Chapter 15

“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality they are not certain, and as far as they are certain they do not refer to reality.”

Albert Einstein

Routines establish themselves quickly, burrowing unnoticed like a worm into the days until it seems they have always been there. With the new people a new routine had crept onto the truck. The tables were now always taken by the small group who liked to play cards and the game of choice was Hearts. On the long driving days Ingo’s loud cries of
"Oh no, do not give me the Black Lady. I will remember you for this. Ingo does not forget this." echoed around the truck over and over drowning even the loudest music from the speakers. For the whole of the drive down to Palenque they played, game after interminable game. Occasionally I was prepared to sit in for a couple of hands but the dedicated players were willing to go at it as if they were on a winning streak in Las Vegas.

It was a considerable relief for most of us to reach our camp. This turned out to be a very pleasant place with a shower block and a pool and a restaurant and, most important of all a large wooden thatched building which contained the bar. Quite a few of us fetched up at the bar in the evening, mostly from the new people. For what happened next I blame the weather. I was just about to leave, to head back to my tent for an early night when the rain started. It wasn’t just a shower it was a true downpour. It wouldn’t have been sensible to walk the fifty yards or so to my tent in those conditions so I stayed and had another beer. And then another. After all I had to wait for the rain to ease. At around eleven thirty in the true and tested tradition of barmen the world over the staff started giving small hints that they would like us to leave - pulling down shutters on the bar, putting the chairs on the tables - that kind of thing. When we said that we couldn’t leave while it was raining they politely pointed out that it had stopped an hour ago.

Of course if we hadn’t been quite drunk already it wouldn’t have seemed like such a good idea to take all the beer and tequila from the truck and sit down by the pool and if we hadn’t been sitting by the pool it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to go swimming. By then we were all so legless that the fact that we had no costumes and had to go skinny dipping wasn’t a problem. We splashed about noisily keeping most of the camp awake until someone from a nearby house came out and in a flood of totally unintelligible Spanish made his feelings on our merriment painfully clear. After that we quietened down a bit and took our exuberances back to the truck where we polished off even more of the booze until, after a long rambling and thankfully mostly forgotten conversation with Ingo in German about, I think, the relative merits of the various women on the trip (some of whom were with us and probably only feigning an ignorance of the language) I fell into a comatose stupor too drunk to manage the ten feet from truck door to tent.

Somehow I was alive and functional a couple of hours later and twenty minutes of freezing water in the shower pulled me round to the point where I could simultaneously walk and talk. I was several miles ahead of some of the others. Ingo in particular was still barely able to stand and grunt, walking and talking were merely a dim and distant dream. Charlie drove us down to the Palenque ruins and I was glad that against all the odds I was feeling relatively good because they are magnificent. In their own way they are probably as exciting, if not as extensive as Machu Picchu. There are temples and ruins enough to satisfy the most archeologically minded tourist but what makes them especially impressive is the location for they are all grouped quite closely together and surrounded by a lush dense forest that covers the encircling hills. The bone-white buildings are embedded in a velvet green setting that forms the perfect backdrop for them. Paths from one section of the site to another weave up and down the hillside and in and out of the jungle opening suddenly onto the next group of ruined temples. If you get bored of wandering you can simply pick one of the large edifices and sit on top of it, waving to your friends who are tiny specks on the top of one of the others. When eventually even that pales - providing your hangover has cleared up sufficiently - you can, as we did, head down the slightly steeper trail towards El Bano de la Reina -the Queen’s bath and the Mariposas and Sombrillas waterfalls. It’s an excellent short walk and quite a few people, mainly ones who had missed out on last nights drunken nonsense chose to go swimming again in the perfect natural pool at the base of the upper falls. I decided that I’d done quite enough of that sort of thing for a while and that my hangover hadn’t gone far enough away to start again at the moment and continued on down the path to where it joined the road and led, via the museum, back to our camp.

We had toured Palenque without the assistance of a guide, our experiences with Elmer having sufficiently put us off the idea. At Uxmal, which is even more densely surrounded by jungle than Palenque, we once more hired someone to show us around. While he wasn’t as entertaining as Gorilla he was at least fairly interesting and knowledgeable and the things he told us were related to the things we were looking at. The trouble was that I was finding it increasingly difficult to get enthusiastic about ruins. One of the earliest trips I ever made was to China. It’s some time ago now but one thing that sticks in the memory is the moment that I discovered the phenomenon of "temple apathy". After a week of viewing some of the most stunningly beautiful and ornate buildings I had ever seen I realised that I didn't actually care if I never saw one again. I had had enough temples to last me a lifetime. It was the same in Thailand with Buddhas. There were standing Buddhas, seated Buddhas and reclining Buddhas, masculine ones, feminine ones and androgynous ones, Buddhas made of gold, silver, wood and jade. Every one claimed some unique superlative - the largest, heaviest, most valuable or whatever. By the time I had seen three or four thousand of them - on about day two - I would have been content never to see another one as long as I lived. By Uxmal I was beginning to feel the same way about ruins. It wasn’t the just ruins that were the problem but also my increasing cynicism about the explanations I was hearing. Gorilla, Elmer and our present guide had all found spots to stand where when they clapped their hands it echoed around the sites in a squishy squelching series of noises. This, all three of them had said in their varying styles, proved the advanced mathematics and acoustic sciences of the builders. I thought it proved no such thing. It proved if anything that in almost any construction there will be acoustic bright spots and acoustic dead spots. It’s just a matter of looking for them. Even more contentious to my mind was the constant finding of religious significance in the number of walls or doors or steps, sometimes by such convoluted reasoning that it became almost a parody. Guides and guide books kept on saying things like
“the building has eleven doors in the south wall which added to the two in the ends makes thirteen which multiplied by four, the number of walls, makes fifty two which is not only the number of weeks in the year but of Special Significance to the Mayan culture.”

I wanted to ask ‘Why’. Couldn’t it just have been the fashion to have eleven south facing doors, the Mayan equivalent of building a double glazed storm porch? I can do the same thing with my own house for heaven’s sake. I can say

“Downstairs there are four rooms, upstairs four more, if we add on the outside toilet, the landing and the outhouse that makes a total of thirteen and thirteen times the four walls makes fifty two.”

You can do it with any building, you just have to pick the things with the appropriate numbers in the first place. I’m a mathematician by training. I know that you can do anything with numbers if you just contrive it properly.

Even without the specious explanations though I wanted a break from seeing ruins but with at least half a dozen more sets to come I thought that it wasn’t going to happen any time soon. Then I reached Merida which is a quite ordinary town that the guide books quite inexplicably describe in glowing terms. There is nothing - road works aside - actually wrong with it. It has some pleasant squares and streets and lots of places to eat and drink but for attractiveness places like San Cristobal have it beaten every time. What it did have that distracted me immediately from the ruins was quite possibly the weirdest hotel I have ever stayed in - the Hotel Trinidad - a place that those same guide books seem to consider rather squalid. I loved it. It was like the inside of a psychotic’s head brought to life. From the moment you walk in past a glass cabinet filled with dismembered parts of baby dolls and a life size cardboard cut-out of Charlie Chaplin it’s clear that this is not an ordinary place. There are surrealist paintings on the walls, a stone fountain and half a dozen cellophane butterflies in the lobby, and an inflatable batman on the stairs. After that it starts to get weird. Most of the rooms are arranged around a central courtyard where, among other random lunacy there are sculptures made from tailors’ dummy body parts and fishing net, a bowling ball on a plate, a pink shoe on an iron pedestal, the bottom half of a sewing machine welded to the top half of a rocking horse, rows of women’s tights filled with sand, a bright blue headless torso with a red handkerchief at the neck, glass jars of stones and twigs, coffin shaped wooden cupboards and all manner of other oddities.

It speaks volumes about my state of mind that I thought the place was wonderful and shot a whole roll of film on it’s absurdities - more than I had used on all the ruins added together. Even the rooms were bizarre - in mine the thirty foot square bathroom had been decorated with millions of pieces of smashed up tiles in all sorts of colours and designs, jigsaw-puzzled together in an eye-wrenching abstract collage.

It was an all too brief antidote to the repetitive nature of the ruins. Soon we had moved on to Chichen-Itza which, we were told, is unusual in having both Mayan and Toltec ruins at the same site. This time our guide was Alfredo, a pleasant and personable young Mexican who managed to drag out the last remaining vestiges of my enthusiasm. We saw, again, one of the gaming areas where teams would vie to throw a ball through stone hoops and heard once again how this was an important religious event with the captain of the winning team being executed to take messages to the Gods. It didn’t sound much of an incentive to play at the top of your game to me but I suppose it had the merit of keeping the playing abilities more even. Other sources suggest that the whole of the losing team was sacrificed which makes a bit more sense but still hardly constitutes an effective training plan. We saw the - once again religiously important - carvings of Eagles and Jaguars and my suggestion that it represented the equivalent of a game report (Chichen-Itza Eagles 17, Palenque Jaguars 14 - Eagles win by a field goal in overtime) didn’t meet with Alfredo’s approval. Let no-one say I’m above knocking the easy targets.

Unsurprisingly I had nothing left to give in the way of bright eyed attentiveness when we reached, only a day later, the Tulum ruins. The only unique thing about them is the fact that they are located on the coast and the temptations of the beach and the ocean are distinctly more alluring than a day wandering around the ruins. Nevertheless we did our sight seeing duty and I found myself, hard on the heels of my American Football musings yesterday, forming a whole new archaeological theory. Tulum, it was clear to me, was the Mayan equivalent of Club-Med. It was where the Mayan 18-30s came for their holidays, for a week of sun, sand and sex. I identified the hotel, the volleyball court, the bar and the pool before I got bored and went down to the beach where I sat for the rest of the day in a bar having a drink with the locals until I realised belatedly that I was supposed to be cooking dinner and rushed back to get on with it. After all a tour group, like an army, marches on its stomach.