Big cities wear us out. The longer we travel, the more we realize that our best stays are not in the biggest places. But, we also realize that the big cities have a lot of the major attractions and museums. If we want to understand a place, we need to see the sites. Last month in Greece, we persevered through a couple of days in Athens to see the Acropolis before we flew to Mexico. We have heard a lot about Mérida which is the biggest city on the Yucatán peninsula at about 1 million people. It is very popular with expats and digital nomads and we felt we needed to check it out. We have heard a lot of good reviews, but also a lot of people told us we should just skip it. We don’t regret out decision to visit, but 4 nights might have been a little too long.
We are still experiencing the hot and muggy weather of southern Mexico. It is winter, but it doesn’t feel like it has cooled off to us and we always just feel damp. We again chose an Airbnb with a small pool that was only shared between one other unit and the Airbnb owners. It was fantastic to jump straight in after our walks around town. We don’t normally like studio apartments and we don’t normally like to be outside of the center of town but we will accept those things if we can have our own little oasis in the Yucatan heat.
On the night we arrived, we were a bit overwhelmed with the chaos that is a Mexican city. You have to deal with walking on sidewalks that were often blocked or deteriorated beyond use, motorcycles that zip through the crowds and are incredibly noisy, and street vendors and restaurant owners that are yelling for your business. On our first night, we walked to the grocery store and were not excited at the idea of spending 4 nights dealing with the cacophony. But the next morning, we took an organized walking tour and were exposed to the nicer parts of town. Merida is filled with several plazas, big parks, many fancy churches, and some great colonial architecture. It was Cycling Sunday (very common in Latin America) so many of the streets were closed to cars and motos. We took a big breath and realized we were going to enjoy our stay in this city.
One of the big reasons we wanted to come to Merida was to see the ancient Mayan ruins of Uxmal. Yes, we have now seen a lot of ruins but this is another place my parents visited in the 1960’s and we wanted to see it for ourselves. It has some of the best restored Mayan buildings including 2 large pyramids. It was interesting to see how few trees there were on my parents trip in 1967 compared to today. We really appreciated that they let the trees grow so we could have a bit of shade on this really hot and muggy day.
To get to Uxmal, we decided not to take an organized tour. Instead, we relied on public transportation – we had to take a 20 minute $4 Uber downtown, a 1 hour colectivo bus for $5, and then a 20 minute motorcycle tuk-tuk ride for $8. The tuk-tuk was a little underpowered to get up some of the hills but we made it. The challenge was to get back home. There weren’t any tuk-tuks or taxis around when we were done seeing the ruins. We were able to get a street food vendor to call us a taxi that we shared with an Australian who was also left stranded. After a bite of lunch, we repeated the colectivo into Merida, and an uber back to our Airbnb. It was a long day. Sometimes that’s how travel goes.
We are now off to Valladolid! Another small town that is the gateway to the biggest Mayan ruins of all- Chichen Itza. We again will have a pool in our Airbnb!!!