After several days of lounging in the sunshine, reading books and enjoying good food and good company, on our last day in Cancun we were ready for an adventure.

Coba is a Mayan village about a 2-hour road trip from our hotel. We boarded a van a little before lunch, and quickly got acquainted with the others in our tour – one other American couple, a Spanish couple, a pair of hilarious Mexican women who came prepared with a handbag full of Bud Light and Cheetos, and a polite young Brazilian traveling by himself with a bag full of camera equipment. Our tour guide, Jose, immediately spoke to us in Mayan, and then translated – he was originally from Coba – a small village still exists near the ruins of the Mayan city. He explained that Coba was a crossroads of sorts for ancient Mayans, and the stelae, or stone slabs that would be engraved with various bits of information, drawings, etc, had dates around 780 AD in some places.

The weather was very hot and humid, and the area of Coba is fairly sprawling. The tour companies keep a fleet of battered bicycles which we used to cycle to the different areas.

The tallest pyramid is in a grouping called the Nohoch Mul, and is the last Mayan pyramid in the Yucatan that tourists are permitted to climb. This will change at the end of this year, when climbing is banned. I understand why and honestly can’t believe that climbing is still permitted – it seems odd to think that they would allow so many streams of tourists access to an archaeological site of such significance. Our guide explained that the decision was also safety related, and once we started climbing, I understood that aspect, too. The high stone steps were shiny and slick with wear, with a rope to help climbers get up and down. B & I set out with our tour group in the blazing sun, and although the height in many places bothered me, with B’s coaxing and help, I made it to the top.

It was a very strange feeling to be standing on a structure of that age and spiritual significance. The limestone was cool and very smooth even in the sun, and seemed to absorb the light. Jose was adamant that the pyramids were never used for human sacrifice, that the Mayans were a peaceful and non-aggressive people. If there was sacrifice, he said, it was done in other places, places not associated with prayer. He also told us that the limestone was carved with tools made of volcanic rock, which had to be brought to the Yucatan peninsula from Central America by foot; he said the limestone reflects the moonlight beautifully, and the pyramids served to guide the travelers who came to Coba to trade. At the top were two inscriptions of the descending or diving god. Not much is known about it except that it may be associated with the Mayan bee god, bees being symbols of the connection to the spiritual world.

We also toured the Mayan ball court, where Jose explained the critical role that the death game played in Mayan culture. There were stelae at the ball court, as well as two round engravings set into the dirt between the walls of the ball court. One depicted a very recognizable human skull, and the other, Jose explained, was an image of a decapitated jaguar holding its own head.

The trip was fascinating and profound. As B said, these pyramids were standing during so many historic events; for Americans, whose historical landmarks are relatively young, it is amazing to put your hands on a stone that was carved in 780 AD, or before, in many cases. Despite the tourists riding bikes or being pedaled around in “tricycles”, it was unearthly quiet, and I couldn’t help but feel the shivery stillness of slumbering old gods everywhere in the trees and stones.

That night, we were given dinner in the top floor of an open-air restaurant as the sun set over a lagoon across the street. The cinder block houses of the Coba village were open to the stifling air and occupants watched us without much interest. Dogs wandered here and there, enervated by the heat. Up in that airless place, we ate huge plates of marinated chicken, rice and beans, and then a group of villagers put on an amazing show. They were painted and costumed as Mayan gods, the god of death depicted as an owl, and players on a Mayan ball court with jaguar masks, headdresses, and as skeletons with skull masks. A tiny girl, younger than L, was costumed elaborately and stood impassive among the whirling suppressed violence of the dance. They drummed and chanted and it was a deadly serious performance that left the dim night thrumming with intensity and a strange, tense, fascinating energy. At the end, one of the performers, glistening with sweat and streaked paint, told us in Mayan, then Spanish, then English that what we had seen was ritual, a legacy from the beginning of Mayan time that was passed from father to son and so on. It represented, he said, the pinnacle of the physical, the emotional, and the spiritual world of the Mayans.

Our guide explained that the ball game at Coba was played with members of the upper class stationed at the top of the ball courts, and members of the lower class on the ground. They passed the ball without using hands or feet, and the team that was able to manipulate the ball through a stone ring at the top of  the court would win. The lower class members of the winning team would then be taken to a different site, and sacrificed. Jose said many times during our tour that the Mayans did not sacrifice at the pyramids, that they were only for prayer, and, he reiterated again that the ball game was entirely voluntary and the sacrifice was an honor. Mayans, he said, believed that a person had to progress through nine layers of the underworld, and then thirteen levels of heaven. I trust Jose’s knowledge of his own culture, and the culture of his ancestors, yet I would be interested to know more about the role of human sacrifice in Mayan religion. I fully intend to do more reading on the topic, and our guide also recommended the movie “Apocalypto” – he said that while Mel Gibson didn’t get everything right (mixing up aspects of the separate Toltec and Mayan cultures and even mixing up elements from different time periods) the movie is excellent and the language absolutely authentic. He said he could understand every bit of the Mayan dialogue.

I loved this part of the trip the most – I would highly recommend a trip to Coba, or Tulum or Chichen Itza (two other nearby Mayan archaeological sites) if you are ever in the Yucatan peninsula. Our tour guide was amazing, as was the site, the food, and especially the performers from Coba.

I spent National Margarita Day in Miami. It’s a small office and our hosts are hard-eyed but stiffly elegant and when they heard me talk about the “holiday”, they went to two different restaurants to find a place that served the best kind. They didn’t drink them, instead relaxing over beers and watching us with amused curiosity. They each had flights out that night, to Bolivia, and they were calm until it was absolutely time to go, then, declaring themselves worried about making it to the airport in time, they swiftly disgorged us into the beautiful night. The margarita had left me with a glowing feeling of well-being and the full moon that had caused such a ruckus for our travel and our dreams was hanging precariously in a palm tree overhead.

I gave a presentation to our South American staff and I had a translator. I would go through a few sentences and the translator would watch me and the slides, and then retell my lessons in Spanish. When he first came into the bland conference room, he seemed like nothing other than a gangling and aged schoolboy, lanky with wire-rimmed glasses and silver in his hair. He seemed young and upbeat, spoke English without much of an accent and I didn’t take much notice of him until we began to work together. At that point, I realized the depth of his quick intelligence and how difficult his job was. He had to completely and thoroughly understand the material I was presenting and be able to repeat it back, picking words and phrases that communicated the concepts. It became a very deft symbiosis of my English and his Spanish, stopping every few sentences to check in with each other. He translated the questions to me and my responses and I think by the end he was as tired as I was.

Instead of going back to his office after the presentation was over, he stayed in the conference room with my boss and me, checking his emails. We worked in quiet and focused harmony until he brought back coffee for us, small thick cups of dirty Turkish brew from the restaurant downstairs, and we began to chat. I thought he might have been a native English speaker who had learned Spanish as a second language, but instead I learned that he was Cuban by birth. His parents had immigrated from Cuba when he was five, with the help of a Swiss family friend.

He told me what he remembered about being a small boy in Cuba, the kindergarten exercises when the teachers would divide the class into groups, the Communists and the Revolutionaries, and give them wooden rifles, and have them fight. He laughed and said the Communists always won. He said his grandparents had been well-off, and one had a beautiful ranch there, and thankfully, he said, he had died before he could see it seized by the government.

He said it took his parents years to leave, and when they left, they left with nothing except their children and their parents. Everything remained with the government. They came to Miami with very little and started from scratch. At the end, he said, the government came to “audit” the house to be sure that they weren’t taking anything with them that should be left. His mother and father gave their wedding rings to the Swiss friend so they wouldn’t be taken (“if the soldiers didn’t like you, they would just find a reason to take everything,” he said with a shrug) and didn’t get them back for years. We spoke about Elian Gonzalez, which is the only real news story I knew about Cuba, and about his feelings on the new openness in the country, the restoration of diplomatic ties and the subsequent breaking down of some long-standing barriers with the US.

He said it caused debate in his family. Some, he said, saw it as a positive thing, something that could only help. However, older Cuban-Americas, such as his parents, were distressed and concerned, and worried that the new recognition of the still Castro-run government would indicate some sort of tacit acceptance of the regime, what it had done and would continue to do. He asked his father if he would ever go back, and his father stiffly said that he could never, ever return to the country as long as that regime was in power, as long as there were Castros there. He had friends and family who had been jailed, disappeared, or killed. I asked my translator if he himself would ever want to go back and he gave that expressive shrug, and shook his head. “Because of loyalty to your parents, and what they went through?” I asked. He pondered for a moment. “Yes,” he said finally. “I can’t help it. In the end, I agree, and just wouldn’t want to acknowledge that government by giving tourist dollars to it.”

I flew home from the balmy warmth, blue skies and palm trees, into the grey and brown dullness of Detroit. There’s an incoming snowstorm. I think I might do some reading about Cuba.