06/03 Took a bus over to Uxmal today. That turned out to be a bit complicated because the motel is on the edge of town so there’s no bus stop or taxi station. I walked into town and finally found a taxi but it was a van and I got the impression that he didn’t want to drive out to the ruins with just me as a passenger. So I headed back to the motel, found out when the next bus would be driving by and flagged it down from the side of the road.

The entry fee to get into the ruins was a bit steep. It was something like $140 pesos which is way more than any other site I’ve visited. It was deathly hot and the tourists, most of which were foreigners, shuffled from one shady spot to the next. I did meet 3 American teachers and we chatted for a bit. They said I should come back for fireworks tonight but I’ll skip that–it was hard enough getting there the first time.

There were lots of cool non-building things to see here. In most of the cave-like rooms accessible to the outside, dozens of tiny birds would fly around like crazy whenever someone walked in. I just stood there kind of like Batman while they flew around my head. Also saw lots of iguanas wandering around. Up in the rafters in one building were 3 birds with the neatest tail feathers (pic below).

Sleep was next to impossible last night so I’m going to be really tired come tomorrow. It’s just way too hot and the ceiling fan is worthless. The wind also died down so there’s not even a breeze.

03/05 Tequila! The manager of the motel hooked me up with a (substantial) shot which I couldn’t say no to because its rude. He and his buddies hanging out in the lobby had a great time ribbing me about staying in the motel (it’s a sex motel but it was only US $9). They thought for sure I had a woman stowed away in my panniers and kept telling the manager to charge me by the hour.

It’s confirmed. There’s definitely something up with teenage girls here. I rode into town and wanted to find a bank so I asked this girl walking on the sidewalk where one was. My ability to ask this question in Spanish has proven successful in the past. She completely ignored me and kept walking. I suspected there was a cultural thing going on at this point so I tried an experiment. I found another girl by a bunch of taxi cabs and asked her where the bank was (even though I could see it a few blocks further down). This one was a little younger and even though she ignored me too she cracked a little smile like she wanted to say something but couldn’t. To complete the experiment I asked an older woman (40’s) where a motel was. She stopped and helped me out without batting an eye. The couple guys I asked when I was trying to find a laundrymat helped out too. I ended up finding it but it was closed which sucks because the heat is causing some ripeness in my clothes.

This town is messing with my pretty good sense of direction because there are two big dried up river beds that people actually use for roads. Even when I was given directions to the laundrymat the guy said follow the river up and turn left. It was a little weird.

Great ride today. I actually rode on reasonably flat land for a while. It was so nice. Hit a military checkpoint and rode through without a problem. Had a great Hawaiian hamburger for lunch which worked out well because of the climbing after that.

And the coolest thing of the day happened after I’d left the town of Xochihuehuetlan (try saying that 3x fast). A guy on a motorcycle rode past me and motioned for me to stop. He handed over a cold bottle of Gatoraide and wished me luck on my trip. How nice was that?

I noticed a couple days ago that the Tekkon external battery I use to charge my laptop/batteries is on its last legs. It won’t hold a charge at all but luckily I can still use it when it’s plugged into an AC outlet to charge my laptop. This sucks because its what my solar panel charged so now that’s useless too. I’ll hang onto it until I can find an AC adapter that my laptop can use and then send my solar panel to my Dad (head’s up Dad ).

GPX Track