Revisioning the Maya ... Tour Log 1 June

1 June 2011

Tomorrow I set off with two friends for Mexico City. For twelve days, we journey slowly across southern Mexico, eastward, toward what the Aztecs called "The Land of the Red and the Black"... For the Aztecs, these colors usually refer to the rising Sun and the watery Underworld**, but they have a double meaning: Red and black are the colors of ink. The Maya were the learned ones, their home the land of innumerable books.
My kind of people!
After twelve days —the wish-list is long, from Cholula to San Lorenzo to La Venta to Agua Azul to Palenque— I join a tour of 27 academics paid for by the NEH (thank you, taxpayers, thank you!) for five weeks, to as many Maya sites as we can get to.
Last trip I took, to Peru for ten days, I came home with 7000 digital photos (many in stereo, so it's not as many as it sounds). My view of the world is often framed by a camera viewfinder.
Packing to do, so will close here. More soon!

**Yucatan is riddled with caves... So many that the land has no surface water to speak of... It's all underground. Every town and village is built around a cave, a *cenote* (Mayan *dzonot*), a sinkhole, access to an underground pool of the clearest, cleanest, sweetest water anywhere. This peculiar topography is thanks to the limestone karst, shivered with a million cracks sixty million years ago by the Chikxulub meteorite impact.... Sorry, dinosaurs!