One Last Stop on the Puuc Route: Ticul

One way to make a very nice loop drive beginning and ending in Santa Elena in the Yucatan, is to leave in the morning, breeze through the ruins at Kabah, Sayil, Labná, Xlapak and Loltun Cave, and wind up in the town of Ticul about midafternoon. Ticul is great. We went there a few times while we were based in Santa Elena.

Ticul has the typical Yucatan town's central plaza and good, modestly-priced restaurants. You won't go hungry. It's a busy town too, and demonstrates the kind of activity that sets the average Yucatan town apart from, say, the average Baja town. Take traffic, for instance. In the average Baja town, folks drive around in small cars and small pickup trucks. Over here in the Yucatan, people are moved via moto-taxis and believe you me they are EVERYWHERE. Here's a view out the rental car to a typical mid-week afternoon on the road in Ticul. The place is like mobbed with moto-taxis.

Here's a photo of a house in Ticul, whose owner is very hip and recycles hundreds of colored plastic bottles into mobiles, windmills and other yard art. This one laundry-bottle windmill stands about 15 feet high in the corner of the front yard, and sort of dominates the skyline. It actually spins – it is a fully functional wind sculpture. What a hoot.

We went to Ticul not just to see the town, but to find some local artisans we'd heard of, who make reproductions of pre-Columbian ceramics at affordable prices. Yes, I collect ceramics and yes, I transport them back to our boat by rental car, bus and/or airplane. Then I sail with them on the boat for a bunch of miles until the next visit to the family back in the US, at which time I either carry them with me aboard another airplane or ship them by UPS back to our storage pod for display at some future date in the house we don't have. That's what makes collecting ceramics, a sport. Yes, it's a little bit insane.

But here are pics of some ceramics we scored in Ticul and the surrounding towns. On the left we see a stucco mask – human-head-size; and on the right is a ceramic polychrome footed bowl in the shape of a toucan. Turns out that a couple of the artisans we purchased from, also work for the regional museums. Turns out that some of the photos I've taken of the "ancient ceramics" on display in said museums, are actually these artists' reproductions. The artists explained that museums hire them to reproduce the ceramics because no museum wants to take the risk of displaying the originals and instead keeps those safely tucked away in the vault. Joke's on me – for weeks now I've been going to museums and photographing parts of their portfoliios. Haaaa.

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