Letter from a Lost World
Did the ancient Mayans have a word for "déjà vu"?
Dear Friends in Southwest New Mexico:
Having a wonderful time, wish you were here. Well, actually, by the time you read this, we won't be here anymore, either; we'll be back there—that is, home in New Mexico. And, truth be told, if you were all here—the humid, jungle-y ruins of the one-time Mayan empire, in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula and Belize—especially all at once, it would feel mighty crowded and none of us would be having such a wonderful time.
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The author at Chacchoben: What, no souvenirs? |
Not that there isn't plenty of empty country down here, especially between the newly hatched tourist town of Costa Maya and the first Mayan ruins we toured, at Chacchoben. We spent part of our "spring break" this year—though it wasn't technically spring yet—along the fringes of Yucatan and Central America, with two tours of Mayan ruins the centerpiece of the trip.
Chacchoben turned out to be a nearly two-hour bus ride from the bustling souvenir shops and beer-soaked beach of Costa Maya. We passed the square white skeletons of condos under construction, Costa Maya's first "four-star" hotel and the area's first (and so far only) gas station, all duly narrated by our guide using the microphone on the bus. We passed a checkpoint guarded by armed Mexican soldiers, on the lookout for illegal border crossers from nearby Honduras. The irony hung heavy in the humid air as we jounced away.
Then civilization gave way to a long, flat stretch of gray highway and scrubby vegetation. We went miles without seeing another vehicle. Our guide, a voluble Mexican woman, filled the time with a running monologue on local history and culture. We heard—not for the last time—the entire saga of the early Spanish conquistador wannabe who "went native," marrying a Mayan woman and undergoing the ritual scarring that Mayans thought made them look like the fiercest animal in these jungles, the panther. When Cortez' men came looking, he fought them side by side with his new Mayan brethren.
No one on board our bus looked ready to skip the return trip to Costa Maya and go native. We fingered our water bottles nervously—just how hot and humid would it get out there?
Very, we learned soon after the bus turned off into thickening jungle and pulled into a clearing beside a small fleet of other buses. Suddenly, we'd gone from an almost completely blank country to a traffic jam. The Mayans may be ancient history, but their appeal to modern tourists is magnetic.
Even here in the Yucatan back country, they understand the universal rule of tourist economics: Make everybody pass through the souvenir shops before seeing or doing anything. To get to the restrooms, desperately needed after a long and bouncy bus ride, we had to run the souvenir gauntlet. We skipped the opportunity to buy giant replica sculptured heads that would never fit in the plane's overhead compartment, various fabrics and T-shirts (I looked for one for our daughter that would read, "My parents went back a millennia and all they brought me was this stupid T-shirt," but no luck) or huge coconuts whose fit on a 21st-century airplane was also dubious. Wisely, we did buy what passed for food—a pack of coconut-flavored cookies—once we realized that we weren't getting lunch. Then, the sweat already beginning to dapple our clothes, we were ready to be led to the ruins—by way of the souvenir stand, of course.
What was hard to grasp about the ruins, especially at Chacchoben, was that we were only seeing the tip of the iceberg. The stone-stepped pyramids we snapped photos of rested atop a platform that, over the centuries, the jungle had utterly appropriated. We were walking atop the Mayan ruins. Now grass covered the ancient platforms and even trees had taken root there.
It was hard not to imagine future tourists walking atop the buried remains of our civilization's temples—Caesar's Palace in Vegas, say—with only the turreted tops poking out above the compacted rubble. ("We can only guess at the function of these structures," the 31st century tour guide would intone. "We believe this portion here was a temple to a goddess known as 'Celine Dion.'")
Our guide's carefully prepared lecture—complete with visual aids she'd made herself—devolved into an interminable question-and-answer session as a few in our group attempted to recast Mayan religion in Christian terms. Did they not realize that the Mayans had no knowledge of Christianity until the Spanish arrived? Rather than rudely shouting this, we wandered off to explore on our own. Soon the guide was left talking to only a single, droning knot of her former flock.
This scene repeated itself as we took a different way back to the souvenir-bedecked entrance, past the rubble that had once been residences of Mayans upscale enough to live in the neighborhood of the temple ("2 rms w/ pyramid view"). Even in the shade afforded by the jungle, we New Mexicans—accustomed now to thinking that anything in double digits is "humid"—felt like we were trapped in a sauna. Eventually we left the group and struck out toward the exit, trusting we wouldn't lose our way and wind up like that long-ago Spaniard who went native.
By the time of our second tour, which began at Belize City, we knew the drill. Long bus ride? Check. Water bottles provided? Yes. Lunch? No.
The ruins at Altun Ha proved more extensive and impressive, and here we actually got to climb narrow steps to the top of a pyramid. (Although authentically ancient-looking, the steps turned out to have been installed just a couple of years ago with funding from the US Agency for International Development.) From the top, we could gaze out on the green plazas and stark stone structures, rough gray shapes against the jungle backdrop, that had once been the core of a city of perhaps 8,000 to 10,000 people.
This guide—Kenny was his name—proved much more adept at marching our group along and cutting off droning questioners. ("I will answer that at the next stop," he'd say, turning to move on.) We learned a number of surprising facts from Kenny, such as that Mayans were not nearly as prone to human sacrifice as their Aztec neighbors to the north. They tended to use the tops of their temples for less fatal, if only slightly less bloody practices involving self-mutilation.
We also learned from Kenny that the Mayans are not really "vanished." Kenny himself turned out to be part Mayan, and significant percentages of the population in the Yucatan and Belize are still Mayan. They tend to live in the more impoverished-looking back-country areas we'd passed through en route to the ruins. Most don't have electricity except for the car batteries used to power their TV sets. When the batteries die, the Mayans tote them on the bus into the city to be recharged. Kenny described the surprise of a Belize political candidate when his Mayan constituents told him they didn't need electricity—just cable TV: "We want CNN!"
There's really no mystery about what happened to the Mayans, Kenny explained
to us. Their empire went out not with a bang, but a whimper. Their leaders
spent too much time and resources in pointless battles with each other and
with neighboring tribes. Their agricultural practices eventually exhausted
the soil. Over time, what had been a mighty civilization simply dwindled
away, its people dispersing from the crumbling cities into the jungle, whose
green tendrils swiftly made it look as if the cities and temples had never
been there at all.
Let's see. . . creeping environmental catastrophe coupled with overweening militarism. This was starting to sound depressingly familiar—and modern. Could Kenny have just been watching CNN?
Kenny also set us straight on the Mayan calendar, which several of the more gullible in our group knew comes to an end in December 2012. Presumably they were already packing for the end of the world. No, no, Kenny reassured them, the Mayans didn't believe the world would end in 2012. That was simply the end of the current cycle of history, and the beginning of the next.
The Mayans, our part-Mayan guide told us as our bus rattled away from the wrecked splendor of Altun Ha, believed that history repeats itself.
We rode in weary silence back toward the city, wondering if perhaps the Mayans were right.
David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure.