the therapy jar. I am somewhat pleased that their first? exposure to monkeys is in the wild. Though the girls’ first exposure was probably via “Dora the Explorer”. Sigh.

We would have stayed longer at La Selva; the duena was a fountain of stories of the area and other guests, made lovely hammocks, tortillas (a mano) to DIE for, and everything she cooked the kids RAVED over. For the first time, however, we’re in a bit of a crunch to get to PaaMul as my folks are heading there and the kids have friends (they’ve never met) waiting for them to play with. So, off we headed from La Selva after a luxurious breakfast of pancakes and eggs (no bread for days as no electricity for many days now) to Laguna Bakalar.

The roads from Calakmul weren’t the best and I kept hearing a squeak that sounded new and different. I got Jamie to listen and I wondered if maybe it wasn’t wild parakeets or something as it seemed quite intermittant. We stopped on the highway (no place to pull over pretty much ANYWHERE in Mexico) and checked the rig out and couldn’t find anything out of place, so I kept the speed down, kept trying to figure it out and avoid the monsterous gaping holes of which the carretera had been constructed. When we approached the small town of Xpuhil, an hour or so out of Calakmul, I drove even slower than normal through town, trying to see if I could catch the noise and heard a new one. A soft swishing of something dragging. We pulled over and found that two pieces of our trailer suspension had failed terribly and the leaf springs on one side were now with absolutely no support. Almost immediately, the second Green Angel we’ve ever seen this year in all of Mexico drove by and I flagged him down. He checked out the failure, drove off and got us a welder and accompanied us back to his place of work (while I INCHED over a monsterous tope that I was sure would cause the tires to break through the floor of the slide). The welder was sure he could fix it all, so we headed to a comedor and had 2 large plates of chicken with green sauce, tortillas and rice, a large plate of pork and rice, 2 gigantic (1/2 dinner plate sized) empanadas, six waters, a plate of rice and goodies for Ellen for 87 pesos. The entire town turned out to gawk at the kids and the trailer and then the clouds mercifully appeared and the job was done. We were happy to pay the 400 pesos; I didn’t bargain, I didn’t counter; the guy and 2 assistants worked for a solid hour or more and fashioned two new parts for us and put everything back together and it is still holding, even after another 100km of awful road.

We spent today at the cenote; it is just as refreshing as we left it; the cleanest feeling water in the world, but the mosquitoes have been so ravenous of our flesh that between Bakalar and Calakmul, I’ll not be the least bit surprised if someone doesn’t come down with Malaria.
Tomorrow we head for PaaMul and a visit from Papa and Tata.