Kohunlich: A Long Ride's Short Visit

Leaving the comfort of a 3,500-passenger cruise ship after two full days at sea can induce a unique anxiety in most passengers. If you're planning a long day away from the all-you-can eat buffet, ports of call throughout the Caribbean usually forbid visitors to bring any food ashore. Fortunately, most ports like Cozumel or Belize have plenty of restaurants that are more than happy to sell margaritas and conch fritters as a supplement to the ship's fare. And lucky for me, the six-hour tour I booked to the Mayan archaeological site of Kohunlich from the Regal Princess during its stop in Mahahual provided a small snack bag.

Of course, touring Kohunlich wasn't about the food, it was about the history of the Mayans, the local indigenous population whose civilization dates back more than two thousand years. The site in Quintana Roo on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico was already settled by 200 B.C. and was abandoned almost a thousand years ago after an elaborate array of structures, including temples, ball court, palace and a residential area, were already built. Eventually enveloped and covered by the surrounding jungle, the twenty-acre city complex was only discovered by archaeologists in the early twentieth century, with excavation beginning in 1968. Still, most of the site remains buried.

The ride to Kohunlich from the cruise port is a long one: over three hours on my large tour bus. The guides warned us there could be some traffic delays because of the construction of the Tren Maya, a trans-Yucatan Peninsula rail line started in 2020 that will provide tourists an easy way to visit the region's main cities. In fact, the construction project crossed our route to Kohunlich at least twice, displaying the ugly gash the line is carving through swaths of virgin jungle. As of a week ago, I can report that no track was laid in the region but that concrete railroad ties were stacked along the highway in anticipation of imminent installation.

Kohunlich is actually under construction in its own right, as a visitor center and parking lot were being excavated the day I arrived. As a result, the sound of bulldozers permeated the landscape: a "jungle filled with the sounds of howler monkeys" being an inaccurate description advertised in the tour's brochure. Nonetheless the protected site is situated within native forest, and as we walked deeper into the complex, the sound of birds soon drew my attention.

It's difficult for me to visit the Yucatan and not be drawn to the tropical fauna. When I toured the excavated Mayan city of Lamanai in Belize two years ago, I was captivated by the euphonias, trogons, manikins, and brown jays in the canopy of trees extending as high as the tallest temples. We actually even encountered a group of noisy howler monkeys.

The first bird I discovered at Kohunlich was a yellow-breasted warbler, a winter migrant to the area that is quite common during the summer across the eastern half of the Unite States. Several noisy Yucatan woodpeckers soon lured me further away from my tour group. In the dense foliage of a cluster of trees, I discovered two great kiskadees and a lone tanager I couldn't identify.

The Ball Court with its spectator stands, the Acropolis, the Temple of the King, and the Plaza of the Stelae were in good enough condition to remind everyone on the tour that an advanced society once thrived in this city. But the Temple of the Masks probably demonstrated how the people might have seen themselves. The temple's central stairway was flanked by six-foot tall masks of a Mayan sun god, five of the original eight still on site and under restoration. A steep walk up the stairs gave not only a view of the surrounding jungle but of the archaeologists hard at work on their project.

To the side of the temple I heard a familiar caw that I couldn't quite discern. At first it sounded like a jay, but it turned out to be the calls from a resident roadside hawk, a common bird of prey throughout Latin America and that looks similar to a Cooper's hawk.

After a little over an hour, our visit to Kohunlich ended. It would take over three hours back on the bus to return to the port and our waiting cruise ship where our tour group would be some of the last passengers to board. The six hour tour ran actually closer to eight hours, all but an hour or so of it spent riding the bus. Recounting stories of temples, birds, history, and jungles should have been on our minds but as hungry cruise ship passengers we were, alas, all more interested in an early dinner.