The other day I was sitting comfortably by the wood stove when my lovely assistant Rich appeared brandishing a small slip of paper: He flipped it over to show me the back, which bore the cryptic inscription: “Do you remember those guys we met at Hierve el Agua?” Rich prodded. “They told us about a cave we had to check out?” Suddenly it all came back t me. Rich, Gina, and I had been hiking around at Hierve […]
After reading Mayan Backroads, and John Doran’s recommended books, I was inspired to go back into The People’s Guide to Mexico’s original website and update some of the books that Carl and others had reviewed there. For these and other books and articles about the Maya, see The Maya: Recommended Reading While poking around amazon.com, I also found some interesting books that I hadn’t seen before, such as The True history of Chocolate and Maya Achi Marimba Music In Guatemala. If you have read […]
From the shores of Lake Patzcuaro to the cloud forest of Manatatlán to the mines of Zacatecas, Western Mexico: A Traveler’s Treasury takes the armchair traveler on a tour of western Mexico’s treasures, many of them little known. The author, geographer Tony Burton, gets off the beaten path time and time again, and provides detailed historical and cultural information about towns that many guidebook authors only mention in passing: La Barca, San Juan de los Lagos, Tamazula, and Lagos de Moreno, […]
The BBC and Smithsonian.com report that a large Mayan pyramid in Belize was destroyed by a construction company that used the rocks as filler for building a road. The temple was part of Noh Mul, a site that dates back to 350 B.C. and was active in two distinct periods, the late pre-Classic era and then again in the late-Classic era, from A.D. 600-900. Dr John Morris of the Belizean Institute of Archaeology said the temple was obviously a ruin […]
By Jeanine Kitchel The Maya punched numbers and astronomical calculations that could make our heads swim, but nothing had more meaning to them than the movements of the sun. The Dresden Codex, one of three paper-bark books that survived the mass destruction of documents by Spanish zealots in 1562, is filled with numbers—mostly calculations for lunation cycles and Venus tables. And one of the Maya’s main calendars, the haab, is tied to the earth’s rotation cycle. They calculated it at […]
The Mexican Government is predicting that the coming Maya apocalypse will create a tourism boom of 52 million visitors. The state is building a new hotel at Calakmul to deal with the influx, and government-sponsored, Maya-themed tourist events abound. When I first read about the official 2012 fanfare, I thought it sounded like a desperate gimmick, a weak attempt to use a thin premise to bolster flagging tourism. After all, it takes about 30 seconds with Google to discover that the supposed […]
editor’s note: The following article is the work of a new People’s Guide contributor, Jeanine Kitchel, who writes about Mexico, the Maya, and the Yucatan. In this year of the Maya, the obsession has been all about the Maya calendar and the media frenzy over the end date of their Long Count on December 21, 2012. But obscured beneath this much-hyped date is the core of Maya brilliance: their unfailing ability to accurately chronicle, assimilate, and compute the calculations of […]
by Rich Peterson Tourism: Mexico’s Ministry of Tourism projects 52 million visitors in 2012. The Tourism Ministry expects a boost from interest in the end of the 13th b’ak’tun of the Mayan Long Count Calendar. If the Ministry of Tourism is right, that would shatter the previous record of 22.6 million set in 2011. Hopefully nobody’s too disappointed when the world doesn’t come to a cataclysmic end. Energy: Mexico needs it, too. According to Reuters, the United States and Mexico […]