Ruinas de Coba

We’ve been on the road a bit since the last post! Here’s what we’ve been up to.

We took a collectivo down to Tulum, beautiful white ruins of a Pre-Columbian city on a cliff facing the Caribbean Sea. Tulum means walls; there are walls along the sides of the city that don’t face the ocean to protect it from attack. Tulum was a port city. The Maya would take boats along the coast to trade obsidian, a volcanic rock that is so sharp it is still used in eye surgery today.

When we finished our five nights in Playa del Carmen, we rolled our suitcases a half mile up to the collective stand to get a taxi (cheaper there) to Coba, a 90-minute ride. In Coba, we stayed at this beautiful hotel a 10-minute walk to the ruins facing a lake. The hotel looked like it had been a convent or monastery at one time. There were all of these alcoves where you would expect to see a statue of the Virgin Mary and our room had what looked like a holy water font, where you would dip your fingers in to bless yourself like at the entrance to a Catholic church. Right outside our door, there was a beautiful courtyard with a pool, surrounded by flowering bushes and palm trees and orange birds of paradise flowers. We spent a lot of time in the pool – it’s really hot here!

We woke up early to get to Coba (Cōb – ah in Mayan) as soon as it opened to beat the heat and the crowds. We are in the jungle with lots of mosquitos, so we had long pants and sleeves that had been treated with repellant. We hired a guide, who was born in Coba and spoke the Mayan language and brought the buildings to life with the stories of how things were built and what life was like there. Also, he gave us warnings not to touch the poisonous trees. Helpful. 😊

Many of the buildings at Coba were built in 500 – 900 AD. (In Europe, this was after the fall of the Roman Empire, sometimes called the “Dark Ages.”) Some of the pyramids were built over a period of 300 years! Our guide explained that each layer is 52 years, the average life span then. Back then, the pyramids were covered in limestone plaster and painted red. The red paint was made from ladybugs, which they farmed. It was great to be there in the morning – we could see how the pyramids were built facing east and west as the sun rose over the top of the first pyramid we saw.

The limestone to build the pyramids was carried by laborers walking and carrying the stone. Horses weren’t on the continent until the Spanish came (a thousand years later in the 1500s). The Maya did not use the wheel, and there are a lot of different reported reasons for this. Wheels existed then and can be found in Toltec and Aztec toys, but they weren’t used for labor or transport.  Our guide said that the Maya did not use wheels because circles are sacred because they are the shape of the sun and the moon; they did not touch circles or use them for labor because that would be disrespectful to the gods. Some articles say that the wheel just isn’t needed – they had plenty of people to move blocks, no horses to pull carts on wheels, and the jungle terrain wasn’t a great place for wheels. Documentaries have also said that labor in Maya culture was what made something special, which is a thought that you see in our own world today – I just crocheted my sister a baby blanket instead of buying one off of Etsy (which would probably be prettier with fewer mistakes) because it’s the labor that makes it special. (Something to think about in this world with AI!)

In Coba, the pyramids were not built by slaves. There were no slaves in Coba. They were laborers who cared the stone on their back, with a strap around their head. Our guide showed us how the strap impacted the workers skeleton – they had hunched backs and their skulls were round. He showed us a picture of a skull of a king. When they are babies, the Maya royalty have their heads pressed by a board to elongate their skull and distinguish them from others, so it this way the archaeologists could tell if the bones belong to a king. (Again, biology telling us about history!) He showed us a picture of how they strapped in the baby.

 

I know that this seems kind of strange to us (strapping a baby in just for a cosmetic affect!) but doctors today pester parents about not letting their babies get a flat back head, and when I asked if it mattered, the doctor said that flat heads were just a cosmetic concern. We don't strap babies down, but we put them in these weird helmets if they start to get a flat head so they can have rounder heads…. (see the TV show Jane Chapter 28 for a helmet example :P). 

K and I rode in a “Maya limo” to the back pyramids while M and Otto, our guide, took a bike. The Maya limo is a kind of reverse tricycle, with a bench for two people to ride in the front and the biker pedaling behind us. It was beautiful to be zooming through the jungle. There were two ball courts, one with the hoops still perfectly intact. I’ve seen models in museums, but it is something else entirely to be able to stand in the middle of an actual court and imagine the players.

The ball game, pok-a-tok (an onomatopoeia like ping pong), is not really a game. It is not for fun or entertainment; it is ceremonial. It was used to decide disputes or for religious reasons. I always thought that it was a combination of basketball and soccer, from what I read in museums, but it’s very different. Like soccer, you can’t touch the ball with your hands (or your feet) because circles are sacred; you can only bounce the ball with your shoulder or your knee or your hip. And like basketball, you are trying to get the ball through the hoop. But each side stays on their own side. They play on the slanted surface. Only if the ball goes down in the middle can the other team go get it. Our guide said they only play until one point is scored; then the game ends. In many cities, the winning team is sacrificed to the gods. (You don’t sacrifice the losers – the gods don’t want losers, Otto said.) But in Coba, they did not do human sacrifice. They did “auto-sacrifice,” you would cut your finger or your hand to get blood and then burn the blood like incense to send it to the gods. (They sacfice animals, too, he said.) The ball is very heavy, made of rubber from the rubber tree. (We saw a video – a really long cooking process.) So, it is necessary to wear protective gear; he showed us a picture of the uniform, which included a turtle shell for knee pads. We saw a small demonstration in Playa del Carmen; we’re hoping to watch a fuller demonstration in Merida.

There was no internet-available schedule of buses from Coba to Merida, just a general sense that the buses comes up and down the road we came in on, according to the hotel staff. I went to the place where we’d had breakfast to ask (in the little Spanish I’ve learned on the free library app over the last year) where the bus comes, which side of the road to wait on, what time it comes – and I understood! The bus stopped around 12:00 at the restaurant (actually more like 12:30) and it would say “Merida” or “Valladolid” on the top; we should be careful not to get on a bus back to Playa. So we waited for two hours, nursing our milkshakes, and waved down the bus when it came. It was a 2+ hour ride, mostly through jungle and really small towns that had craft stands and short cities. It reminded me of China with the make shift buildings and stalls and open air restaurants.

We have a really cool place in Merida – I’ll write more about Merida soon!