More Ruins

This weekend I did 2 day trips from Puebla. Saturday I went to the state of Tlaxcala, just north of Puebla to go to 2 sets of ruins (Cacaxtla and Xochitecatl). One is your average ruins, but the other is supposed to have great colorful murals (Cacaxtla). Unfortunately after getting there I was informed that Cacaxtla it was closed for excavation. At least I wasn’t the only one there who didn’t know. So I ended up only going to Xochitecatl. There was a 2 km path from the one to the other which looked legit, until you got to the other ruins and realized you were exactly on the opposite side of the entrance and now had to walk around the whole fence (not bad expect there were a ton of cactus and I think that might have stretched the limitations of my flip flops).

Sunday went to some fairly unknown ruins (Cantona) given their size and importance, basically on the Veracruz-Puebla border. These ones are over 12 sq km and is the best organized city in all of Mexico, but few people actually know about it or visit it. So I took a bus to Oriental, Puebla, where I was supposed to be able to catch a colectivo to another town and then from there another colectivo to the ruins. However, for some reason, unknown to me and most of the other people in the town, the colectivos were not running that Sunday. Good news is that in Mexico its not too hard to convince taxi drivers take you to obsure places, including taking me to ruins that are 35 minutes away, leaving me there for 3 hours and then coming back to pick me up. Wasn’t sure if I was actually going to see the driver for the return trip, but he showed up. I think that Cantona may now be my new favorite set of ruins in Mexico. It is an immense network of streets, ball courts, and pyramids with a great scenery of mountains and cactus, many of which are blooming now. Plus as an added bonus with the time change Sunday, the whole place was virtually empty.

On the way back to Puebla the taxi driver recommended that I make a detour to the state of Tlaxcala on the bus ride back to Puebla and visit the town of Huamantla, one of the towns at the base of the volcano Maliche (a little too much smog for any good views though). It was a cute little colonial town with some nice churches and a very strange puppet museum.