I arrived in the village of Tulum in the early morning with a night bus from Palenque. For once I wasn't dead tired getting off the bus. So after checking in, I jumped onto the hostel's free shuttle to the beach to have a look at the Caribbean. I knew that the Mayan ruins of Tulum were somewhere on that beach, but since I didn't know where, I decided to just enjoy the beach and started walking along with my feet in the lovely blue sea.
After a few minutes, however, guess what appeared on the horizon? Exactly: something closely resembling ruins. Apparently, it was time to visit Mayan city #3 this week after all.
The atmosphere in Tulum was entirely different again from the two previous Maya cities: the coastal setting directly overlooking the Caribbean removed the jungle feel and added palm trees and a certain dryness instead.
Tulum was also the smallest of the sites I'd visited so far - so small that I could stroll through at a leisurely pace, see everything, and be done in less than two hours. It seemed to me as if not only the geographic extension of the site was smaller, but also the size of the individual buildings. This, for example is the central palace, residence of the rulers - just compare it with the monstrously big palace I'd seen in Palenque!
Being located on top of a cliff overlooking the Caribbean...
... as well as all land access roads, the rulers of Tulum also didn't see the need to erect overly tall pyramids. The temple in the back of this picture is the tallest structure still standing in Tulum:
One interesting bit that I learned today concerned the organization of the Mayan civilization and its decline. There was no one huge Maya empire, but rather many small city states, ruled independently. Warfare among neighboring cities was a common occurrence. As a consequence, not all of the city states declined at the same time. Tikal and Palenque, both located in jungle lowlands, declined around 900 AD. Tulum, in contrast, didn't decline until the arrival of the Spaniards, centuries later.
There are various hypotheses as to why some of the Mayan city states declined as early as they did: some say fierce wars with their neighbors were the cause; others say it was overpopulation leading to resource exhaustion; and especially for Tikal, a drought could also have been the reason. (Even though Tikal was located in extremely humid jungle, there were no rivers in the vicinity. A variation in annual rainfall combined with dense population could therefore have had disastrous consequences.)
After I was done visiting the ruins, I passed the rest of the afternoon sitting in the shade of palm trees enjoying the view of white sands and turquoise waters. No wonder the Maya built a city here - the setting is amazing!
