ADVENTURES IN EK-BALAAM

Hi there, I have been away for sometime and it's only now that I have a chance to write again since we have been in Cancun enjoying the beautiful aqua-marine waters of the Yucatan Peninsula but whilst we were there, I wanted to take the opportunity to visit more of the fantastic ancient lost cities of the Maya Route and learn a little bit more about this mysterious culture. The photos you can see here, are from the city of Ek-Balaam which is two hours drive from Cancun, it's worth the trip. There was no tour to go there but this has never been an impediment for me to arrange my own trip to go wherever I wish to go, so I hired a taxi for the whole day which came to pick us up at at 9 A.M. at our hotel. The day was very hot but there is nothing like coco-nut water to quench the thirst! Once we were at the entrance of the site, we hired a guide so that he could show us the city of Ek-Balaam. We climbed a steep temple and as I was climbing the stairs, I happened to notice a sea-shell incrusted on the floor of one of the stairs and asked our guide Casimiro about it. He told me that all of the Ek-Balaam site had been at one time submerged underneath the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and it has suddenly been uncovered when a huge meteorite fell in Ixalum, some kilometres away. Once we got to the middle of the pyramid I was fascinated to see a sculpture of a man with large wings behind his back like an angel. I found it very interesting that the very idea of winged men could be also be seen in this other independent culture that had nothing to do with the Greeks, nor the Egyptians or Mesopotamia who first showed in our culture the concept of winged beings but the other fascinating thing to see, was a stucco painting which looked very much like the ones you see in the Egyptian tombs, there was also a figure perched in what looked like a ledge and that similar to the figures you see in Budhist temples in Thailand. Casimiro told me that this was an eunoch who looked after the Royal ladies, he was sitting on a ledge on an enormous square slab, this slab had heads of Tlaloc in each bottom corner and the really dark square doors beyond, represented the gateway to the underworld unfortunatelly I couldn't stay too long up there because I had left Peter down below sitting on a bench underneath the shade of a tree as he had previously stumbled on a stone before the climb and he had scratched both knees and hands. Poor Peter had his trousers reduced to shreds and he looked pitiful but a nice lady had given me wet cloth towels to disinfect his wounds so I didn't want to leave him too long down there. When I got down, I hired a rick-shaw so that he could sit on it and be comfortably driven to see the stellas and the other buildings like the stadium, where the ball game was played. Some of the structures had the unusual arquitecture of triangle shape doors, which didn't come into Europe until much later. Afterwards, we headed down to the city of Valladolid founded by the Spanish Conquistadores. Valladolid is the second largest city of the Yucatan Peninsula after Merida (which we visited last year) where we made a stop over for a lunch, I enjoyed seeing this colonial town with its iron balconies and the cathedral just in front of the park. Once we arrived back at the hotel in Cancun, in the evening Peter had a warm bath and I summoned the hotel nurse to desinfect his wounds properly, in two days time his knees had completely healed. I could do this again.