Cruising Around Cobá

Mayan ball court

Today we went to Cobá.  Cobá is an ancient Mayan city that is over 75 square kilometers and has what was the tallest structure on the Yucatan peninsula.  It takes about an hour to get to Cobá and there are three ways to do it, by taxi, ADO bus, or colectivo. Colectivos here are like tro-tro's in Ghana except that they are much newer and often have air conditioning.  Last night when looking into how to get there we found out that taxis have a pretty much standardized really high price.  The first ADO leaves at 10 but we wanted to leave earlier so that it wouldn't be quite the full heat of the day when we were there.  That left us trying to  figure out where we should look for a colectivo that would take us there.

Bike taxis

This morning we found a colectivo that would take us to Cobá and we had it practically to ourselves.  Our driver even said he would wait for us at the ruins and drive us back.  In the ruins the first thing we did was rent bikes.  The place that you can rent from has tons of bikes.  Even with all those bikes it was really hard to find any that we would be okay with riding for an hour and a half to two hours.  The bikes that we chose were still uncomfortable and not the right size for us.  For those that prefer not to bike or walk around Cobá there is a bike taxi service.  They have converted the tricycles that you see everywhere in town into make shift taxis, very much like the cyclos in Vietnam and Cambodia.

When we were there, we read that Cobá was once a Mayan city of 50,000 people. Since there was very little trace of structures where people could actually live, this was really hard for me to imagine.  It’s also very hard to believe that such a big city with so many big pyramids culd just be abandoned and forgotten.

As we were leaving the ruins we found our colectivo driver looking for us just inside the gate.  He told us something about not being able to take us back to Tulum that I will never understand.  That was okay because there was a bus going back to Tulum just late enough for us to have lunch first.  The bus was more comfortable than the colectivo anyway.
- Brook