Merida

We spent Thursday walking around Merida and didn’t go near the minibus once. Merida is a bustling, tightly packed city full of colonial buildings in various states of repair. There is continual activity in the centre with numerous buses, many of which you can hear and smell before you see them. The city revolves around a large shady Zocalo where the cathedral is sited, which was built in 1559, the oldest cathedral in Latin America, which inevitably has a Baroque facade, although almost classical inside.

Also in the Zocalo is the Palacio de Gobierno, which houses a collection of enormous murals depicting the struggle of the Maya to adapt to living with their Spanish conquerors. The El Colon Sorbetes y Dulces Finos is also here, which has been serving great ice cream since 1907, where we had 2 flavours never tried before – guanábana and sweetcorn both quite delicious. Inevitably there are a vast number of churches, most of them fairly horrendous. Whilst walking through the Zocalo we noticed many people using their laptops plugged into the electricity supply by each bench accessing the free wifi. Europe has much to learn.
We also visited the Museo de Antropologia y Historia, housed in a neoclassical ‘chateau’, in Merida’s answer to the Champs Elysees, which doesn’t quite work. The museum has a small but excellent collection of Maya artefacts from various sites in the Yucatan including examples of cosmetically deformed skulls with sharpened teeth and pieces of jade inserted into the teeth (while the person was still alive). There was also a collection of pre-Columbian ceramics – as indeed there are in most of the museums – and they are expertly made with a range of glazes and decoration as well as ingenious design.


In the evening we all went out for dinner together to one of the patio restaurants in Merida. This was the last night we are all together as a group because Peter, David and Antonio, our driver, leave us in Cancun. The reason we have to have a new driver is because drivers from Mexico are not allowed to take passengers into Guatamala and drivers from Guatamala are not allowed to take passengers from Guatamala into Mexico so a driver from Guatamala has to bring an empty bus to collect us from Cancun. Such quaint customs.