I pulled into Valladolid in the late afternoon after a full day between Rio Lagartos and El Balam and picked a hotel listed in my guidebook to check out. The Hotel Aurora Colonial is quite centrally located about two blocks from the center of town and even has off-street parking. The listed price for a single room on the wall was 900 pesos (about $45). They informed, though, that they only had one room left but it didn't have a working TV and used a shared bathroom but had a lower price. "How many rooms share the bathroom?" I asked. The answer was only mine because all the other rooms have bathrooms but it was open for public use by people staying at the hotel. “OK, how much less is it?” Well, it was a third the price of a regular room - 300 pesos (about $15). What a bargain for a perfectly good room. I often pay more than that for a bunk in a hostel when I travel.

Valladolid is a conveniently-located city about half an hour from Chichen Itza and Ek’ Balam ruins, so gets a lot of visitors to its beautiful historic center . Like many Mexican towns, though, you don’t have to get very far from the well-kept center of town before things get a little scruffy-looking. The Spanish colonial city dates from 1543, but it’s located on the site of an older Mayan city that was conquered in that year, so has a much longer history of human habitation.

 There are a couple of significant sites in Valladolid, but mostly it’s an attractive colonial town to hang out in for a good part of a day. One notable site is the Casa de Venados to which I devoted a separate blog entry. The other big one is the Iglesia y Ex-Convento San Bernardino de Siena, a big church and monastery built in the mid-1500s which is now partly a museum. Besides those there are a few minor museums, significant churches, and historic homes. It’s a pretty nice place.