Exotic Bicycles of Yucatan

This bike started life as a conservative Schwinn but when Carlos *Cherli” Dzidz Chí got it, he has mexicanized it with reflectors, ribbons and fancy do-dads. Now it is exotic.

 Dr. Steven Fry is a trendsetter. CD rear reflectors, rubber chicken squeeze horn, angle-iron seat extension, rubber hose speed shifter and numerous other eccentric innovations make his bicycle  at home in Mexico

.Biking on the streets of Yucatán; one kid to steer, one for locomotion and a passenger aft.  A device called a “diablo”, or devil is fastened to the axle shaft ends and is designed to stand on making extended passenger carrying capacity possible in the land where safety is an option.

For more exotic bikes, check out John's blog story: More exotic bicycles from the 1890's to 2011.

For bicycling in Yucatán, check out our website: www.bicycleyucatan.com 

Finally the book for traveling adventures who want to see more than just trinket shops and crowded tourist traps has arrived:

Just launched—our new book, Yucatán’s Magic – Mérida Side Trips: Treasures of Mayab

Built one stone at a time like the Mayan pyramids; Over a quarter of a century of inspired exploration and recording of our travels in captioned photo stories has led my wife and me to compile an impressive collection of outings that are the foundation for this book, built one story at a time.

We present the best of the best after over twenty-five years; places, excursions and outings. Each place we have visited we like for different reasons; tranquility, history, view of village life, and connect with the Maya past and present, change of scenery, and a look at a uniquely distinctive region. 

Available in Kindle and soon in paperback. 

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005POWVU8

IZAMAL, YUCATÁN, TO KANTUNIL WITH VISITS TO CUAUHTÉMOC, SUDZAL AND XANABA BY BIKE AND BUS 2011

One of the all time best one-day Yucatán get-away excursions we have found.
This is an easy and pleasurable trip if you take advantage of a tail-wind and cold front. We are down-wing sailors. (With a northerly wind start from Izamal. Contrarily with a southerly wind begin your trip from the other end at Kantunil.)
To maximize the pleasure of this adventure we recommend taking the Centro bus that departs at 6:45 AM from their terminal on Calle 65 two blocks east of the main market, adjacent to and east of the Casa de Pueblo.
There are faster ways to get to Izamal but this quiet back road route, though slow, is a pleasant look at Yucatán that most tourist miss.
Our bus route took us east first to Tixkokob, famous for hammock makers, while the early morning shoppers were still packing the quaint colonial streets.
Being a local bus we were steadily acquiring more and more passengers heading to the remote villages that lay ahead. As we passed our next town of Cacalchén the road narrowed perceptibly and each of the upcoming towns in turn grew smaller and smaller heading to Bokobá. Tekantó, Tixcochó, Teya, and Tepekán, were all typical quiet quaint Mayan villages where many of the homes were palapa thatched huts commingled with the remnants of colonial era haciendas. At rural Tepekán we made our final turn and headed into Izamal on a road as straight as a die and we knew that this roadway had to be a remnant of an ancient Maya sacbe road built countless centuries before.

As tourist end destinations go Izamal is one of Yucatán’s finest and well worth a day or two of your time to explore and get to know. I have mentioned previously the book, Mayan Missions by Richard and Rosalind Perry as an indispensable field guide. You will want the book because it answers a multitude of questions explaining history and gives intriguing facts regarding Mayan temples as well as the mysterious old Yucatecan churches.

Izamal has a rich Mayan and conquistador history. Huge temple pyramids are still part of the town. A 16th century Franciscan monastery is situated atop one of them. The statue in the photo above of Bishop Diego de Landa faces the monastery he directed to be built. He is the man responsible for destroying the Mayan books. Take a carriage ride, it is memorable.

Yucatecan free enterprise provides us with fresh tropical fruit. Sweet mandarin oranges helped make our trip a pleasant experience.

On the road to Kantunil: We love the fresh air, quiet and rural nature we found along this seldom traveled road.

 Down the road from Izamal we arrive at the small village of Cuauhtémoc where the ruined church of Pixilá stands upon the mound of a ruined Mayan temple.
As you can see little Cuauhtémoc is rural and on the verge of being desolate. Time has silently passed by here with little notice.

This is the unhurried main street of Cuauhtémoc where we can hear a car coming from kilometers away. The contrast to Mérida’s push and shove commotion makes us want to whisper.

Some attempts at restoration and upkeep are visible to this 18th century church which was a satellite of Izamal dedicated to the Virgin of Candelaria.

Still roofless. the Pixilá church was originally built with a thatched roof.
Amazingly the forlorn little old church is in use. Some attempt at restoration is evident in the side chapel and altar that are freshly plastered and painted. They have a long ways to go.

Rural tranquility is viewed from the arched church doorway into the side yard now a pasture for this horse.

As we visit the hushed little village it is hard to imagine a time when enough eager souls diligently put forth the effort to construct this church.
A plaque above the front door is inscribed; Se acabo año 1797, “Work was finished in the year 1797”.

Horses nibble fresh green church yard grass, a product of recent rain.

The church of Pixilá is indeed forlorn. After more than two hundred years of deterioration someone is making attempts at restoration. This seems to be moving ahead at a pace similar to the rate that the mail is delivered in Mexico.

Continuing south down the quiet road with a tail wind, we arrive at quiet and clean Sudzal. There is a beautifully pleasant overpowering aroma of orange blossoms filling the fresh country air and it makes us want to drink it in. It is a shame we couldn’t take a photo of the perfumed fragrance. Observe the thousands of white blossoms hanging over the wall that will soon become oranges.

Time and nature relentlessly pull down the works of man.

Sudzal is conspicuously devoid of visitors and traffic. The 16th century church has been renovated with a new roof and paint job.

Other than some power poles, the vista around Sudzal has changed very little over the centuries. These gems of the past are becoming few and far between but here along this road are several towns still bypassed by the hurried tourist crowd. It makes for a perfect bicycle day trip.

The Sudzal city building and church seem abandoned with little street traffic and just the few chickens and turkeys left to pluck unhurriedly their way along. Jane and I have found another slice of bike paradise.

Xanaba though on the way to Kantunil is barely a wide place in the road. The rural countryside is little disrupted by its presence.
This place seems to be made to order for cross-country bikers like us who positively love the quiet bucolic countryside.

The only asphalt road in town surrounded the church and as you can clearly see the quaint country setting picks up where the pavement ends. The view down this city street perhaps hadn’t changed in centuries along with the pace of life.

As small and insignificant as Xanaba was this centerpiece of town on the main road put on a fresh and maintained appearance.
A surprise awaited us when we ventured south headed into our day trip’s next stop of Kantunil.
A real bicycle obstacle course awaited us. Evidently the transportation department had taken little notice to the fact that bikers may want to pass between these two towns. Just before entering Kantunil we encountered the new approach to the toll road, it was barricaded with a huge barrier accompanied by a no bicycles sign. We had to hoist our bikes over the obstacle, pass through the woods on a small walking path and then ascend a high drainage curb in order to traverse the next two lanes of highway. We persisted.

Persistence prevailed and we arrived at the outskirts of Kantunil.

This little town had every appearance of being upscale. It is on the bus route to Mérida!

Below, the church of Kantunil

Jane enjoys the shade of the meticulously kept city park along side the bust of Miguel Hidalgo, a Mexican priest and leader of the Mexican War of Independence in 1810. Notice that the parking problem in the city center is nearly non-existent because of the conspicuous lack of motor vehicles; bicycles prevail.



This lovely morning was made even better by connecting with the Mérida bound Oriente bus that arrived with perfect coordinated timing.
We stowed our folding bicycles below, climbed aboard in air conditioned comfort and I didn’t awaken from my profound snooze until we were rolling into the Mérida bus terminal.
After this outing we were able to scratch one more road trip off our list. As it nearly always happens when we remove one trip from the list we add two more. Well, with this trip we added four new ones as we passed numerous side roads that need exploring.
Twenty five years of cycling around Yucatán and our bicycle adventure list continues to grow larger.
If we could find a better place we would be there.
So, stay tuned as we keep scratching bicycle adventure excursions off our ever expanding list.

©2011 John M. Grimsrud

Related links:
Bus terminals of Mérida

Izamal

Mayan Missions by Richard D. Perry

Bicycle Yucatan

Map of area - Mérida to Izamal and Kantunil
Click on map to enlarge.

Faces of Carnival - Mérida, Yucatán - 2011

To view more of John's photo of Faces of Carnival, click here.

Ruta Puuc - Three lovely days in Yucatán

LABNÁ, XLAPAK, SAYIL AND KABAH VIA GRUTAS LOLTÚN ON RUTA PUUC 2011
Three lovely days in Yucatán.
We invite you to come along with us on our bike-bus tour where we will share this eco-friendly adventure through a captioned photo story.
Beginning in Mérida after our five kilometer bike ride to the Tikal Restaurant for their breakfast special, we next boarded the 9:30 AM Lus bus at the Noreste terminal at calle 50 y 67 bound for Oxkutzcab. Our folding Dahon bicycles were stowed below and before we reached the outskirts of bustling Mérida the bus was full.
This three hour Sunday morning bus trip is a perfect starter for your Yucatán back country sightseeing adventure.
We traveled the back roads of Yucatán, entered the quaint colonial villages and got a first hand look at the colorful local population, many of whom would be our traveling companions.

Just twenty kilometers out of Mérida at Acanceh we had already left behind the big city rush and our back country sightseeing adventure was just beginning.

 Bustling open air markets, festive circus carnivals, wooden scaffold bullfight rings,  jubilant marching processions, street venders, people powered tricycles (triciclos de carga),  and more all generated a cacophony of bizarre sounds commingled with a tantalizing olfactory enticement of regional cooking generating uncontrollable mouth watering temptations.
This is the real Yucatán that tourists miss most!
Our meandering back road bus route next took us to Tecoh, Telchaquillo, Tekit, Mama, Chumayel, Teabo, Tipikal, Maní, and on to Oxkutzcab.
We are not strangers to these fascinating places and you can see them all in more detail on our web site. We invite you to take a look.

Oxkutzcab is the hub of many interesting adventures that are far too numerous for one visit. Again visit our web site to glimpse these possibilities. They include the market/food court, restored colonial church, hill-top hermitage chapel, plus side trips to the Grutas Lol-tun.
We recommend a taxi to go up to the Grutas Lol-tun and then bike back down the hill making sure that your bicycle brakes are in good working order.

Something else we also find a lot of fun is to rent a tricycle taxi [tricitaxi], (people powered not the motorized kind), by the hour to sightsee the city.

You will find this a fun thing to do everywhere you go in Yucatán.
Yucatán is a strange and interesting place that makes for an outstanding photo opportunity.
This story presents another side trip adventure possibility.

Day two of our journey begins before 7 AM when we roll out of our convenient hotel Trujeque across from the city center park with our fully provisioned Dahon folding bicycles bound for the local taxi stand adjacent to the tortilla shop, “molino” , (west side of the main market).
There was no set or posted prices for our destination of Labná so haggling would be required. This can be a lot of fun if done in a good natured way. Six taxi drivers joined in the negotiation and price quotes began to fly around - 100, 200, 150 pesos were mentioned and I suggested 50. Oh no! The banter goes on and someone suggests 120 pesos…we nod yes and were on our way.

Jesús, our taxi driver, and Jane survey the packed and stacked cargo as we ready ourselves to depart Oxkutzcab. One of our folding bicycles would go inside and the other was lashed along with empty orange crates in the trunk. Jesús had come to town with those orange crates full earlier in the morning.
Jesús had an interesting story to tell. He and his family had left the little fishing village of Champotón, Campeche thirty years earlier when the fishing industry collapsed from over fishing and petrol chemical pollution. Jesús has a heritage of large families and was one of eighteen with thirteen children of his own.  His mother died at the age of 102.
He must have had some pangs of conscience about the fare or actually got to like us because he pulled off onto a dirt road and picked us a bag of fresh oranges, which were a welcome supplement to our cross-country diet. By the way the angelic aroma of orange blossoms in the Puuc Hills this season makes you want to drink in the sweet air and linger.

Here south in the Puuc Hill we were just far enough away from the semi arid northwestern Yucatán with its low spiny scrub and coastal ciénegas used since ancient times by the Maya for their sea-salt production. Here in these beautiful rambling hills of dry jungle form the transitional land between the northern semi-arid Yucatán and the steaming – teaming tall jungle of Central America. Notice the tall trees

Here we were high up in the Puuc Hills at Labná where we would have our breakfast in the peaceful jungle tranquility before the gate opened at 8 AM. As you can see we travel light on our three day excursion. For this day’s travel we did however pack along eight liters of drinking water and 500 ml. of suero, a solution of essential bodily salts necessary for survival when heavily perspiring. All pharmacies stock this product and have it in flavored liquid form and also in envelopes of powder to mix with water.
Jane is unfolding her bicycle, a process that only takes twelve seconds.

Labná in the early morning is worth the effort. Here you can glimpse the ornate stone work of the ancient Maya and their style of arch building.

Jane framed by the famous Mayan corbelled arch of Labná; You can see that the hand work involved in building these structures where each stone was manually shaped and sized to fit before the advent of machinery or even iron cutting tools was an effort of unimaginable proportions.
These buildings had been plastered and ornately painted.

Jane with Felipe Zapata the overseer and manager of Labná; He is from Oxkutzcab and his cousin owns a new hotel there that we had visited the previous week.

Our next stop is at the Mayan ruins of Xlapak, a short way down the peaceful road from Labná. On the back of my bike is the bag of oranges that were a gift from our taxi driver.

These intricately carved stones were in a style unique to this area. We met a man some years ago that maintained that if you imbibed enough of the hallucinogenic morning glory seeds that you too could envision this type of sculpture. He added that if you only ate four seeds that you would feel good, but if you took forty you would begin building pyramids…we never tried.

Our third stop for the morning and our coffee break.

Sayil is impressive and of a similar style of nearby Uxmal which is connected by a straight paved sacbe road as were all of the Mayan temple sites.

Back on our bicycles and a short way down the lovely and quiet paved road where the only sounds were birds chirping and the passing wind in our ears we come to the Mérida-Campeche cut-off.

The Mérida/Campeche bus you see here passes several times a day. There is however no bus service along the Ruta Puuc road we had just traversed.

Pointing to the Ruta Puuc at the Mérida/Campeche cut off intersection these sign give you the kilometers to each of the Mayan ruin sites.

We spotted some shade and went to soak it up at the Yucatán/Campeche border inspection station. The friendly inspectors were from Mérida and proved to be jovial.

With a straight smooth road and a slight tail wind Jane and I were doing at times 38 kilometers per hour heading north to Kabah…biking at its best.
We would recommend that if you are interested in visiting these lovely Mayan ruins that you spend the night in Santa Elena and bike to Kabah very early in the morning. This place is just too good to rush through. You can then leisurely enjoy what this place has to offer without the competition of hoards of tourists that disembark their tour bus with only thirty minutes to climb over everything and snap their photos. You will be richly rewarded for your efforts with an unforgettable memory.

This is what you see when you enter the gate at Kabah…there is a lot more to this place.

Here is the smooth road that sizzles you along all the way from the Campeche cut off to Santa Elena. Jane got a few second head start on me and she is just a small distant speck in the above photo. I had to huff and puff to catch up.

Our rest stop at Sacbe Bungalows in Santa Elena is the perfect place for quiet, tranquility and convenience. www.sacbebungalows.com.mx
After a cool-me-down shower to take the day’s road stress out of our bodies Jane and I relax in the unhurried jungle atmosphere ambiance.
Cycling options here are great. We recommend visiting nearby Uxmal by loading your bicycle aboard the bus that passes Santa Elena at 7:30 AM. That way you will arrive early, beat the crowd and have plenty of time to leisurely cycle back to Santa Elena for lunch.
The Kabah trip eight kilometers south should also be started early to capture the jungle morning ambiance in the Puuc Hills at its finest time.
Another cycling option from Santa Elena is north to Ticul and beyond. A note of caution; make sure your brakes are in top operating condition before you start down the Ticul hill. If you have any doubts we recommend that you walk your bike down.
We invite you to visit our web site for more detailed stories of bicycling and exploring this one of a kind magical tropical paradise…Yucatán and beyond.

©2011 John M. Grimsrud

Related Links: 

Santa Elena

Oxkutzcab

BicycleYucatan

Bus Terminals - Mérida

Mérida