Mexico - Playa del Carmen - Suntans and Other Aesthetic Deformation

Starting my trip with a beach vacation was an excellent idea. Not that I´ve been too stressed out leading up to this trip, but when isn´t a week of relaxation a good idea?

Armando sold Mick, Carly and I on a week in Playa del Carmen, a town just south of Cancun. Having only Varadero in Cuba to measure it against, Playa comes out the winner. The streets are impeccably clean (as is the beach), there are no touts while you´re sunbathing, and there are way more places to stroll around and find a snack.

Now I´m not usually a lounge-on-the-beach-and-tan kind of gal, but with enough applications of sunscreen and enough layers of clothing, I´m starting to see the appeal. Mick and Armando scoff at how precautious I am about getting a sunburn, but Carly knows better (see Varadero, 2006).

Strangely enough, we didn´t even get to the beach during the day until our third day here. We were only interested in finding some dinner the night we flew in. Day Two Armando scored us a package to go see Chichen Itza, the largest Maya ruins in the area and as everyone will tell you, one of UNESCO´s 7 new wonders of the ancient world.

I can see why. The temples and the main pyramid were enormous and the science behind how they were built is mind-boggling. Although the Maya civilization could build a perfectly circular tower, they never invented the wheel. They had amazing astronomical precision. They created the craziest echoes with their architecture, and positioned the main pyramid exactly on the same latitude as the pyramids in Egypt. Crazy right?

On the weirder and slightly appalling side, they also practiced a whole lot of human sacrifice. The willing victims drowned themselves in cenotes (underground water wells, usually incredibly deep). The unwilling ones went to the temple past a statue of a reclining man who as it turns out symbolizes ¨Repent¨. Nice eh?

There was also an arena where some sort of ball sport was played and the winners were decapitated (you would think that would be a disincentive to win, but apparently it was a huge honour and almost surefire way to sweet after-living). Here is where we learned about the practice of aesthetic deformation.

Now for those of you who saw the new Indiana Jones movie, you may already have heard of this practice. When a Maya baby was about a month old, mama would bind his-her teeny head between two big planks of wood to change the shape of the skull as it grew. Needless to say, not all babies survived this head trauma, which is why this civilization typically had families of 10-12 children.

It gets stranger. They also highly valued cross-eyedness. They would dangle a piece of jade between babies eyes on the bridge of the nose to encourage that trait, so most Maya would be cross-eyed to an extent. We were left wondering how useful that was come battle time - surely it had to impact their peripheral vision...

The tour to Chichen Itza also included a few other stops on the way back to Playa. One was for lunch, one at a local cenote (we were allowed to swim in it but it was late and the air con was full blast on the bus, so not many took advantage - not to mention the catfish and bats in the cave), and lastly in Valladolid to see an old church (very random).

Hope everyone had a great New Year´s eve... Welcome to 2009!