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Border Town
By mcdog | April 5, 2007
The driver of the taxi we catch from the very modern looking bus station in Chetumal doesn’t have a clue of the whereabouts of the hotel we ask for, we have to show him the address in our guide book. In a few minutes he’s pulled up outside an opening in a wall of buildings, there’s no sign to say Hotel Palma Real. Herself near breaks her neck when she steps on the gleaming foyer floor. They’ve got a room, it’s $36 and she hasn’t looked it over cos she says that the foyer is so clean that she didn’t bother.
We’re in, and her instincts were right, the room is spotless and bright and all the ‘bits’ work. This is good and we can ‘steal’ access from an unsecured w/less network. We eventually get a password for the hotel’s network but never manage to get it to provide a useable connection.
We walk the few blocks down to the front as it gets dark, there’s a lot a people about and food stalls are being setup nearby. There’s a small patrol boat tied to the jetty and the guard gives us a greeting as we pass. We stroll out to a large concrete structure a few hundred yards away, decide it’s probably a theatre but we’re not sure: discover a few days later that it’s probably the courthouse. There’s a pickup scooting about spraying a mist at the buildings so we dodge that and head back to the food stalls.
We buy some tacos from the nearest stall and move onto another. A couple of mexican guys make room for us at their table and we get talking, in english. One is from Mexico City but they both are living at the north end of the Costa Maya. They are in town for a meeting with other members of their fish-farming co-operative and they tell us of their plans to farm tilapi and run sea fishing trips for the tourists that visit their district from the cruise ships. One of them is catching the 0600 bus back north but the other has to stay to visit a dentist, he’s got toothache.
They leave us and we pay the stall-holder and start to wander back to the hotel. Herself buys a sweetcorn cob covered in sour cream and cheese and eats it as we go, it’s on a stick like a giant cylindrical ice lolly.
We’ve read that the big tourist attraction in town is the Museo de la Cultura Maya but it’s not open on a Monday, so we decide to stay here till Tuesday so we can visit. The museum is on three levels, the bottom level represents the underworld, the middle the world of humans and the top level is the world of the gods. An over-sized Mayan world tree extends through the three levels just as it does in Mayan cosmology. The displays are explained in spanish and english and are very impressive. After that we look at the art shows and then the Mayan house/courtyard in the museum’s courtyard. There’s an iron grinder in the hut which is a little odd until we realise that it’s supposed to be a modern mayan house, the only ‘modern’ things in there were the grinder and the drinking glasses. So not much has changed for the maya then, not even a tv set. We’ve seen lots of these huts in the edge of the jungle on our bus rides.
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