After breakfast and allowing Eloïse a few minutes of playing on Plaza Grande, we left Mérida and headed for Uxmal.
Uxmal is about an hour’s drive south-west of Mérida. It’s an impressive site with many large buildings in amazingly good condition, considering their age.
As with most sites in Yucatán, climbing the pyramid’s steps is not allowed, so one has to admire these great feats of engineering from ground level. I’m sure that’s better for their preservation, anyway.
It was a sweltering day, the temperature somewhere in the mid-thirties. Iguanas basked in the sun all around the ruins, some of them at the side of the trails, others clinging to the rocks of the buildings. Eloïse found them fascinating.
After a surprisingly decent lunch at the site’s sole restaurant, we drove back towards Mérida and joined road 180 heading eastward. Road 180 is the old Cancún to Mérida road that has been superseded in some respects by the 180D motorway, its toll-charged cousin. 180D is an expensive road (about 300 Pesos to travel its entire length) and we had already driven the full distance from Cancún to Merida a few days earlier, so we were curious to see how bad the old road was.
It actually turned out to be a decent, one lane road. It was a Saturday, so there wasn’t much heavy goods traffic to hold us up and the scenery was considerably more interesting than along the almost unerringly straight toll road. That’s because the old road passes straight through all of the towns en route, instead of skirting around them. This provided many a pleasing scene of people and their dogs; eating, chatting, sleeping or just watching our car go by.
We eventually reached Piste, the last town before the historic site of Chichén Itzá, just before sunset. We continued the extra few kilometres to our hotel and settled in for the night. It was a fairly long drive today, about 280 km in total.