Chris Eboch

Selected journal entries from my 1992 trip to Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Costa Rica with my friend Nicole.

Mexico City:
Hours of research—reading travel guides, looking at maps, studying the language—can only take you so far. There is a point where traveling takes on a life of its own. If you hate the unknown, this will be frightening. For most people, however, this is where things unexpectedly get exciting, and their best memories are of unplanned events.
We would never have intentionally ordered cow’s feet for lunch, but when the smiling waiter brought a rubbery yellowish strip covered in red sauce, we were pretty sure it wasn’t potatoes. Wait, the menu said “patas,” not “papas.” A quick check in the Spanish-English dictionary revealed the dish’s origins, and left us with the queasy knowledge that we would have to try it to be polite. Good? No. Memorable? You bet.

Piste, Mexico:
We took a taxi six kilometers to the Balankanche Caves….The guide led us through the caves at a rapid pace, turning on lights ahead of us as a recorded tour played. It was a wonderful cavern, easy to see why the Mayans used it for religious purposes.
In the 1950s they found the cave with Mayan ceremonial offerings intact—pots, miniature mortars and pestles, etc., spread out in different spots. We were all very impressed, especially with the main room, where a stalactite three or four feet across reached from ceiling to floor, and carved pots were laid out around it. We also saw a few bats.
To save cab fare we walked the six k. back to Piste. Not so hot now, and fairly pleasant. Most people honked and/or waved as they drove by.

Up early and off to Chichen Itza. Fabulous day. Five hours of walking left us with sore feet and sunburned forearms. We started when the park opened at 8. Climbed the 91 steep steps of the great pyramid. We also got to walk up a narrow damp stairway inside the great pyramid. At the top were two well-preserved statues behind a mesh fence. Saw bats in the observatory, large lizards on the rocks, and multi-colored iridescent birds by the nunnery. The huge ball court had carvings of players still visible in the walls, and the skull temple had rows of carved skulls, three high along the walls.
The cenote, a deep natural well about 100 feet across, was where they threw sacrificial victims. We tried to imagine things as they might have been—the pillars of the market topped with thatch and the stalls filled with small dark people and bright clothes and produce.

In the evening we went to a sound and light show at Chichen. It was kind of silly. Colored lights lit up the pyramids, while voices with heavy accents told a story that was hard to follow.

Palenque, Mexico:
Today to the ruins! We caught an early bus, but the crowds were already there. Nicole and I were feeling energetic, so we set a fast pace. She even ran up the temple steps several times.
Palenque is fairly small, and the excavated ruins are close together. This is the only place we’ve been able to see remains of the roof combs. There are a lot of visible carvings, inside the main rooms at the tops of temples, along walls, and even on steps and the edges of tables. They didn’t destroy the faces here, and a lot of them are well-preserved.
It was hot, but not as bad as we expected, and there were no bugs. We stopped for a snack in one of the small structures. Twenty or 30 Lacandon Indians were selling things near the entrance—mostly bows and arrows of various sizes. Both men and women were dressed in their traditional white tunics and long hair with bangs.
The peaceful Lacandons retreated into the jungle when the Spanish came, so they were never conquered and Christianized. Now about 450 of them—up from 200 a few decades ago—live in two villages, one of which is modernizing. They used to live more spread out, but so much of the forest is gone, destroyed by logging and slash-and-burn agriculture. They’re trying to reforest it now. Their religion says that if you cut a tree without God’s permission, the sky it is holding up will fall down. Their spiritual leader, a man in his 90s, believes God will destroy the world for taking all the trees.
The Lacandons also make a lot of toys out of clay—animals, dolls, etc.—supposedly the same way they did centuries ago. This suggests to me that many of the figurines from lost cultures that are given religious significance by scholars might actually have been toys.
We visited the museum, which had a number of nice carvings, hieroglyphics in clay, and fragments of carved heads and hands. Then we walked through the jungle, looking for monkeys.

San Jose, Costa Rica:
We visited the jade museum downtown. It had many artifacts from the indiginos of Costa Rica—jade, gold, ceramics and metates. The metates (corn-grinding tables) are carved out of volcanic stone. They each have three legs. Unlike those we’ve seen in other countries, here they are sometimes elaborately carved and decorated, probably for ceremonial use. The legs become various creatures, and designs are etched into the undersides.
The jade was often cut in the shape of a knife blade, etched with crude human figures, and worn as a pendant. They also wore carved jade spoons as pendants. The gold jewelry included tiny figures of humans, gods, or animals such as lizards, frogs and turtles.
After lunch we went to the National Museum, in an old fort. Many of the same things as before, plus a few giant fossilized teeth, and cannonball shapes carved out of stone, one to four feet across. These supposedly had astronomical purposes, and are remarkably smooth and perfectly rounded.

Moin, Costa Rica:
The forest along the canal was lush green, with huge beds of floating water plants with purple flowers. We saw several sloths (their Spanish name means lazy), one about ten feet away. The guide hit at the branches around it with a pole, but the sloth just opened its eyes and looked at us.
We saw one monkey (howler?) chained to a tree in someone’s yard, and two more (spider) high in a tree. They quickly moved into the branches when we stopped. There were also white, blue and tiger herons, kingfishers and other birds, iguanas and sardines. We didn’t see any alligators, perhaps because it was cloudy. The turtles are farther along, closer to Tortuguera.