Mayan Mystery Tour
Why did the ancient Mayans abandon their magnificent cities at the peak of their fabulous achievements and suddenly disappear? This is one of the most famous unsolved mysteries of history. Nobody knows why this mighty empire collapsed without leaving a clue as to the reason, and nobody knows where the people went. The only remains are the pyramids and the ruins of ancient cities.
(If you do not see a pyramid, a photo will appear in a few seconds.)
Some of those deserted Mayan cities were among the largest in the world at that time, with sturdy structures built to last a thousand years. Why did the ancient people suddenly walk away from them, leaving behind even tools and valuables such as jade carvings and jewelry?
The cities were abandoned hundreds of years before the Spanish arrived, so the conquistadores were not the reason. The most popular theories are disease, crop failure, a natural disaster and war. All of those theories are plagued by flaws, so after decades of research by dedicated archeologists from many leading universities and museums, nobody yet knows the answer.
The Mayan Mystery Tour takes you to ground zero of this puzzle, it takes you to Belize and to the same sites visited by the author of Mayan Mystery Unveiled, as he searched for the answer to the famous mystery.
This tour also introduces you to a bit of folklore discovered by the author, a tale that had been passed down from generation to generation in a Mayan village close to the ruins of an ancient city. This bit of folklore was told to the author by a Mayan who lived in that village, and the author believes it originated when that city was abandoned. According to this author, a folklore enthusiast, every folklore tale has hidden within it at least a scrap of truth, and for this tale that scrap of truth could reveal why the people fled the city.
Mayan Mystery Unveiled, available from Amazon, is about the author’s search for that scrap of truth. It’s a lot like an Indiana Jones adventure, but without the snakes. This is a novel, the characters are fictitious. but the places are real and the events in the story were actually experienced by the author.
Read about it in the book, and you may want to take the Mayan Mystery Tour to experience this adventure for yourself.
For a brief description of the tour, the author tells the story.
The Excursion
At the Tourism Village in Belize City, we board a small bus with a driver and a tour guide, and it carries us westward on a paved road like I would expect back home in eastern North Carolina. Belize is not a primitive country with dirt roads, we find that parts of Belize are quite modern.
We cross miles of flat coastal lowlands, much like parts of our home state that lie along the coast, sparsely populated and with mostly marsh grass and scrub vegetation. Occasional trees stand tall on clumps of high ground, separated by tidal creeks. When we leave the lowlands, thick jungle lines each side of the road, and then we began to climb into the foothills of the mountains. The bus stops at a narrow river and waits for a small ferry to come from the other side to take us across.
This hand-cranked ferry is the first I have ever been on or even seen, one of many new experiences in Belize. It takes our small bus across the river to a paved road that snakes its way up the side of a mountain.
Our bus guide tells us that we will soon arrive at the ancient city of Xunantunich, and she asks us to repeat the Mayan name. We Americans cannot pronounce it properly, so she tells us that it sounds like ‘tuna sandwich.’ From then on, that’s what we call the city. If someone tells you they went to Belize and visited ‘Tuna Sandwich’, this is where they went.
The bus stops on a gravel parking lot at the top of a mountain and when we step off, we are met by a brown-skinned man, a Mayan. He tells us he is a farmer from a nearby village so he knows this area well, and he also took a course and earned his license to be a guide. He leads us to a trail through the jungle that takes us beside the ruins of an ancient palace, and then we follow him across a wide, grassy plaza.
Beyond that stands an enormous pyramid.
The Pyramid
That’s me wearing the sun glasses and my son-in-law is in front of me. We listen as our guide explains that the ancients leveled the top of this mountain and built this huge structure even though they did not have metal tools, and they had not invented the wheel so every rock was carried by hand. This helps us realize the tremendous human effort involved in creating this structure.
Those ancient Mayans were amazing people, this was an impressive achievement.
Our guide tells us that we are looking at the sunrise side of the pyramid, symbolizing birth and life. The band of symbols half way up the structure tells the importance of the king, who was considered a god by those people. They believed he connected them to the unseen spirits that protected them against their enemies and provided the annual rains they needed to grow their crops.
View From The Top
Let me introduce you to Virginia, my wife. She is on a platform at the top of the pyramid.
This is where ancient priests stood when they conducted their religious ceremonies to satisfy the unseen spirits that the people depended upon to defend and sustain them. A huge crowd of commoners would have gathered in the plaza below to witness the ceremonies, and to worship their god and king.
Notice that the city behind Virginia is quite large and well planned, indicating the size of the population and the complexity of the society that thrived here for many hundreds of years.
Also notice the lush rainforest that surrounds us, and that it has been cleared from the center of city, which extends to the palace in the distance. These ruins are now part of a national park set aside for archeological study, and as an attraction for the million tourists that visit Belize every year to view the remains of the amazing achievements left behind by the ancient people who mysteriously abandoned this city a thousand years ago, giving it up for the jungle to overcome and to swallow.
Our guide then leads us down the trail on the sunset side of the pyramid, the side of darkness and death, and to undisturbed mounds that cover what had been homes and shops of a thriving city a thousand years ago. As we stand in what probably was a street, he explains the activities of the ancient people who lived here, and he also tells us a folklore tale that had been passed down from generation to generation in his nearby village, perhaps for hundreds of years.
Someone asks if he had ever come here as a young boy, since he grew up so close to these ruins. I remember his exact words.
“No, never. The old folks told us that evil spirits live here.”
Evil Spirits Live Here
This folklore tale explains why many of the current Mayan villagers do not go near the ancient city. Could it also explain why their ancestors abandoned it?
I am familiar with folklore, love to collect tales told by the old oystermen of the Chesapeake Bay in the maritime town where I grew up. I learned that most folklore tales have a scrap of truth in them.
I suspected this ‘evil spirits’ tale began a long time ago, and like most other folklore, it contains a scrap of truth. It told me that something very traumatic happened to drive the ancient Mayans away from the city, and this tale was passed down as a warning to the next generation. It had been retold for the many generations that followed, and is still being retold.
If I could find the scrap of truth in this ‘evil spirits’ tale, perhaps it would tell me why the city was abandoned a thousand years ago. Perhaps it would reveal the secret to the famous unsolved mystery. I would love to spend a few hours, maybe days, talking to the Mayans of the village where our guide lives, perhaps they could tell me more about those ‘evil spirits’.
But the excursion has ended, the bus driver needs to hurry us back to the cruise ship. It will raise anchor and sail for Miami before dark.
This Mayan Mystery fascinated me, especially the ‘evil spirits’ tale the guide told us. I wanted to learn more, so when we returned home, I began to study Mayan history as intently as possible even though a great distance now separated me from where it all happened. I looked for it on the internet, I watched for it on TV History channels, I read books and searched old National Geographic articles about it.
I would try to figure out why those ancient people abandoned their city. Several theories have been offered by researchers, but all of them have flaws, so nobody knows the answer. We can be sure only that what happened there was sudden and unexpected, and it was complete. When the ancients abandoned a city, they left behind cook pots and tools that are normally carried when people move, and also jewelry and even valuable jade carvings. They must have left in a panic, and they never returned.
If none of the existing theories by researchers could possibly provide the answer to the mystery, what could? Maybe the ‘evil spirits’ tale of the Mayan villagers would explain what the archeologists could not. I wanted to return to Belize and learn what I could from those villagers. If I could find the scrap of truth in that folklore tale, that could be the answer.
My Search for Evil Spirits
If I wanted to discover the scrap of truth behind that ‘evil spirits’ tale, I needed to discover what these rural Mayans know. On this trip, we visited remote villages and caverns where ancient priests held sacred ceremonies, and also additional abandoned cities.
I would stand in the plaza of an abandoned city, in front of the pyramid that was the center of their religious activities, and I would imagine the events of a thousand years ago, the time that great empire was at the peak of its achievements. I gathered enough information that I could imagine the way those ancient Mayans lived.
I could even visualize the way that ‘evil spirits’ tale started. I had learned that those people worshiped spirit gods, so that explains the ‘spirits’ part of the tale. They must have run away from the city because they feared those spirits. They did call the spirits ‘evil,’ but I did not know why. With this scrap of truth, this knowledge of the spirits they worshiped, I began to develop a new theory for the abandonment. However, I did not know why they feared the spirits so much they would flee the city in panic and never return.
My new theory would not dispute any of the discoveries of archeologists, in fact, it would use their findings but in a different way than the existing theories. It would add to those findings the scrap of truth I had found in the ‘evil spirits’ folklore tale.
Telling the ‘Evil Spirits’ Story
But, what could I do with my new theory? I could not present it in a research paper because I did not have the credentials necessary for it to be taken seriously. I could write a novel, though. I did not need a doctorate in archeology to write a work of fiction, all I needed was a good story.
I would create fictitious characters, Americans on vacation in Belize, and they would be searching for the answer to the Mayan Mystery as I had done. My search for the truth behind the ‘evil spirits’ tale had been exciting and full of surprises.
That should make a good story for a novel.
The main character of the story is Kelli, an American nurse. She volunteers to work at a medical clinic giving free care in a Mayan village in Belize. She goes a week early for a vacation, to enjoy the natural beauty of this tropical country.
Kelli asks a Mayan guide to show her around, and he introduces her to two other Americans who had already hired him. They are retired teachers searching for the answer to the Mayan Mystery. Kelli agrees to join them in their search, and the guide takes them to Mayan historic sites. The teachers are elderly, cannot walk well enough to go to all the sites, so Kelli goes to some with the guide as the others rest. Early in the story, the guide takes her to a deep crater with a mystical blue pool of water. The previous photo shows that blue pool of water, but that’s not Kelli entering it, she’s fictitious, you know. That’s Virginia.
As I said earlier, the characters would be fictional but every place described would be a place Virginia and I have been, and the scenes would be mostly activities we experienced.
Kelli invites the guide to join her in the pool for a swim, and he does. He then tells her an ancient legend that any couple who swim in the pool together will enjoy a happy life together. She tells him to expect a short life, because she returns home in a few days.
The guide takes Kelli to climb pyramids and explore the ruins of ancient cities, such you see in the following photo. Here we pass between an unexcavated palace on the left and an unexcavated pyramid on the right to reach the excavated pyramid in the distance. This taller pyramid was the main temple of the ancient city.
The guide also carries Kelli into a cavern where ancient priests conducted their sacred rituals, and she clumsily knocks the flashlight from his hand. It breaks when it hits the floor, and he leads her out of the total darkness by following the stream of water that had carved the cavern through the mountain. He also takes her to remote Mayan villages of thatched homes, and she learns Mayan ways that had been passed down for generations.
Pulling the Facts Together
Each day, Kelli and her friends discuss at their dinner table all they have learned, and they compare that with the current theories. Their guide knows the ways of his ancestors, and he helps them understand what they are seeing. They recognize that none of the theories of the researchers can be correct. The following photo shows a small restaurant such as the one where they ate at the end of each day.
This flowering bougainvillea covers the canopy over a restaurant I had in mind when I described the daily dinner scenes.
Finding the Scrap of Truth
After their final day of exploration, Kelli and her friends eat dinner at an outdoor restaurant similar to the following photo. I enjoyed places like this where the locals eat, I preferred them to the air conditioned restaurants that American tourists frequently choose.
Kelli and her friends had previously decided that none of the current theories could provide the answer to the mystery, so they discuss all they have learned, especially the ‘evil spirits’ tale, and they pretend they are at the city a thousand years ago when it was abandoned, same as I had done.
They realize that the priests had been using the threat of ‘evil spirits,’ like the Caribbean ‘boogie man,’ to intimidate the common people and keep them in submission. They figure out that those ancient commoners had been repressed cruelly, and the commoners valiantly chose to live free or die, just as other people have done throughout history when their repressive rulers became unbearable. The commoners, farmers and craftsmen, did something the priests had warned them to not do, and then they fled the city in panic because they feared the revenge of these ‘evil spirits’. Kelli and her friends believe they have discovered the secret to the Mayan Mystery, and so do I.
At the beginning of the story, I gave Kelli and her friends my purpose and with what they learned, they discovered what eluded me, why the people had abandoned their city. When my fictional characters achieved their purpose, I achieved mine. To me, this search has been an exciting adventure, and I took it twice. I took it with Virginia, and I took it again with Kelli and her friends.
Can you figure out what they discovered?
If not, I’m not going to tell you. That would ruin the story if you decide to read the book, Mayan Mystery Unveiled. You can order it from Amazon.com, and you can experience the adventure from the comfort of your own home. The book provides the address of a website with many photos so you can better imagine the trip.
It’s a lot cheaper than flying to Belize, but be warned. Reading it may make you want to go there and see the places it describes. Those places are real, you know, like the pyramid at the ancient city we called Tuna Sandwich, shown in the following photo.
I hope you enjoyed my little story about my adventures in Belize. If you did, please share this with someone. I do not have a big publisher promoting the book, so the only way others will hear about it is if someone tells them.
Will you do that for me?
Thanks for your time.
Glenn Lawson
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