On the road

I´ve left Guadalajara and I´m travelling a bit with my extra time. Yesterday I took a bus to Mexico City, and then made a random decision to go to Papantla, Veracruz (being the next bus leaving that looked interesting). The big thing to see there are the ruins of El Tajin. I hadn´t yet visited any ruins of the Gulf Coast cultures. On a whim I hired a guide, which I almost never do. You always have to take what they say with a bit of salt, but he was pretty good. He was a Totonaco, a civilization native to Veracruz that way back in the day was suffering under Aztec opression when Cortez came along with a deal to make everything better...He grew up sort of around the ruins, only when he was a kid it was just hilly farmland--the pyramids were still buried underneath.

Because El Tajin had been abandoned so long, they escaped both the Spanish military/religious zeal, as well as the clumsiness of early archeaologists who have tended to reconstruct Mexico´s ancient cities haphazardly. There are some pretty well preserved reliefs along the ballcourts and even sections of original paint on some pyramids. The one pictured was bright red and blue at one time. A lot of the pyramids have shallow niches built into them, which is apparantely unique to this site, and no one is 100% sure what they were for. This Pyramid has (well, had) 365 niches, giving it some kind of calendar function. Also, a lot of the buildings also have ¨greco¨ zig zag patterns that are typical of the Zapotecs, showing an interchange of ideas with Oaxaca. You can see them in this picture on either side of the central staircase.

It´s interesting--for a national INAH site--that Totonacos live kind of in and around unexcavated sections of the ruins. I could see people´s plots of corn in the surrounding hills (well, probably pyramids underneath). Also a short commute if your job is selling knick knacks to tourists. There is a statue of Tajin (aka the rain god Tlaloc) on one of the pyramids, which according to the guide is still focal point of ritual activity. I realize that this completely sounds like the kind of thing that is made up for gullible tourists, but from the strange offhand way he was talking about it I actually think it might be true.