After leaving Playa del Carmen behind, along with Anita and a four-star all-inclusive, I was quickly right back into the backpacking life. This was quite apparent when my first stop was in Xpujil, where I stayed in a cabana on the side of the highway. The walls didn't really reach the roof, so there were tons of mosquitoes, but I had a net over my bed so it all worked out. A shower curtain acted as the door to my bathroom, and when the shower was on water sprayed all over the toilet, which wasn't a big deal since it didn't have a seat, and I needed to dump a bucket of water into the bowl to flush it anyways. I don't think the woman at reception knew how to smile. At least not during the three days I was there.
The only upside to the "hotel", other than them costing very little per night, was that they were across the street from one of the ruins. Xpujil is quite small compared to all of the other nearby ruins, but for this reason I was the only person in the park when I went to visit, which was great.
"The Maya were never helped by extraterrestial beings."
There really isn't much to say about the Xpujil ruins. They were interesting, but nowhere near as impressive as what I had already seen, and even the information in my Lonely Planet wasn't all that exciting. However, there was a cool little hidden staircase, barely wide enough to squeeze through, with shedded snake skins in large cracks in the walls, where I climbed up to find a great few over the forest. It was quite Indiana Jones of me, actually.
The real reason that I had chosen to stop in the small highway town of Xpujil wasn't actually for the ruins across from my hotel, but rather for the more immense and impressive site of Calakmul. According to some of the reading I had done beforehand, Calakmul was the place to see in this area. As large as Tikal, as impressive as Chichen Itza, but without any of the throngs of tourists or artisans trying to sell you mayan-inspired trinkets made in China. The only problem is that the ruins are quite out of the way - one hour down the highway from the nearest town of Xpujil, and another hour off the highway through a national park to the entrance. Tourist infrastructure still hasn't bloomed here yet (although it must be one of the last places where this is the case), so I had to arrange for a taxi to bring me to the ruins. Again, not a cheap endeavour, considering that the drive is two hours each way, and the driver has to wait for you while you explore the ruins. Eventually I found a hotel owner whose nephew would bring me for 700 pesos (the cheapest price I had been able to find at that point) and wait as long as I wanted (as opposed to the 3 hours offered by most drivers). Plus, he apparently knew his way around the park, which was a plus. At 5am the next morning, I was flying down the highway to Calakmul.
Just as I had been told, Calakmul was empty. We were the only car in the lot when we got there, and the ticket office wasn't even open yet, so we just headed in. My driver was really great in the end, as he pointed out a whole bunch of wildlife that I otherwise would have walked right by, including a few forest hawks chilling in the trees. At one point, a whole group of spider monkeys began passing overhead - the first one scouting us out before they all began to swing on by, having a jolly old time. We later saw a group of wild boars grazing on the hillside about 50 feet away, tons of jungle turkeys (which are quite hilarious creatures), flocks of parrots, and mosquitoes so big that they might as well have been parrots themselves.
I still wasn't all that impressed with Calakmul until the very end. Up until that point, we had seen tons of small ruins, and sure, there was nobody in the park, but I wanted to see the BIG stuff. Sure enough, two hours into our hike through the jungle, we arrived to the collosal temples.
Just like at Tikal, you could climb all over them, and even better, there was nobody at the top to ruin the experience for you. An arduous climb to the top was rewarded with a 360° view over the jungle, my only company being the vultures that scattered as I arrived at the top and proceeded to soar overhead waiting for me to leave (or fall off). 700 pesos well spent.
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