From Uxmal and the Mayan sites of the Puuc Route I continued my big counterclockwise loop around the Yucatan Peninsula south into Campeche, one of the three Mexican states on the peninsula. The landscape through a largely empty countryside of scrubby vegetation that looks like south Texas kept getting dryer and more burnt looking now well into the dry season here. The area around Hopelchen surprisingly contains landscapes that look a lot like the Great Plains states of the U.S. with big farms with fields watered by center-pivot irrigation systems, houses that look more like those in America and Canada than Mexico, and lots of heavy farm equipment. It turns out that there's a large population of Mennonites whose families immigrated from Canada in the region who control most of the commercial farming. Apparently there’s also an underground aquifer they can tap into because the Yucatan Peninsula is notorious for now having any surface water.

The area inland from Campeche city is known archaeologically as the Chenes Region . The ruins of Mayan cities in the area have common architectural features that differ from those of other parts of the Mayan world like the Puuc region to the north or Rio Becque region to the south. There are many sites in the region that can be visited which a true aficionado of Mayan ruins could make a good day out of. Despite my general interest in archaeological ruins, I don’t really consider myself such an aficionado and decided only to stop at the largest one in the region – Edzna.

One great thing about Edzna, is that despite being a very significant site, it’s very off the beaten path and gets few tourists. I probably saw about a dozen visitors in my hour and a half there, half of which were part of one local Mennonite family who insisted they spoke no English when I asked the father to take a picture of me. I suspect they might not speak much Spanish either. Like many of the Mayan cities in the southern part of Yucatan, Edzna peaked between 600 and 900 A.D. before going into decline . However, it remained a significant population center until about 1450 A.D., in contrast to many cities that were completely abandoned. The site was only rediscovered again in the early 1900s.

Like many of the archaeological sites in Mexico and Central America, Edzna is heavily reconstructed which gives much of it a quite neat appearance. It’s not like the U.S. where we insist on leaving our Indian ruins in the Southwest in places like Mesa Verde unaltered from the way they were found. At Edzna much of that work was done in the 1980s by refugees fleeing the civil war in Guatemala.

Edzna’s most famous building is the unique Temple of the Five Stories, a five story temple building that looks completely different from any of the structures I’ve seen at other sites. It forms one side of an ensemble of temples and pyramids around and open field on a raised structure that’s considered to be the center of the city. Across an open, now grassy, area from the Acropolis is what appears like a huge straight line of stone bleachers almost 500 feet long and many stones high . From what might have been a podium used by rulers to make speeches to assembled masses at the top center, you can clap your hands once and the amazing acoustics are that the sound echoes around the entire site like thunder.

I found Edzna to be a quite special site, maybe because I had it nearly to myself. On the other hand, though, it was absolutely broiling hot there in the late afternoon, probably the hottest day I’ve experienced so far. I then continued on for about an hour into Campeche where I filled my nearly empty fuel tank. The gas station attendants asked me where I was from. When I said Los Estados Unidos, one grumbled and said, "Donald Trump". I insisted, “No me gusta Trump!”