Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Feb 8. Tonino ruins

 
Left our beautiful campsite for the short 100 meter bike ride to the Tonino ruins ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toniná )



This is truly an unbelievable site. For many years the rulers of this enormous site even dominated Palenque. 

The royal family of this city ruled over thousands of acres of productive farmland. They were also very successful warriors and dominated the Mayan world for many years. 



One interesting part of the ruins was the "ball court". Here teams from other cities would challenge Tonino to a game similar to soccer. The losing team would have a rather unfortunate fate of becoming human sacrifices to the gods--hence the expression "play your heart out" ??

Other pis of the ruins





After Tonino, it was a mere 105 km trip to San Cristobal. However it took over 3 hours. The road was so twisty, hilly and narrow that Dahlia never got into high gear!

We must have almost stopped on each of well over 100 topés!  Everywhere there was a dozen houses, there was at least 3 topés. In one kilometre spot we counted 12 topés--very slow travel!!

Some pretty sections
...some clear cuts

We often followed Colectivos. Instead of vans they were trucks loaded with payin passengers!



Reaching San Cristobal was like a breath of fresh air. A vibrant, clean, well organized ancient city whose birthplace took place 500 years ago. 

Today there are 180,000 residents who honour the great history of their city. Although I have been here on two previous occasions the town never always is a highlight for me. There are several vibrant town squares that are alive at night in a friendly and entertaining manner. 


Sent from Tom's iPhone

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