Its pishing down….still, the wind has dropped which is great, but the rain is falling in sheets from the sky. This is our only window to visit the Coba jungle ruins and the weather is only supposed to get worse as the day progresses.
Coba is just under an hours drive from Tulum…we passed through small towns waking up to another wet day. Rosie is getting good at taking photos out of the car window. Every roadside stall is set up next to a ‘toble’. This is a speed bump, when you enter villages or small towns the tobles are built into the road every 100 meters, works well in slowing the traffic and you have to ever so slowly creep over them as they are not all built the same. Strategically its the perfect place for a roadside stall…you have to slow down and it gives you time to case out what they are selling. This also gives Rosie plenty of time with window wound down, to point and shoot.
Locals were setting up their juice stands and starting the charcoal BBQs for their roadside slow cooked chicken to be ready for lunch.
Souvenir shops were taking down the blankets that acted as walls to keep out the rain and protect stock overnight.. Dogs roamed the streets and a lot of people were just sitting in their doorways watching the world go by.
Rosie was excited to be going to Coba, it seemed like an intrepid destination after the manicured pathways of Tulum yesterday. Set in a jungle, surrounded by the trees, roots and undergrowth that have slowly taken over this citadel since the day the Mayans left sounded so exciting.
We pull into the parking lot, its 0800am, we are the first people there, The Operator reckons the sky is getting lighter, he suggests we wait in the car abit to see if the rain is going to ease before we venture forth. Thunder and lightening start rumbling in the distance….well, its now or never, things are not going to get any better.
Lathered in mosquito repellent, huddled in rain coats, the outside temp is still 26c and humid, ‘things’ are buzzing past Rosies ears and peripherally some seem quite big. This is going to be an intrepid journey.
We are the first through the doors today and still the only car in the carpark….no one else is as silly as us to venture forth in this weather. The site is about three kilometres square and it is recommended that you hire a bike to cover the ground quickly….Rosie and The Operator do not want to dally so this was the plan. The bike rental place hasn’t opened yet….serious!
We are on Mexican time…and the inclement weather makes it worse….but wait, a man is approaching us with a pedal cart. He is one of two guys sitting on his bike with a big umbrella over the top. His name is Jesus and he offers to peddle us around the site for $125pesos…$8.70….his sales pitch is in perfect English. ‘Come and sit under my umbrella and let me take you where you need to go, you will stay nice and dry and I will get you there quick’. Can’t argue with that!
Rosie had already shaken his hand and was making herself comfortable under the big red umbrella. The Operator is always abit reluctant in these situations as he dosnt like to be chauffeured around manually….he would have been in his element if Jesus was sitting by me and he was peddling the bike…but on he boarded.
Jesus was right, it was so nice and dry as we set off down down the flooded limechip path to whatever awaited us. Other paths forked off the main route, Rosie and The Operator would have been lost in the rain on rented bikes if we had gone our own way. Like all of the other sites, there are no clear signage, minimal information and certainly no lovely coloured brochure outlining anything. Lucky for us we had Jesus.
A crash of thunder and lightening roared directly over heads and the rain intensified as we came up to our first ruin, it was raining so hard we could only see ten feet in front of us…how can we be this unlucky with the weather? But wait, with that wee weather bomb came the wind….what was a lovely cart ride under our red umbrella which had left us so nice and dry, within minutes we were saturated with the wind driving the rain directly at us. ‘Do you want to stop here? yelled Jesus over the wind. No, said Rosie, keep peddling, we will go to the farthest point of the complex and then work our way back, hopefully the weather will ease.
It didn’t, we arrived at the main acropolis of Coba, it was majestic and soared steeply up into the grey sky. You could climb this pyramid to the top and The Operator was not going to pass this opportunity up, no matter whatever the weather. Rosie said he was mad, Rosie reminded him that three tourists had died falling from this pyramid as they descended…and you can bet they didn’t climb it in the middle of a hurricane.
Like a monkey The Operator scrambled to the top of the 42 metre pyramid in under two minutes. He posed on the top for Rosie and took a couple of pictures from the top himself. The way down looks so treacherously steep from the top, The Operator said ‘it was’ and super slippery. He said all you could see directly in front of this pyramid in any direction to the hazy horizon is green jungle and this clearing in front of it where Rosie nervously waited below as The Operator descended at a more sedate rate.
Whilst The Operator was climbing the pyramid, Rosie was left on her own at the foot of it. The grey ancient slab reared up over head into the murky sky. The mist was starting to descend and we were surrounded by dripping green jungle. The patter of the rain and howl of the wind was loud….but so was the noises of the jungle, whoops and clicks and cackles. It was toatally alive out there and so was this piece of ancient stone, it felt warm to the touch and marbley smooth. On my own down there looking up to the top of this ancient monument it felt quite electrifying and humbling to be standing in the shadow of something so old….it also felt a little ominous in this setting….thank goodness, The Operator is nearly at the bottom…..
Safely on the ground, standing in the rivelets of mud and water it was so amazing that we were here…all on our own having this incredible place to ourselves. The Operator said that he could hardly stand straight on the top because of the wind and rain….the photographs don’t do the conditions justice at all, it dosent even look like it is raining…believe me Rosie is not exaggerating how bad it was.
Jesus was patiently waiting for us to finish up, further back, under a stand of trees, we sat down, soaked to the skin as he took us to the other sites.
Coba means ‘waters stirred by the wind’ which is an appropriate Mayan name as the site is surrounded by two large lagoons. It was colonised about 500ad and its heyday too was around the 11th – 15th century when up to 40, 000 people lived on this site. Coba was the central hub of the area where up to 50 roads left from its main pyramid to other sites in the Yucatan. The roads were a series of elevated stone and plaster causeways which radiate out, the longest being 100 kilometers. These roads were sacred and named by the Mayan ‘White Roads’. Agriculture was the mainstay of this community and the people of Coba traded in food staples and water giving it a lot of power. Nobody knows why this site as well as others were abandoned and left for the jungle to swallow.
This site was first rediscovered however in the 1930s, it was too remote and access too difficult to do anything more as there were no roads at the time. In the 1940s a team of archaeologists mapped the site and once again it was left as there was no access. The first road was pushed through the jungle in 1972 and then settlements and excavations started. In the 1980s the road was tarmacked to Tulum and the first bus service started. This was the start of tourism to this site.
Below is a infamous Mayan Ball Court, it is a small one, only a two man court. The object is to get the ball through the hoop at the top of the sloping wall. There is one hoop, in the middle on each side. The person who gets the ball through first…lives…great incentive to be a winner in this culture. Some games were played with feet only, you could only kick the ball and some were played with the use of a stick and you had to hit the ball. At the head of the court, in the middle you can see a round piece of metal….it is protecting the carved skull set into the ground at the head of the court….mwhaaaaa.
Rosie cannot believe how new it is to the world after lying swallowed by the jungle and forgotten for so long. She was buzzing after that trip. It didn’t matter that Rosie and The Operator were sitting on towels in the car with the aircon cranked, the heat on high totally saturated to the skin with a foggy window all the way home.
Rosie was looking forward to a hot shower, a change of clothes and a beauty free breakfast with lashings of coffee back at the hotel. Breakfast finished at 1100am and we were back from our jungle adventure at 1015am because of our early start and lack of dallying in the rain, perfect timing.
OMG…. When we opened the door to our room….it was completely flooded, again….worse than last time. Drips were also plopping onto the floor from the ceiling, the thatch had been breached! As we got changed out of our wet clothes in our wet room….The Operator said, ‘look a crab has just scuttled into the bathroom’. Rubbish Rosie countered, we crept to the door of the bathroom and looked into it. Sure enough a tiny crab was making its way across the floor….
Well, the Hotel was really nice about our situation, we really didn’t want to stay one more night so they refunded us, we packed our bags, had one last fantastic breakfast and said good bye to our tragic beach holiday.
Before we drove away, Rosie and The Operator stood in the ankle deep water on the floor of their room and gazed out toward the grey Caribbean and sighed. Then our eyes clamped on the tragic sight of the four guys with their wheelbarrows on the tide line.
Everyday these guys have been out there in the rain….shoveling seaweed into their wheelbarrows, walking it across the road from the hotel and dumping it in the jungle behind the hotel car park. They cart barrow after barrow and it dosent even make a dent….tide and time stop for no man….its like having a job in one of the seven circles of hell….and you are not even dead yet. Poor buggars.
We started our drive two hours inland to our destination, Valladolid. Rosie is so glad we stayed an extra night in this gem of a town, it is amazing. We cannot wait to show you around.
