Day 9: Coba to Tikuch (Near Valladolid)

January 12, 2018

Today starts with some wildlife identification questions. The first was an insect that perched on my handlebar mount, a risky choice as we packed up. It is a fascinating one, clearly wing to imitate a leaf. And when I carried it to a large jungly plant, I could see the colour tone was an exact match.

The highway out of Coba then yielded two snake specimens, not alive of course. Bill Shaneyfelt seems always to come up with identifications, so I hope he reads this.

Poisonous or just trying to look like it?

The highway itself offered a good shoulder, and cut straight through the jungle. The plants were lush and tending to encroach on the road. There were no services and nothing to look at, save trails hacked into the jungle and seemingly leading to tiny farms.

The road to Valladolid, but not quite the 180 yet.

When riding in the Southern US we had entertained ourselves on boring roads by counting beer cans. When we got even more bored, we counted them by brand. But even the carelessness of drivers there can not begin to match the roadside scene here. All along, the road margin was covered in plastic bottle garbage. In fact this was not quite or not only stuff being thrown from cars, but rather the road was treated as the garbage dump. So we ran into TV sets, and black garbage bags, and just general huge piles of debris. We are thinking that a plastic recycling program and deposit on bottles would clean this up really quickly. But clearly the society does not value tidy roadsides.

This is not just a small example of roadside litter, it was all the way along

We reached the junction with the road to Valladolid, the 180, and were eager to see what it is like, since we will be on it all the way to Merida. The arrangement was the same - with a good shoulder to ride on. Here, the brush (and presumably - the plastic bottles) had been burned back from the roadside. This revealed the huge number of brown glass beer bottles. Distressing.

We just patiently pedaled the featureless road until we arrived at Tikuch. This is a little village about 10 km outside of the major town of Valldolid. We had spotted a hotel here and figured it would just cut the days ride a little to stay out of town.

Tikuch, has a school and church but seems to mostly lack food and groceries

We pedaled though the village, past city hall, the church, and the school, but did not spot the hotel. So we returned the highway and stopped into a little juice stand/souvenir store. Coconut water, sipped from a coconut with the top chopped off can is very refreshing. We asked the stand owner about the hotel, but it did not ring any bells, even when his wife and young son joined the quest. We had asked in town too, with no luck.

It's strange, because the hotel was 1/2 km down from the juice stand. I guess some people have very insular lives. I checked out some of the souvenirs and rather liked the one below. We could change our name to Los Abuelos while we are down here!

We must have hung around too long, because a dog fell asleep under Dodie's wheel. We had to back around carefully so as not to disturb him. It's tiring being a dog here!

Not really a hard to spot hotel - but unknown to locals.

The hotel has a "pool" that is somehow built into a cenote. Soon we will check it out. One problem about this out of town choice is no food. But there is a small OXXO as part of a gas station near by. Our next big adventure will be to research that.

A quick look down here also revealed lots of iguanas

Update: Well I went down into the cenote/swimming pool and found it a bit puzzling. The setting is in the bottom of a clear cenote type hole, but I could not see where the pool was getting its water from, and whether it was going through any pumps or filters. Certainly with the standard pool enclosure, it did not have the cenote magic. On the other hand, the hole is wonderfully landscaped and pleasant, I really appreciated the various tropical plants. Dodie during this time was napping - the strong mid day sun really gets her tired.

This shot shows the pleasant surroundings but does not illustrate how the pool is partially in a cave.

These are not red flowers but rather red leaves. There is lots like this to look at near our room.

Once Dodie arose from her nap, we rode the 400 meters to the OXXO. OXXO has little of any quality, like a US gas station market, but of course it can keep you alive if desperate. We bought rice pudding, chips, cookies, and one of the evil looking sandwiches, rushing our treasures home for a less than elegant feast. Answering the famous Chubby Checker question "How low can you go?", the sandwich not only used the cheapest orange processed cheese, but it was packaged sliced in half to show off the filling. That's normal, but the orange cheese was cut 1/2" wide and just slotted in to the exposed cut area. Opening the sandwich to examine this, I got a closer look at the "meat"component - but closed it all up fast. Some things are better not known!

Today's ride: 54 km (34 miles)
Total: 377 km (234 miles)

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