Hey everyone! I am going to write about some land travel we did in Chiapas, Mexico. This was from a long time ago, we are on land now traveling the National Parks now. I figured it would be better to post it now though then never. In Chiapas, we went and did some land travel for a week with our boat friends on Utopia. It was a ton of fun. We saw lots of different Mayan ruins, heard and saw howler monkeys, saw some beautiful waterfalls, walked around to different towns, went on a boat ride through a canyon, and ate lots of tacos, roasted chickens, and quesadillas 😉 Sally posted an overview of the trip more in depth. Today I am going to write about Yaxchilan ruin.
It was a cool day out, a bit cloudy, it seemed like the weather before it rained. Everyone had just eaten sandwiches for lunch. The group was going to go on a boat ride to a ruin. We started walking down a dusty dirt road. We got to the entrance of the national park, and we went to see which tour was the best price. After the adults negotiated the boat ride and a tour there, we all went down to to the beach. All of us got onto the boat, and it started making our way through the river. The water in between the land was separating Guatemala and Mexico, so we had almost been to another country. I used to think that most countries are different, even like their landscapes, but I wouldn’t know by looking then which country was which besides what side of the river it was on.
The river water was a really pretty color, it was like a chalky blue and a beautiful contrast to the deep green of the mountains and jungle. We were on the boat for about 15 minutes. We pulled up to a rocky beach and we all jumped off the boat. We then started walking up the path. As soon as we were at the site , we could see (and hear) howler monkeys jumping around the branches. I even saw a couple of monkeys jumping from one tree to another, when the trees were at least 5 feet apart. We headed to look at the ruins.
We started off looking at the old ball game court. The Maya people used to play a game that is now called the pelota or ball game. They wore stone things that were on their hips and elbows to hit the ball into a hop. It was a bit like basketball, but they hit the ball their hip and elbows. In every village, the game differed a little, but in the ruin we visited they said that they used to play one on one. The ball was made of the sap from the rubber tree. In this town, they used to sacrifice the people that won the game. They believed it was an honor to sacrifice themselves to the gods.(There was a ruin we went to the day before they didn’t sacrifice anyone.) We saw carvings of the ball game players, and they had the amount of stairs that they walked down after they won and were about to die. The Maya people believed that if you walked down the stairs you defeated the devil, and you were going to go up with the gods. After we finished looking at those carvings, we walked up about 200 stairs to get to the main ruin were the royalty lived.
There were lots of carvings in the wall. I think that is so amazing that the carving have stayed for so long, and can tell us how people used to live. There was also a pretty big statue inside. It was headless. Our tour guide told us that the head was in the next door. It was really dark and smelled like earth and wetness as we made our way out of that part of the ruin. We saw the head, it was surprising to me that the statue still looked brand new, even though it was from 200 AD. We learned that a legend said that if anyone ever put the head back onto the statue, the world would end. The poor statue will never get his head back!
What I thought was the coolest thing about it, was that you could imagine what it would be like. There was howling, croaking, and you were surrounded by jungle. We were the only ones there at that site. We walked around some more, and soon, we started heading back to the boat. We started walking back to the hotel. It was a great afternoon!