Took the bus to Tikal this morning. What an amazing place. Lot’s of Mayan buildings along with plenty of wildlife. Saw a lot of spider monkeys in the trees but they move fast and stay high up so it was hard getting a picture.

Not sure if I’m going to stay here tomorrow or not. My legs are a little sore from all the climbing today. I also need to find someone to fix the zipper on my new shorts. Remind me never to buy clothes in Belize again.

Worst rest days ever. I don’t know what I have or who I got it from but I think I’ve almost kicked this thing. What started out as a headache has worked its way down my poor body in a rather systematic manner: headache, runny nose, sore throat, coughing and then stomach problems (won’t go into details). I tried walking around today to get some fresh air and didn’t do too bad. There’s a church at the top of a huge hill that I wanted to see but I gave up half way. Didn’t have the energy for it.

Lot’s of people out enjoying the nice weather. The market was crazy. Not a good place for tall people though. Glad I was wearing my bike helmet. Just kidding.

There are a lot of people struggling to survive here which is sobering when you’re strolling around with a nice camera and a full stomach. There was a guy sitting in one of the aisles at the market with his leg extended out. He had a really bad case of elephantiasis on it and I doubt he could even walk. The indigenous people, mostly of Mayan descent, have tonnes of sidewalk booths set up where they sell everything from blankets to jewelry. There are just so many you have to wonder if entire days go by where they don’t sell anything.

The hippy/dreadlocks people here are a bit wacko. I can’t tell where they’re from but I don’t think it’s the States. One pair was playing a set of drums outside a church while a hippy girl spun around some rope or something. Really? It seems a bit tacky to me to travel to a developing country and try to hit people up for loose change so you can keep traveling the world. Maybe its just me though. Besides the hippies the other foreigners here, of which there are quite a few, seem to stay pretty low key.

Tourism has definitely left its mark on the people that live in the main historical area of the city though. For the first time someone made a snide comment when I couldn’t explain in Spanish what I wanted. It was a guy in a bike shop and after spending all of 15 seconds trying to tell him I wanted a bike tube he walked over to get it and muttered “Spanish” under his breath. Fair enough–not speaking the language very well sucks but give me a break. It’s not like I was being demanding about it and it was kind of obvious I’d traveled a long way so there shouldn’t be an expectation that I know every word in the language. If I encountered a foreigner traveler in the States or Canada and they couldn’t speak English it wouldn’t even cross my mind to be anything but helpful. If I was living here totally different story. Of course you never really know what experiences he’s had with people before me so I’m sure that played into it. Pete had a similar experience with some seemingly anti-gringo sentiment and that guy speaks Spanish better then anyone I know. On a positive note, one good thing about this place is that almost no one stares at me (except the ladies). I kind of miss the small towns now.

I also haven’t seen anyone since I got here. I had to bail on seeing Roland/Belinda and Karin/Marten this morning and Pete left this morning and I didn’t get to see him either. If I got any of them sick I’d feel horrible.

02/20 What a difference 2000 feet makes. The wind was still howling today but once I dropped down to 7100 feet it stopped being quite so frigid. I was still pushed around a little but I had a wide shoulder when it was the strongest so it was fine.

Busy day with siteseeing. The road from Chapultepec to here had some of the most amazing scenery I’ve seen so far in Mexico. The Sea of Cortes was pretty cool but when you start throwing massive snow-capped volcanoes at me there’s not much of a comparison. I’ll have to find out the name of the range I was riding by because it has to be huge. I’d guess the highest peak was at least 16,000 feet. Update: the volcano is called Popocatépetl and it’s 17,800 feet. It’s the 2nd highest peak in Mexico.

First stop of the day was the ruins at Xochitecatl. This area, on top of an ancient volcano called Cerro de Xochitecatl, was a ceremonial center and necropolis. The climb to get to the top was fun. I left my bike at the guard shack and went off exploring. The highest structure is the Pyramid of the Flowers. It’s about nine stories tall. The site had another smaller pyramid which was kind of neat because there were no stairs (there are now)–you would have had to walk the around the pyramid as the terraced steps wind up to the top.

Cacaxtla, another set of ruins close by, is supposed to have some nice murals but didn’t feel like climbing another massive hill so I skipped it.

Cholula, my home for the night, is a city right next to the much bigger city of Puebla. The first thing I did was ride over to the main square to see what was causing explosions so loud that they were setting off car alarms. Not sure what everyone was celebrating but there were all these guys dressed up in costumes firing off guns. It looked like they were re-enacting a battle. The noise was from the gunpowder that I watched them cramming into the muzzle. When those guns went off the smoke practically obscured the person shooting it and scared everyone even though you knew what was coming.

Once settled in a motel I walked over to see the real reason I came here: the largest (in volume) pyramid in the world. The Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl hasn’t been excavated so it just looks like a massive hill. It dates back to the 1st century B.C. Up at the top sits the Templo de Nuestra Senora de los Remedios which was built in 1594. The view was pretty impressive. Back at the bottom I walked around the base to see if I could get a tour of the tunnels beneath the pyramid. Nearly three and half miles of tunnels have been excavated. Crazy. The public can only go in about 1000 feet though. I found the place to get tickets to go in but it was closed.

GPX Track