Day 2 Jan 4

Breakfast in the hotel and a rental car delivered. We set out for Campeche on a nice 4 lane highway (RT 180). The first stop was at an exclusive spa resort called Chable that recently opened in a rebuilt old hacienda outside of the village of Chochola in the middle of nowhere. A room is $800 a night and spa treatment is $550. Bo read some articles about it in travel magazines and wanted to see it, but they would not let us in because they want to respect the privacy of their guests. On the way back we stopped in the village to visit a cenote, which is a natural pit or sinkhole resulting from a collapse of limestone bedrock that exposes ground water underneath. There are thousands of cenotes in Yucatan. They even say that Yucatan is like Swiss cheese – full of holes. Mayas considered them sacred places. Some cenotes are above ground and some underground. This particular cenote called Cenote San Ignacio is in a cave and it’s spectacularly beautiful – turquoise waters surrounded by limestone with picturesque stalactites and stalagmites. The water temperature is constant 81 degrees year round. We had to pay 90 pesos each to get in, leave all our stuff in a locker, and then climb down steep stairs to the cave. There were some people there swimming. One of them was a Chinese student studying in Syracuse. The next stop was Becal, a small Mayan village where 80% of families make panama hats. They call them Jipi Japa. They’ve been making them for hundreds of years. Children start learning this craft when they are 9-10, both boys and girls. We had a demonstration of the process, starting with separation of the leaves into fibers for different quality hats, then bleaching the fibers in the sun, dying them, then weaving the hats. The weaving takes place in the cave to make the fibers more flexible and can take a few hours for a low quality hat to 20 days for the highest quality. The finished hat is placed in a special mold and pressed for 10 seconds with a metal form heated to 220F so it can retain its shape. Bo bought a nice hat. The next stop was another small Mayan town called Pomuch. It’s mainly known for its Day of the Dead ritual of exhuming and washing the bones, but it’s also known for the best bread on Yucatan, maybe even in the whole of Mexico. Their special bread is called el pan de Pomuch. We wanted to try it! After a walk through the town center, we found the most famous bakery in town, which was mobbed. We stood in line, but by the time it was our turn, one kind of bread with cheese and sausage was already gone, and there were only two pieces left of the cream cheese bread, the only other bread left. We took them and ate them on a bench right outside the bakery. The pan de Pomuch is really delicious. Then we attempted to visit another little town – Tenabo, where supposedly them make hammocks and do embroidery, but we didn’t see any craft workshops there so we drove on to Campeche. The last part of the road was really bad – lots of construction and traffic. We had a hard time driving to our hotel because it’s located on a pedestrian street. We kept driving around and finally we just parked and walked there. The hotel guys helped us bring it and park it. The hotel (Hacienda Puerta Campeche) is lovely as is the city itself. More about it tomorrow….