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WONDERS OF NATURE
Yucatan Peninsula. Nature miracle
On the map, the Gulf of Mexico looks like a predatory shark mouth, ready to swallow a careless fish swimming towards it - the island of Cuba. Two mighty fangs - the Florida and Yucatan peninsulas - adorn this giant jaw. Both of these ledges of land, washed by warm seas and warmed by the fertile sun of the tropics, are famous for the beauties of their nature and attract tourists. But if Florida, with its marvelous beaches and the exotic raw jungles of the Everglade National Park, is a well-developed and most popular resort area in the United States, where millions of people spend their holidays every year, then Yucatan has not yet been spoiled by the attention of travelers. Meanwhile, he has much more reason to deserve a visit from an inquisitive tourist. The huge peninsula, whose area is twice the territory of Portugal, is divided between three countries: the northern, most part, belongs to Mexico, and in the south are the lands of Belize and Guatemala. These regions were the cradle of the great Mayan civilization, destroyed by the Spaniards four centuries ago, and have preserved to this day many monuments of the amazing culture of the natives of America. This was largely facilitated by the peculiar natural conditions of the Yucatan, which did not attract either the Spanish planters or the greedy seekers of gold placers and other subsoil treasures.
The territory of most of the peninsula is a low-lying plain, only slightly elevated above sea level. South and east winds blowing from the sea bring abundant rains here, and it would seem that lush jungle should cover the Yucatan like Indochina or New Guinea. In reality, however, the picture is quite different. In the vast expanses of the Yucatan there is not a single river or lake. Only low and thorny dry-loving plants grow here - more bushes than trees. Their thickets are called chaparral by the Indians. Only in the extreme south of the peninsula, in Belize and Guatemala, where the low, up to a kilometer high, Mayan mountains rise, real tropical rainforests stretch in a narrow strip. What is the reason for the emergence of such an unusual semi-desert landscape in the north of Yucatan, in an area with ample rainfall? The fact is that the plains of the peninsula are composed of cracked limestone, and tropical showers, falling on the ground, instantly seep through the porous rocks into the depths. This is why the surface of the Yucatan looks so dry and devoid of life. By the way, chaparral thickets are not so lifeless as it seems at first glance. There are so many wild turkeys and black pheasants here that the local Maya Indians practically do not need to engage in poultry farming. If there is a need for meat, the head of the family goes to the thickets near the house and soon returns with game. In addition, the scarcity of the vegetation of the peninsula has its positive aspects. Here, for example, there are no large predators like a cougar, and local hunters, like peasant cattle, are not threatened with attacks. Only wild cats and small jaguars hide in the chapparal, watching for a gaping lizard or chick. Of course, it is not easy for the Indians to live in such an arid area. Of course, there are no conditions for agriculture here, and most of the Maya are pastoralists. But the inhabitants of Yucatan have no particular problems with water. Deep wells dug into the limestone provide quite a tolerable water supply to their small villages. After all, underground waters on the peninsula are plentiful, as few places else on the planet. They washed in the bowels of an extensive network of karst tunnels, caves and passages through which underground rivers and streams flow. There are also natural cenote wells in the Yucatan. They form where the top of a limestone stratum has collapsed into an underground cavity close to the surface. Such wells reach thirty or forty meters in diameter and serve as water reservoirs for entire towns. Even during the Mayan Empire, these sources of life were deified by the Indians. In the ancient Mayan capital of Chichen Itza, excavated by archaeologists, there is still a deep cenote with a diameter of about fifty meters, with a lake located at a twenty-meter depth, where the Mayans, exhausted by drought, solemnly threw gifts to the rain god Yum-Chak. To cause a long-awaited downpour, the most beautiful girl was sacrificed to the deity, according to custom. After her, they threw gold jewelry, vessels and dishes.
Now, with the help of scuba divers and special pumps, scientists have managed to extract many priceless historical relics from the sacred cenote, which have become the property of museums. At the bottom, in the thickness of the silt, skeletons of people, mostly female, were also found, which confirmed the stories of the Indians about the religious customs of their ancestors. But the largest Maya cities were located in the southern Yucatan, where lush jungles grow in mountain valleys. After the death of the Mayan civilization, the green wall of the forest reliably hid the pyramids and temples from treasure seekers, and only a century and a half ago, the famous American archaeologist Stephens took up their study. Since then, more than a dozen cities of the Mayan empire have appeared before our contemporaries in their former appearance, and the traveler can now climb, like the ancient priests, to the top of the stepped pyramid and view the temples, observatories, stadiums and palaces of an amazing, mysterious appearance and stretching for hundreds of kilometers around green sea jungle Yucatan. By the way, the name Yucatan itself has nothing to do with geography and arose as a result of an elementary misunderstanding. When the Spanish conquistadors, led by Francisco Montejo, landed on the coast of the peninsula, they began to find out from the fleeing Indians what their country was called. - Uyak-ud-dtan! Maya shouted, surprised at the sound of alien speech. In their language it meant: "Listen to what they say!" The Spaniards, not understanding, considered the phrase they heard the name of the land they had discovered. In a slightly distorted form, it has now found its way onto all geographical maps. The eastern outskirts of Yucatan are also unusually interesting. Here, on the coast, wild dense forests grow, where there is not a single road, there are no cities, there are almost no permanent residents. This part of the peninsula is called Quintana Roo. The waves of the Caribbean Sea wash here sandy beaches, separated by white limestone cliffs. Close to the sandy crescents of the beaches, tropical jungles approach, striking with the abundance of tree species, lianas and flowers of the traveler who got here. The forests of Quintana Roo are adorned with tall sapodillas, fan palms, ceibas with their mighty majestic trunks and balsa trees that look like date palms from a distance, somehow magically transferred here from the oases of the Sahara. Occasionally on the coast there are plantations of coconut palms, and among them - small huts with roofs made of palm leaves. But the real owners of the forests of Quintana Roo are the chicleros. They are harvesters of chicle, the sap of the sapodilla rubber tree. Without this unknown and useless tree a hundred years ago, modern civilization is now unthinkable. The fact is that chicle is the main and indispensable component of chewing gum. And near the border of Belize and Guatemala, in the Maya mountains, one of the largest cave systems in the Western Hemisphere, the Chiquibul Caves, has recently been discovered. Karst cavities here go two hundred meters deep into the limestone massif and stretch for tens of kilometers in length. The study of this underground kingdom has not yet been completed, but speleologists have already discovered several giant cave halls in the bowels of the mountains. The largest of them - the Belize Hall - reaches a length of half a kilometer, and a width of two hundred meters. Many of the open caves served as sanctuaries for the Maya who lived here more than a thousand years ago. Gold and bronze tools, clay vessels of ancient people and ritual burials were found here. The Chikabul caves arose as a result of the tireless work of the river of the same name, which has been biting into the local limestone for many hundreds of thousands of years. At the same time, the region of the caves, due to the constant movement of the earth's crust, rose at a speed of about a meter in ten thousand years. The river went deeper and deeper, freeing the voids it created in the depths, where after the rains the water dripping from above created the most beautiful stalactites, stalagmites and other underground stone decorations. Geologists have calculated that, for example, it took one hundred and seventy thousand years to form the gigantic columns in Belize Hall. But now the smallest country on the mainland of North America - Belize, which gave its name to this hall, can boast of one of the unique natural monuments of the New World. Tourists have not yet paved the way here, although the tiny country, in addition to beautiful beaches, tropical forests and stunning underground wonders, also has incredible beauty and diversity of coral reefs off the coast. This is the second largest coral barrier on Earth after the Great Barrier Reef, but the preservation of its pristine coral thickets compares favorably with its Australian counterpart. In addition, Belize is much closer to Europe than Australia. Perhaps, there is no other such corner on our planet where, within a radius of just a hundred kilometers from the green bay with a white strip of beach that gave him shelter, the traveler can visit the world of mysterious pyramids and temples of a civilization that has disappeared without a trace, and underground halls of stunning grandeur and beauty, and in the fabulous underwater kingdom of corals with its outlandish inhabitants. Belize has not yet experienced a tourist boom. And the deserted few people of its beaches, as well as the primordial nature, give even more charm to this "pearl of Central America". Author: B.Wagner
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