Sunday, March 18, 2007

Uxmal - more ruins!



According to our guide the Mayans lived in Uxmal 3 times, each time they ran out of water here they would move onto another city and work their way around 5 different cities. It took them about a generation of people to do this so by the time they came back to Uxmal all the buildings were out of date. So they rebuilt them all. This gives the place the name Uxmal which might mean "built three times" in Mayan.



We started our tour at the back of the main temple and then moved around to the front to see some nice carvings.



Much of the place has been reconstructed from rubble - though I have my suspicions that this might be some ancient Mayan code.



Some fine examples of the rain god here - there weren´t any natural sources of water around so they had to rely on capturing rain water and storing it in huge cisterns.



There is a very nice square in the ruins with some good carvings so we wandered around here for a while. No one is really sure what the purpose of this place is, but it might have been used for some kind of public meetings as it has excellent accoustics.





After dinner night was starting to fall and it was time for the sound and light show. It wasn´t anywhere near as cheesy as I was hoping for, but it wasn´t bad.



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