Because palenque is so interesting, the campground right next to it so great but mainly because we met our friends chantelle and joshua again (overlander from canada and the us), we stayed longer. Visited the museum with a replicate of the grave of king pakal (the original tomb has been closed because of conservatiion reasons) and had been a second time at the archaeological site late in the afternoon.

By the way here is a really good restaurant recommendation: don mucho’s, directly at the national park gate (to the left, 300 feet)

A very beautiful and well-known maya site is palenque which can also be seen in the number of visitors. The city was founded about 300 ad and and it got abandoned in 799 ad. It has not yet been clarified why the great exodus had happened. The most likely explanation is probably an ecological catastrophy. It has now been shown that in the years of 500 -1000 ad more and more stronger periods of droughts had happened and the land became increasingly deserted, because the mayans had cut down the rainforest for calcinating limestone. Probably up to 4 million mayas had lived in this area. The peasants were no longer able to provide enough food for the huge cities, hunger crises forced the survivors to leave the area. The knowledge of culture, writing and astronomy disappeared with them.

These maya ruins are certainly the best-known archaeological site on yucatan for tourism. The result is that about a million visitors come here every year and then they defile along the numerous knick-knack boothes. However, the great numbers also mean that the access to all pyramids and to other buildings was blocked for the visitors. Despite these restrictions, a visit is still very impressive. It was annoying that all visitors had to leave the site at 5pm and at 7pm there was a re-entry for the lasershow visitors (expensive tickets). If you love to look at honkey colorful illuminated ruins and then have to strive to understand the english translation via earphones against the roaring loud spanish version of the lasershow, this torture is recommended.

Wikipedia info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichen_Itza 

The ruins of calakmul are similarly impressive as the remains of tikal, the long time enemy. After fighting over the centuries for the supremacy in the region (see also my blog contribution to tikal) in 695 the game was over and calakmul sank in insignificance. The last inscription, found on a pillar, shows the date of January 20th. 909, after which the city was completely abandoned. Probably all the sacrifices for the rain god were useless after all that slash-and-burn agriculture.

Connections to our present situation are, of course, purely coincidental – I am curious to see to which planet we will move on.

In the mayan language the name lamanai means a “submerged crocodile”. The mayans permantly lived for about 3000 year in lamanai and so it is one of the longest continuously populated maya cities. In 700 AD (the classical period) the population grew to more than 20,000 inhabitants. In contrast to most of the other mayan sites, lamanai was still used when the spaniards came to belize in the 16th century. © wikipedia (german)