Mexico - 2019
In April-May 2019 I had a 6-week trp to Central America.
(Melbourne - Los Angeles – Mexico – Cuba – Belize – Guatemala –
Mexico City – Los Angeles - Melbourne)
I flew from Tullamarine to Los Angeles and on to Mexico City.
Mexico City
At an altitude of 2,240 meters (7,350 ft), greater Mexico City has a population of 21.3 million,
which makes it the largest metropolitan area of the Western Hemisphere.
It is the largest Spanish-speaking city in the world.
The city was originally built on an island of Lake Texcoco by the Aztecs in 1325 as Tenochtitlan,
which was almost completely destroyed in the 1521 siege of Tenochtitlan.
The city was subsequently redesigned and rebuilt in accordance with the Spanish urban standards.
In 1524, the municipality of Mexico City was established, known as México Tenochtitlán,
and as of 1585, it was officially known as Ciudad de México (Mexico City).
The Monument to Cuauhtémoc is an 1887 statue dedicated to the last Mexica ruler (Tlatoani) of Tenochtitlan Cuauhtémoc.
A prominent cultural centre in Mexico City, The Palacio de Bellas Artes (Palace of Fine Arts) has hosted some of the most notable events in
music, dance, theatre, opera and literature and has held important exhibitions of painting, sculpture and photography.
Maria Callas debuted in the opera, Norma, here in 1950.
Originally planned to celebrate the Centennial of the Mexican War of Independence in 1910, complications arising from the soft subsoil
and political problems both before and during the Mexican Revolution, hindered then stopped construction completely by 1913.
Construction began again in 1932 and was completed in 1934.
The exterior of the building is primarily Neoclassical and Art Nouveau and the interior is primarily Art Deco.
The Palacio de Correos de México (Postal Palace of Mexico City) also known as the "Correo Mayor" (Main Post Office)
is located in the historic center of the city near the Palacio de Bellas Artes.
It was built in 1907, when the Post Office here became a separate government entity.
Its design and construction was the most modern of the time.
In the 1950s, the building was modified in a way that caused stress and damage,
so when the 1985 earthquake struck Mexico City, this building was heavily damaged.
In the 1990s, restoration work has brought the building back to original construction and appearance.
The Monument to the Revolution (Monumento a la Revolución) commemorates the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920).
The monument was finished in 1938.
Museo Soumaya (Soyama Museum of Art)
This striking building, which opened in 2011, is named after Lebanese-Mexican Soumaya Domit Gemayel
who is the late wife of Lebanese-Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helo.
Six-stories high it is covered by 16,000 hexagonal aluminum tiles.
The aluminium used in the project was supplied by a company that is also owned by Carlos Slim.
It was designed by the Mexican architect Fernando Romero, who is married to a daughter of Carlos Slim.
The Museo Soumaya has a collection of over 66,000 pieces of art.
The majority of the art consists of European works from the 15th to the 20th centuries.
It also holds Mexican art, religious relics, and historical documents and coins.
Museo Nacional de Antropología - (National Museum of Anthropology)
The Museo Nacional de Antropología is the largest and most visited museum in Mexico.
The modern museum contains significant archaeological and anthropological artifacts from Mexico's pre-Columbian heritage,
such as the Stone of the Sun (or the Aztec calendar stone).
The Huntress Diana Fountain (Fuente de la Diana Cazadora)
Erected in 1942,the sculpture is dedicated to the Roman Goddess of Hunting.
Instead of hunting beasts in the forest, this sculpture portrays hunting the stars from the skies in the north,
thus its original name is “Hunter of the North Stars”.
The National Palace (Palacio Nacional) is located on Mexico City's main square, the Plaza de la Constitución (El Zócalo).
This site has been a palace for the ruling class of Mexico since the Aztec Empire,
and much of the current palace's building materials are from the original one that belonged to Moctezuma II.
The palace is no longer used for Parliament, nor is it now the residence of The President.
It is now home to some of the offices of both the Federal Treasury and the National Archives.
The Palace has fourteen courtyards but only a few of these, such as the Grand Courtyard beyond the central portal, are open to the public.
Click here to see the magnificent Teōtīhuacān ruins, 40km from Mexico City.
Puebla
With a population of 3,250,000 people, Pueubla is the 4th largest city in Mexico.
We had a 2-hour trip on a modern air-conditioned coach from Mexico City to Puebla.
Many students come from all over the country to study in its many renowned and prestigious colleges.
The largest Volkswagen factory outside Germany and a very modern Audi plant are located here.
A University in Puebla.
Biblioteca Palafoxiana - Puebla
It was the first public library in colonial Mexico, and is sometimes considered the first in the Americas.
Click here to see Cholua, the largest pyyramid by volume known to exist,
Oaxaca
We had a 5-hour air-conditioned coach trip from Puebla to Oaxaca.
Pronounced Wahaca, Oaxaca relies heavily on tourism, which is based on its large number of colonial-era structures
as well as the native Zapotec and Mixtec cultures and archeological sites.
It, together with the archeological site of Monte Albán, was named a World Heritage Site in 1987.
Click here to see photos of the magnificent Monte Albán ruins.
El Árbol del Tule (The Tree of Tule) is located in the church grounds in the town center of Santa María del Tule,
approximately 9 km east of the city of Oaxaca on the road to Mitla.
It is a Montezuma cypress (Taxodium mucronatum), or ahuehuete (meaning "old man of the water" in Nahuatl).
It is claimed to have the stoutest trunk of any tree in the world.
In 2001, it was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
About 70 km east of Oaxaca, past Mitla, Hierve el Agua (Spanish for "the water boils")
is a set of natural rock formations that resemble cascades of water.
These formations are created by fresh water springs, whose water is super-saturated with calcium carbonate and other minerals.
As the water flows over the cliffs, the excess minerals are deposited, much in the same manner that stalactites are formed in caves.
We travelled on an overnight coach from Oaxaca to San Cristobal. A 12-hour trip.
The coach was very comfortable, but because of many, many speed humps and traffic lights,
it was nowhere nearly as smooth as a plane trip.
San Cristóbal de las Casas (Spanish also known by its native Tzotzil name, Jovel),
is a town and municipality located in the Central Highlands region of the Mexican state of Chiapas.
The municipality is mostly made up of mountainous terrain, but the city sits in a small valley surrounded by hills.
The city’s centre maintains its Spanish colonial layout and much of its architecture, with its red tile roofs,
cobblestone streets and wrought iron balconies often with flowers.
Most of the city’s economy is based on commerce, services and tourism.
Sumidero Canyon - Cañón del Sumidero
The spectactular canyon is about 50km from San Cristóbal.
Cascadas de Agua Azul (Spanish for "Blue Water Cascades") are a series of waterfalls found on the Xanil River.
We left San Cristóbal at 3:30am for the 6-hour trip to these falls.
The early start was to avoid political demonstrations which randomly cause the road to be closed during the day.
It was a 2-hour trip from here to Pelenque.
Click here to see the magnificent Palenque ruins.
Merida
Mérida is the capital and largest city in Yucatán state in Mexico, as well as the largest city of the Yucatán Peninsula.
The city is located in the northwest part of the state, about 35km off the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
Gran Museo del Mundo Maya
Inaugurated in 2012, the contemporary building was designed in the form of a ceiba,
a sacred tree believed by the Maya to connect the living with the underworld and the heavens above.
The museum houses a permanent collection of more than 1100 remarkably well-preserved artifacts,
Casa de Montejo
This mansion dates from 1540.
It originally housed soldiers, but was soon converted into a mansion that served members of the Montejo family until the 1800s.
It is located on the side of the main square in Merida.
Monumento a la Patria depicts the history of Mexico
Click here to see photos of Chichen Itza.
Cenotes - Sinkholes
It is claimed that there are thousands of cenotes dotted all over Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.
The Yucatan Peninsula is characterized by its mainly limestone bedrock.
Limestone is a soluble type of rock, and if exposed to percolating water for long periods of time, say millennia, limestone will eventually dissolve.
In the resulting karst landscape, the porous bedrock does not allow for fresh water to accumulate above ground in forms of rivers and lakes.
Instead, drainage occurs subsurface as rain water filters through the perforated rock and collects underground where the process of erosion continues.
At times, the surrounding bedrock destabilizes so much that it collapses to reveal the cave underneath, marking the birth of a cenote.
In a region devoid of rivers or lakes, such as the Yucatan, cenotes provided year-round access to fresh water for the Mayan people.
Playa del Carmen
The first of my 3 IntrepidTravel segments finished in Playa del Carmen.
Playa del Carmen is about 70km south of Cancún on the Caribbean Sea.
Originally a small fishing town, Playa del Carmen is now a major tourist destination and has recently undergone extreme rapid development
with new luxury residential condominium buildings, restaurants, boutiques and entertainment venues.
In April-May 2019 I had a 6-week trp to Central America.
(Melbourne - Los Angeles – Mexico – Cuba – Belize – Guatemala –
Mexico City – Los Angeles - Melbourne)
I flew from Tullamarine to Los Angeles and on to Mexico City.
Mexico City
At an altitude of 2,240 meters (7,350 ft), greater Mexico City has a population of 21.3 million,
which makes it the largest metropolitan area of the Western Hemisphere.
It is the largest Spanish-speaking city in the world.
The city was originally built on an island of Lake Texcoco by the Aztecs in 1325 as Tenochtitlan,
which was almost completely destroyed in the 1521 siege of Tenochtitlan.
The city was subsequently redesigned and rebuilt in accordance with the Spanish urban standards.
In 1524, the municipality of Mexico City was established, known as México Tenochtitlán,
and as of 1585, it was officially known as Ciudad de México (Mexico City).
The Monument to Cuauhtémoc is an 1887 statue dedicated to the last Mexica ruler (Tlatoani) of Tenochtitlan Cuauhtémoc.
A prominent cultural centre in Mexico City, The Palacio de Bellas Artes (Palace of Fine Arts) has hosted some of the most notable events in
music, dance, theatre, opera and literature and has held important exhibitions of painting, sculpture and photography.
Maria Callas debuted in the opera, Norma, here in 1950.
Originally planned to celebrate the Centennial of the Mexican War of Independence in 1910, complications arising from the soft subsoil
and political problems both before and during the Mexican Revolution, hindered then stopped construction completely by 1913.
Construction began again in 1932 and was completed in 1934.
The exterior of the building is primarily Neoclassical and Art Nouveau and the interior is primarily Art Deco.
The Palacio de Correos de México (Postal Palace of Mexico City) also known as the "Correo Mayor" (Main Post Office)
is located in the historic center of the city near the Palacio de Bellas Artes.
It was built in 1907, when the Post Office here became a separate government entity.
Its design and construction was the most modern of the time.
In the 1950s, the building was modified in a way that caused stress and damage,
so when the 1985 earthquake struck Mexico City, this building was heavily damaged.
In the 1990s, restoration work has brought the building back to original construction and appearance.
The Monument to the Revolution (Monumento a la Revolución) commemorates the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920).
The monument was finished in 1938.
Museo Soumaya (Soyama Museum of Art)
This striking building, which opened in 2011, is named after Lebanese-Mexican Soumaya Domit Gemayel
who is the late wife of Lebanese-Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helo.
Six-stories high it is covered by 16,000 hexagonal aluminum tiles.
The aluminium used in the project was supplied by a company that is also owned by Carlos Slim.
It was designed by the Mexican architect Fernando Romero, who is married to a daughter of Carlos Slim.
The Museo Soumaya has a collection of over 66,000 pieces of art.
The majority of the art consists of European works from the 15th to the 20th centuries.
It also holds Mexican art, religious relics, and historical documents and coins.
Museo Nacional de Antropología - (National Museum of Anthropology)
The Museo Nacional de Antropología is the largest and most visited museum in Mexico.
The modern museum contains significant archaeological and anthropological artifacts from Mexico's pre-Columbian heritage,
such as the Stone of the Sun (or the Aztec calendar stone).
The Huntress Diana Fountain (Fuente de la Diana Cazadora)
Erected in 1942,the sculpture is dedicated to the Roman Goddess of Hunting.
Instead of hunting beasts in the forest, this sculpture portrays hunting the stars from the skies in the north,
thus its original name is “Hunter of the North Stars”.
The National Palace (Palacio Nacional) is located on Mexico City's main square, the Plaza de la Constitución (El Zócalo).
This site has been a palace for the ruling class of Mexico since the Aztec Empire,
and much of the current palace's building materials are from the original one that belonged to Moctezuma II.
The palace is no longer used for Parliament, nor is it now the residence of The President.
It is now home to some of the offices of both the Federal Treasury and the National Archives.
The Palace has fourteen courtyards but only a few of these, such as the Grand Courtyard beyond the central portal, are open to the public.
Click here to see the magnificent Teōtīhuacān ruins, 40km from Mexico City.
Puebla
With a population of 3,250,000 people, Pueubla is the 4th largest city in Mexico.
We had a 2-hour trip on a modern air-conditioned coach from Mexico City to Puebla.
Many students come from all over the country to study in its many renowned and prestigious colleges.
The largest Volkswagen factory outside Germany and a very modern Audi plant are located here.
A University in Puebla.
Biblioteca Palafoxiana - Puebla
It was the first public library in colonial Mexico, and is sometimes considered the first in the Americas.
Click here to see Cholua, the largest pyyramid by volume known to exist,
Oaxaca
We had a 5-hour air-conditioned coach trip from Puebla to Oaxaca.
Pronounced Wahaca, Oaxaca relies heavily on tourism, which is based on its large number of colonial-era structures
as well as the native Zapotec and Mixtec cultures and archeological sites.
It, together with the archeological site of Monte Albán, was named a World Heritage Site in 1987.
Click here to see photos of the magnificent Monte Albán ruins.
El Árbol del Tule (The Tree of Tule) is located in the church grounds in the town center of Santa María del Tule,
approximately 9 km east of the city of Oaxaca on the road to Mitla.
It is a Montezuma cypress (Taxodium mucronatum), or ahuehuete (meaning "old man of the water" in Nahuatl).
It is claimed to have the stoutest trunk of any tree in the world.
In 2001, it was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
About 70 km east of Oaxaca, past Mitla, Hierve el Agua (Spanish for "the water boils")
is a set of natural rock formations that resemble cascades of water.
These formations are created by fresh water springs, whose water is super-saturated with calcium carbonate and other minerals.
As the water flows over the cliffs, the excess minerals are deposited, much in the same manner that stalactites are formed in caves.
We travelled on an overnight coach from Oaxaca to San Cristobal. A 12-hour trip.
The coach was very comfortable, but because of many, many speed humps and traffic lights,
it was nowhere nearly as smooth as a plane trip.
San Cristóbal de las Casas (Spanish also known by its native Tzotzil name, Jovel),
is a town and municipality located in the Central Highlands region of the Mexican state of Chiapas.
The municipality is mostly made up of mountainous terrain, but the city sits in a small valley surrounded by hills.
The city’s centre maintains its Spanish colonial layout and much of its architecture, with its red tile roofs,
cobblestone streets and wrought iron balconies often with flowers.
Most of the city’s economy is based on commerce, services and tourism.
Sumidero Canyon - Cañón del Sumidero
The spectactular canyon is about 50km from San Cristóbal.
Cascadas de Agua Azul (Spanish for "Blue Water Cascades") are a series of waterfalls found on the Xanil River.
We left San Cristóbal at 3:30am for the 6-hour trip to these falls.
The early start was to avoid political demonstrations which randomly cause the road to be closed during the day.
It was a 2-hour trip from here to Pelenque.
Click here to see the magnificent Palenque ruins.
Merida
Mérida is the capital and largest city in Yucatán state in Mexico, as well as the largest city of the Yucatán Peninsula.
The city is located in the northwest part of the state, about 35km off the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
Gran Museo del Mundo Maya
Inaugurated in 2012, the contemporary building was designed in the form of a ceiba,
a sacred tree believed by the Maya to connect the living with the underworld and the heavens above.
The museum houses a permanent collection of more than 1100 remarkably well-preserved artifacts,
Casa de Montejo
This mansion dates from 1540.
It originally housed soldiers, but was soon converted into a mansion that served members of the Montejo family until the 1800s.
It is located on the side of the main square in Merida.
Monumento a la Patria depicts the history of Mexico
Click here to see photos of Chichen Itza.
Cenotes - Sinkholes
It is claimed that there are thousands of cenotes dotted all over Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.
The Yucatan Peninsula is characterized by its mainly limestone bedrock.
Limestone is a soluble type of rock, and if exposed to percolating water for long periods of time, say millennia, limestone will eventually dissolve.
In the resulting karst landscape, the porous bedrock does not allow for fresh water to accumulate above ground in forms of rivers and lakes.
Instead, drainage occurs subsurface as rain water filters through the perforated rock and collects underground where the process of erosion continues.
At times, the surrounding bedrock destabilizes so much that it collapses to reveal the cave underneath, marking the birth of a cenote.
In a region devoid of rivers or lakes, such as the Yucatan, cenotes provided year-round access to fresh water for the Mayan people.
Playa del Carmen
The first of my 3 IntrepidTravel segments finished in Playa del Carmen.
Playa del Carmen is about 70km south of Cancún on the Caribbean Sea.
Originally a small fishing town, Playa del Carmen is now a major tourist destination and has recently undergone extreme rapid development
with new luxury residential condominium buildings, restaurants, boutiques and entertainment venues.
From Playa del Carmen I flew from Cancún to Havana for my week in Cuba.
After
my week in Cuba, I flew back to Cancún in Mexico and then
took the airport shuttle to Playa del Carmen
for the start of the third segment of my 44-day
IntrepidTravel trip of Central America.
The next day I went on an optional trip to Coba.
Part
of the day-tour from Playa del Carmen included a zip-line crossing part
of a lake.
An old man on a zip-line ...
We all had a chance to help the lady make tortillas.
Click here to see photos of Coba ruins.
Click here to see photos of Tulum ruins.
My
Central American trip continued to Belize and Guatemala.
From Antigua in Guatemala I flew to Mexico City for one night,
Then on to los angeles and back home to Melbourne,
A great 6-week trip.
