The Tuesday morning we were in Mexico, we woke up about 8:00, ate some cereal bars while we lay in our hammocks on the balcony and decided we might as well try to head to Coba to see the ruins.  Once again we loaded up my crossbody bag with about the equivalent to Lake Michigan in water, electolyte tablets, Deep Woods Off (we’d heard Coba’s ruins had bad mosquito issues), sunblock, and snacks for lunch.  

Oh, and the camera too.

So we taxied in to Tulum and were dropped off at the bus station.  I bought us two round-trip tickets to Coba and, conveniently, the bus arrived 10 minutes later.  After a 45 minute drive, the bus stopped in the tiny little town of Coba.  We hailed another taxi, and the driver drove us the mile or so to the ruins.  Really we could have walked, but we had no idea where we were going, and it was like eleventy billion degrees outside.  We wanted to save our strength.  The taxi ride only cost about 50 cents anyway.

We bought our Coba tickets and stood outside the entrance slapping on sunblock and Deep Woods Off like the Americans that we were.  Once we had sufficiently given ourselves cancer from applying chemicals directly to our skin, we handed off our tickets and walked in.

I was instantly surprised by the difference from the Tulum ruins we had seen the day before.  Those ruins were all out in the open and there were no trees, but part of the charm of the Coba ruins is that they are largely unexcavated and MAJORLY spread out in the jungle.  There’s lots of shade.  (And lots of bugs.)

We read the sign that described the ruins, and it was then that we realized just HOW big the Coba ruins were.  Each site (and there were 3) were about 1 km apart.  We remembered the tour book saying it was easy to get lost at Coba and we originally hadn’t beleived them.  But now we did.

Our first stop was to rent bikes.  For $3 apiece, we had the privilege of riding on THE JUNKIEST BIKES we have ever ridden on.  But it was so much fun.

Whizzing down a gravel path in the jungle in Mexico on a junky bike en route to see ruins is just about the coolest thing ever, y’all.

(It took us about 20 tries and about 15 near-miss accidents to get a picture of us both riding the bikes.  Never again.)

Check out that sweet bike path!  They weren’t all this wide, just the one right after the bike rental place.  Some of them were quite narrow and the jungle was starting to encroach, which only added to the atmosphere and feeling that WE were discovering the ruins.

There seemed to be more vertical structures at Coba than at Tulum.   That’s maybe because the palaces and such at Coba haven’t really been excavated yet, but we saw more towers than we expected to see.

The first tower we encountered was almost entirely restored.

Talk about amazing…we walked around and pounded on the rocks (Joey resisted the urge to climb up them) and tried to figure out HOW they had done this all those years ago.

We saw several smaller sites and, just when we thought it was time to break for lunch, we arrived upon this monster:

“I am so totally climbing that,” Joey said.

“You are on your own,” I said.  ”No way am I climbing that thing.”

I actually tried, but I didn’t get further than about 20 steps before I started getting dizzy and feeling like maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, because what comes up must go down.  And it was the whole going down part that didn’t seem like much fun.

It’s really hard to articulate how tall this thing was, but those are little people climbing it.  And that line down the middle is a rope to hold on to if your feet get unsteady.  At one time, this was the tallest Mayan structure in the Yucatan…and I totally believe it.

I wished Joey luck and he plowed (PLOWED!) up those steps.  He owned those steps.  He wrote “JOEY WOESTMAN” on each one as he blew past it.  (OK, he didn’t really.)

Anyway, he finally got to the top.  He admits that he almost chickened out once he got to the top because he realized he was unnaturally high on a crazy steep set of steps on a Mayan ruin, but he didn’t let that stop him.

Once at the top, he found the structure that the priest either lived in, or made sacrifices in.

It was a kind of step looking thing and inside was a room.

That’s me down there at the bottom.  I bet you didn’t recognize me either…Joey had to point me out.  I’m sort of there…second from the left along the base.  (Yeah, I didn’t think you saw me.)

The panorama of lush green forest was beautiful, and really what I was sorry I had missed by not climbing the ruin.  But when Joey wailed and complained of his SORE LEGS for the next two days, I was glad I had stayed on terra firma.  The steps were an awkward height, requiring foreign muscles to get up and down.  Actually, Joey said going down was the worst part.

After the tower climbing excitement, it was time for a power lunch.

Mmmmmmm, PowerBar nutrition.

We bought a Sprite and a Fresca at a little shop near the base of the ruin, and happily ate our PowerBars, Chex Mix and fruit leather.  Then some bees took over Joey’s Sprite and he got all disappointed, so I shared my Fresca with him.

Before leaving, we reapplied our sunblock and bug spray and zipped off to the next site.

Many times, they just jumped out of the jungle at us, especially when we were at the more remote locations.

I wish I could tell you those were tall steps, but they really weren’t.  However, I can attest to having sore legs after climbing them.  The Mayan people did not study ergonomics when it came to step building.

The final site we visited was the most unexcavated.  Over on the edge we spotted a couple wires strung across what looked like it used to be a path, so we crossed them to see what they were concealing.

It was an entirely unexcavated ruin, so we got closer to check it out.  It was here that we met Mr. Mayan Man, a guy with an enormous camera and larger knowledge of Mayan culture who was plowing around the ruin talking to himself and FREAKING OUT.

“¿Hablas Inglés?” He asked us.

“Uh, yes,” I replied.

“OH GOOD,” he gushed.  ”You MUST come up here and see this.”  And then he rattled on about how this was original Mayan construction, don’t touch anything, but GET UP HERE NOW BECAUSE THIS IS COOL.

We complied.  I mean, we didn’t have much choice.

The original Stela was covered by a recent roof-thatch job to protect it from the rain, but it was still original, nonetheless.

Soon Mr. Mayan Man was yelling to his wife to GET OVER HERE NOW to see what he had discovered.  She said, “But isn’t that just that Stela you pointed out?” and he replied that she needed to “forget about all that because what I have found is even more amazing, it is an original priest’s room.”

(Original priest’s room)

(And more original priest’s room.)

Joey and Mr. Mayan Man’s intensity as our cue to leave.  We needed to get going so we’d make our bus back to Tulum anyway, so we hopped on our junky bikes and whizzed down the jungle paths back to the entrance.

We stopped at the restored Ball Court near the original Coba site.

The tower here was not climbable yet, as it is not finished being restored.  But it was still amazing, and so hidden in the jungle that we originally walked right past it and didn’t even see it.

(This site is where I told Joey the people at Coba kept their people for sacrificing until it was time to sacrifice them.  He totally believed me.)

After hours and hours in the sun, we were ready to board our FIRST class buss and zoom down the road to Tulum.  

The Coba ruins were, hands down, my favorite.  There was just something about the size of it combined with the mystery of the sites being ticked away in the jungle like they were.  I thought the entire experience was delicious, and I’d do it again in an instant.

Provided I had an ample supply Deep Woods Off, that is.