In December 1941 a Pennsylvanian dentist on holidays in New Mexico, was enjoying exploring the famous caves of Carlsbad Caverns. Dr Lytle S Adams was very impressed by the activity of about a million bats flying around in the dark in the caverns that were their home. He was still vacationing at Carlsbad on the evening of the 7th when news came through about the surprise Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour. Adams, like every patriotic American was shocked and appalled at the attack, but unlike most every other private citizen, Adams decided, more or less immediately, to actually do something about it.
The small town dentist from Irwin, Pa. devised a plan of action…within one month he submitted a seemingly preposterous proposal to the White House – Adams proposed using bats as flying incendiaries to hit back at Japan in its own cities! An apparently hare-brained notion like this from a suburban dentist could normally be expected to receive short shrift from bureaucrats and military authorities, but Dr Adams had some special connections, he was a friend of the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. This guaranteed Adams’ proposal would get a good official hearing from the Military, and eventually (through a recommendation from leading zoologist Donald Griffin) the approval of President Roosevelt.
The right bat for the operation
Adams reasoned that radar-guided “bat bombs” would wreak havoc when dropped on Japanese cities because the buildings and other structures were made largely of wood, bamboo and paper. The idea you would think, to most reasonable ears, would sound ‘batty’! Adams however can’t be accused of not doing his homework…he researched the subject of bats extensively, eventually selecting the Mexican or Brazilian Free-tailed Bat (Tadarida Brasiliensis), highly prevalent in the southern regions of the US, as the optimal candidate for the task.
Mexican F-tailed Bat-cave, Carlsbad
What made the Mexican bat an attractive choice to Adams and his team of field naturalists (and to the NDRC – National Defense Research Committee) was that it weighed only ⅓ of an ounce, but could carry three-times its weight (one ounce!) Other biological factors in favour of using bats as carriers was that they occurred in large numbers, their proclivity towards hibernation and dormancy meant that they didn’t require food or maintenance, and their capacity to fly in darkness and locate dark, secluded niches to hide in during daylight [‘Bat Bomb Video’, www.wizscience.com].
Destruction by weaponised bats – the theory
The US Military embraced Adams’ idea and developed a strategy to weaponise the bats: attaching micro-incendiary devices to thousands of captured bats…the Pentagon boffins devised canisters (each had compartments housing up to 1,000 hibernating bats) to transport the bats in. B-24 Bombers would release the canisters over Japanese industrial cities initially in the Osaka Bay area of Honshu at 1000 feet. The casings would break apart at high altitude, the now awake bats would scatter and roost in dark recesses of buildings all over the city. The bats, attached to the micro-bombs by surgical clips and some string, would bite through the string and fly off. The time-activated explosives would then cause countless fires to break out all over the targeted city [Anders Clark, ‘NAPALM BATS: the Bat Bomb!’, 3-Mar-2015, Disciplines of Flight, www.disciplesofflight.com].
B-27 Liberator flying over Carlsbad National Park
Bat bomb trial-and-error
The Military labelled the bat bombs Project X-Ray and soon got down to testing Adam’s secret weapon. The first bat test the Army conducted was in May 1943 in California. Several thousand bats collected from New Mexico were induced into hibernation and then dropped from a refrigerated aircraft using dummy bombs. Unfortunately things did not go to plan…many of the bats didn’t wake from their hibernation and merely crash-landed on California soil, while only some of them managed to fly away. The attrition rate for the Army’s test bats was accordingly high. Altogether over the Project’s lifespan around 6,000 bats were used in the Bat Bomb tests (about 3,500 of these were collected from the Carlsbad Caverns) [CV Glines, ‘The Bat Bombers’, Air Force, Oct 1990, 73(10); Clark, op.cit.]
1943: Army Bat Bomb test goes haywire!
The location got changed to an Army auxiliary airfield near Carlsbad (easier access to the seemingly inexhaustible supply of bats from the caverns). Eventually the Army loaded the bats with explosives to trial some live runs. Again the bats performed erratically as glide missile pilots but this time with unintended and negative results…an Army aircraft hangar caught fire, as did a car belonging to an Army general [Clark, op.cit.]. Disillusioned by the reverses, the Army hand-balled the Project on to the Navy and Marine corps.
The Marines and the Japanese Village
The Marine corps in particular took on the renamed “Project X-Ray” with some enthusiasm…after several encouraging tests the test site was moved to the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, where a mocked-up Japanese Village had been created in 1943✱. The Dugway tests went better than the earlier ones, according to the testers “a reasonable number of fires” were successfully ignited, and a NDRC observer present commented that “It was concluded that X-Ray is an effective weapon”.
Dugway Proving Grounds, Utah
Tests at the Dugway, Utah, site continued in 1944 with the Marine corps believing that the Bat Bomb Project could be deployed against Japan by mid-1945. The Navy hierarchy however was unhappy at the prospect of a delay of another twelve months-plus and canned the project altogether. The US subsequently focused on bringing the atomic bomb to a state of readiness, and the outcome of those efforts altered the course of both the war and of postwar history.
Dentist-inventor Adams was extremely disappointed when the Military pulled the plug on the project. Adams maintained that what happened with the atomic devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could have been avoided if the US had stuck with his bat-delivered bombings: (would have caused) “thousands of fires breaking out simultaneously … Japan could have been devastated, yet with small loss of life” [‘Top Secret WWII Bat and Bird Bomber Program’, 6-Dec-2006, www.historynet.com].
PostScript: Project Pigeon, BF Skinner’s birds of war
Before the idea of bat-bombing Japan briefly captured the imagination of the US defence establishment, serious consideration had already been given to weaponising pigeons to be used in warfare! The notion was first mooted by influential, pioneering US behavioural psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner in 1939. Skinner believed that the humble feral street pigeon, Columba livia domestica, had the innate attributes (excellent vision and extraordinary manoeuvrability) to be trained to guide glide missiles. The behaviourist utilised his technique of operant conditioning to train the birds by rewarding them for pecking a moving image on a screen which accurately steered the missile they were piloting towards their intended target✫ (and unfortunately also towards their own destruction!)
BF Skinner’s pigeons of war
Skinner got some backing from business and the NDRC for Project Pigeon (as it was called), and he was able to demonstrate success with trained pigeons, however the government/military was never more than at best lukewarm on the Project…ultimately by 1944 the Military abandoned the Pigeon Missile because of concern that its continuation would divert crucial funds away from the “main game”, the construction of an atomic bomb. In 1948 the Navy revived the Project, now renamed Project Orcon but in 1953 it was dumped for good when the superiority of electronic guidance systems was established [Joseph Stromberg, ‘B.F. Skinner’s Pigeon-Guided Rocket’, The Smithsonian, 18-Aug-2011, www.smithsonianmag.com; ‘Project Pigeon’, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon].
Footnote: the US Military’s experiments on bats and pigeons were classified and conducted covertly under a wartime information blackout. They would not of course have been condoned by the American Humane Society (for the welfare of animals) had the organisation known of them.
▦ See also related blog JUNE 2017 on USA/Japan conflict in World War II: Project Fu-Go: Japan’s Pacific War Balloon Counter-Offensive
∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸
✱ two mock-up enemy villages were constructed on this same site side-by-side, a Japanese one and a German one
✫ Skinner, also an inventor, devised a nose cone (attached to a explosives warhead) in which up to three pigeons could perch and pilot the missile’s trajectory
Our last day at Mérida was more or less entirely given over to exploring a local geological feature in the region that Yucatán is world-famous for – the cénote✳ (Pron: say-NO-tay). Cénotes are natural pits, large sinkholes in the ground formed when limestone bedrock on the surface collapses exposing groundwater underneath. The ones we visited on that day were subterranean, deep down below ground level in cave formations in sites sheltered by overhanging cliff-faces. The cénotes in Southern Mexico are very popular with divers and snorkellers and the more accessible ones usually require the payment of an entry fee (from about 50 to 100 Pesos each). To get into the water at many cénotes you need to make a steep descent on rickety old ladders, although not all cenotes are sunk deep into the earth’s surface…some other cénotes like the one we saw in the Bay of Pigs in Cuba are located just below the ground and just look like natural pools surrounded by worryingly jagged rocky ledges.
Guía José conducts a cartography class in the field!
It was a decent old drive to reach our first Yucatán cénote, it was located in a place called Tecoh, quite remote, dry-parched and harsh land, real sagebrush territory! Our sociable guide for the day, José, laid down a map of the Peninsula on the ground and explained a bit of the cénote story. The ancient Maya people apparently used the cénotes for both practical and religious purposes. In a landscape (Yucatán) with hardly any rivers to speak of and quite few lakes, the cénotes provided a much-needed source of fresh water. The Maya also used them, it is believed, for sacrificial offerings sometimes. José’s finger traced a circuitous line around much of the map, pointing out the location of cénotes which seemed to be dotted all over the place. After we had swam in the first cénote I asked José who clearly relished the whole cénote experience if he had swam in every cenote in the state. José chuckled and indicated that there was over 2,000 cénotes all over the Peninsula, and he might need another 20-30 years to reach that target!◊
The roof of something deep, dark & delightful…
Cénote Dive-and-Snorkle
The ladder going down to the water-level was a concentric spiralling contraption of wooden steps which were in far from mint condition (words like flimsy and haphazard come to mind), necessitating that we made sure we trod fairly cautiously on each rung. At the bottom was a pretty primitively constructed wooden platform with only a small recess in the wall of the cave where we crammed our clothes and bags into every possible crevice.
Being a hesitant auto-immerser in any deposit of water greater in scope than a domestic bathtub, an aquatic prevaricator who can hold his own and delay with the best of them, I coaxed and eased myself with glacial speed into the seemingly bottomless, blue-turquoise chasm. The water was a little cool at first but I soon accustomed to it. The water quality looked pristine despite it being in constant by visitors, I was attracted by the appearance of a myriad of tiny colourful fish visibly close to the surface. The pool looked very deep…José speculated at least forty metres deep. Above us small birds flitted around the cave, dipping and diving in and out of several holes in the roof that have formed over the millenniums. The light emanating from the holes through tufts of vegetation provided a kind of natural spotlight projecting on to the water, giving the entire cavern a magical glow.
The beautiful azure water!
After a half-hour or so’s frolicking in the cénote Jose coaxed us out with the promise of a visit to an even more spectacular cénote that was only a short distance away at Carretera tecoh-telchaquillo. To get to the second cénote site we had to travel on more bumpy dirt roads, passing through several gates taking us onto different land-holdings. As we approached each closed gate, two small chicos (boys) that José had brought on the trip, would alight on a signal from the driver and scamper up and open the gate for the mini-bus◘.
Aquanauts of an ancient cénote!
An idyllic natural swimming hole full of picturesque delights
Cénote número dos managed to meet the high expectations of Jose’s extravagant rhetoric, and then some! It was a wider, deeper cave and the pool had a considerably more expansive mass of water. When we got to the cliff overlooking the cénote there was already a quartet of scuba-divers equipped with underwater cameras foraging around below the surface (“Japanese tourists”, they looked like to me). The drop from the top to the base platform was longer than the first cénote but glad to say the ladder was in better state with one long, straight descent to a three-quarter way platform and then a shorter ladder to a lower platform where you enter the water. José as usual wasted no time in shedding his T-shirt and thongs and diving into the sparkling abyss, following swiftly by the two boys. With everyone else quickly into the water, I paused briefly to take a few shots of the vast cavern and its water-treading occupants, before doing likewise. The pool was many metres deep (hence the presence of the scuba-divers), so once in I treaded water for a bit before swimming out to the middle of the water where someone had helpfully anchored a red buoy to the bedrock floor.
With one arm securely clasping the floatation device I took a breather, and while I was there I was able to have a good look around the cavern roof above. Bright beams of light from the limestone roof illuminated the water surface like a spotlight and made it possible to make out the presence of a few hibernating Mexican bats suspended from various nooks and niches of the craggy rock. Our guide pointed out that the walls of the cave accommodated a host of other small creatures like iguanas and spiders. I liked how there were lots of long, long vines growing over the edge of the cliff and cascading down almost to the water✥…the vines looked sturdy but I wondered if they were strong enough for any daredevil adventurer brave (or stupid) enough to swing off them from the roof into the water?
A gate-opening chico & the word of Señor Jesuchristo
Community lunch with the family
The fee for the cénotes excursion included lunch in the casa of a local family that José took us to in nearby Pixyá. When we got there the niños were still hanging round so I wondered if this was José’s lugar. A number of the humble dwellings on that street had the identical message in Spanish painted on the front walls – a quote from Señor Jesuchristo (Ro. 6:23), something about paying fish when you die in order to ensure eternal life (my idiomatic interpretation anyway!).
A typical Yucatán Sunday spread!
As small livestock wandered around the yard inquisitively, we were guided to our seats at a long, outdoor table under a covered awning. José and the dama of the house brought out the food, in no time we were tucking into a delicious meal of meats (mainly pollo) and a smorgasbord of vegetable dishes. José produced jugs of a home-made lemon or limonáda drink to compliment the midday meal. The authentic, community “Sunday lunch” with the family capped off the day of subterranean cénote adventures to a tee!
Setting out again from Pixyá in José’s mini-bus, we bounced along the dusty dirt road towards Mérida, the further we went the better, and therefore the smoother, the road surface got. Back in town, having developed a craving for hot choc drinks after some early disappointing coffee experiences on the tour, I sought out a late afternoon caliente chocolate at the Italian Coffee Company (this seems to be a sizeable franchise business chain in different parts of Mexico, noticed they had several shops around where we stayed in Puebla).
Being our last night in Mérida, Hector took us to one of the liveliest and most crowded nightspots he knew in Mérida City Centre, Le Negrita Cantina (corner of Calles 49 and 62). We got a sensory dose of typically pulsating Mérida night-life here…wall-to-wall people seated cramped close together munching burritos (my non-appearing cerveza seemed to have been redirected back to the brewery – in a nearby town!) in an enclosed firetrap, wait-staff constantly circling round the tables with trays of margaritas, sangritas and micheladas looking for homes. Couldn’t really hear ourselves speak with the din going on, but the exciting buzz of the non-stop musical band and the dancing was great to experience!
≡—≡—≡—≡—≡—≡—≡—≡—≡—≡—≡—≡—≡—≡—≡—≡—≡—≡—≡—≡—≡—≡—≡-≡—≡—≡—≡
✳ the word derives from ts’onot, used by the low-land Yucatec Maya to refer to any location with accessible groundwater ◊ possibly José was being conservative with even that formidable number – other estimates (eg, www.aquaworld.com.mx) place the number of cénotes in the Yucatán Pen at in excess of 5,000
◘ the two small children doing the leg-work, I presumed, were José’s own niños
✥ some of the hanging vines in cénotes resemble the icicle-like stalactites often seen in caves
Mérida historico centre: Lucas de Gálvez market – the large mauve square next to the Post Office
The museums ticked off my list, the late afternoon/evening was freed up to explore more of the city. I had noticed on a tourist map of Mérida there were city markets somewhere on the south side of the green zócalo. I thought these might be worthwhile checking out. As I walked down Calle 56 towards the markets (named Mercado Lucas de Gálvez), I noticed how the streets were getting dirtier, the shops more basic and down-market and there were more pedestrians competing for space on the footpaths, and the people I passed tended to be not dressed in their best clobber to put it mildly! This was definitely not the big end of town, as we understand this term.
TripAdvisor pinpoints the address of Lucas de Gálvez market as being the corner of 56T Street and 67 Street, but when you are there its hard to, a) work out where it precisely starts, and b) gauge how big it actually is. I had in fact walked into the precinct of the markets without being aware I was in it! The markets seem to have spilled out of the original building or buildings into stalls lining the adjoining streets. I entered the markets building proper near where there were several stalls on a corner selling cheap clone versions of well-known American backpacks for paltry amounts, as little as MXN50 (less than AUD4)!
That well-known international fashion label “Tonny Halfmaker”!Market Carnicería: Butchers’ fresh!
Multi-markets, Carnicerías, pescaderías, etc
Inside the markets it was a huge area and way too many vendor stalls to ever get your head around❈. There was row after row of narrow alleys stretching the length of the building, the whole place was pretty gritty and grimy (much like a market!) The market was divided into several separate sections including clothing and shoes, bags, fruit and veg, meat and fish, food seasonings, pots and baskets, records, etc. I didn’t fancy the look of the raw meat hanging up all day and the fish lying round, wasn’t sure about the refrigeration situation or the hygiene…if I had to cook in Mérida especially in summer, I’d think twice about getting my supplies of carne, pollo, jamon and pescado from this outlet. Outside in Calle 56T there were lines of street stalls flogging the standard souvenir stuff, and on the other side of the road the markets seemed to continue in another building✦…I noticed in this part that one whole aisle comprised mainly hairdressers’ shops. So many of the leather goods, merchandise and materials of any sort were “knock-offs”, transparently unlicensed Third World clones of famous First World brand name products.
The markets were of course abuzz with people coming and going every which way, these were locals mainly it seemed. I didn’t spot many overseas tourists while I was there, just swarming bunches of Meridians with that characteristic Mexican build, squat and solid forms busily stocking up on the weekly groceries, or perhaps there to find a special gift, some trinkets, or more practically, invest in a new pair of budget-priced shoes or a new pair of ‘threads’.
Lucas de Gálvez (continued!)
Feeling a bit peckish I scouted out the most reasonably clean looking of the markets’ food outlets and settled on a small snack to eat (some battered, fried zucchini croquette-shaped morsel) and a soda. After wolfing the food down I enjoyably wasted the best part of an hour roaming up and down every single aisle in the enormous market. I concluded that I had ‘done’ Mercado Lucas de Gálvez…all there was to see of the city’s famous central markets I has seen – or so I thought! Spotting an open doorway on the northern side of the building I exited through it into a narrow lane. To my surprise, I discovered another market building separated by the narrow lane-way, this one bustling with every bit as much commercial activity as the first!
Mercado especialidades: religioso y joyería
I ventured inside to find…more of the same merchandise, but also something a little different too. It was missing the comestibles, the meats, the fruits and vegetables and such of the first building, but it had a whole sub-section on items of religiosity, objects of (need I specify it?…Catholic) veneration and worship, some of it quite garish and kitschy stuff. Fortifying my atheistic senses against such a holy and pious assault on their sensibilities, I promptly quickstepped my way past its tempting arrays of ecclesiastical delights and necessities to explore what other merchandise the market had to offer. Away from the section catering for the fashionably devotional, a lot of the market seemed to be given over to yet more cloned items of clothing and accessories.
Joyeríasgalore!
I noticed that this section of the markets had more jewellery shops (joyerías) than the first building, each alley had at least one or two jewellers in it, displaying signs proclaiming their silver and gold carat wares…Joyería Lorena Oro, Oro y Plata, Joyería Anael, and so on.
My appetite for mega-markets well and truly satisfied, I stumbled out of the northern end of Lucas de Gálvez into the cooler night air. I made for Calle 60 which would take me back in the direction of my hotel. Halfway down Calle 60, not far from the Catedral Mayor I found a nice little corner restaurant, lively but not too crowded. The food was good quality if a little more expensive than the more modestly appointed eateries in ‘Marketland’. I tried a different type of tortilla dish, accompanied by the obligatory cerveza. A succulent postre put the finishing touches to the meal. An unexpected bonus about eight as I was tucking into my comida was the appearance of a three-piece musical group. As they had set up within touching distance of my table, I couldn’t miss hearing any of the standard Latino numbers that the female singer with an opera diva’s physique performed (including The Girl from Ipanema and a retinue of well-worn Mexican classics).
PostScript: Mérida street grid, confusion by numbers – Calle Sensenta y Seis where are you?
The original town planners of modern Mérida probably thought they were doing the sensible thing, arranging the city streets in numerical order to make it easy to navigate around and avoid getting lost in a sprawling metropolitan centre₪. It certainly makes sense…on paper. But when I tried to chart my way back to our hotel in Calle 66 after dinner, I discovered there was a gap between the theory and the practice! Setting off in a northerly direction my intention was turn at each intersection I came to and then head west until I reached Calle 66…simple! The flaw in the plan as it turned out was that the numbered streets didn’t run consistently, I’d find myself say passing Calle 54 and expecting to be at Calle 56 at the next cross-street but finding I was at Calle 58…Calle 56 with mathematical illogic had just disappeared! So I ended up in this increasingly frustrating “merry-go-round” situation going from street A to street B back to A again¤ (it also didn’t help that a lot of the street were quite dark and not all the corners had street signs!)
I had the presence of mind to bring the hotel’s business card with me but this proved of very limited value because the card, incredulously, had neither its address nor a street map pinpointing its location printed on it! I stopped a young local guy in the street and asked for assistance. The politely spoken Mexican boy didn’t know the hotel but kindly offered to ring the hotel for me so they could give me directions (my phone plan didn’t function in Mexico). But just to add insult to injury, the staff at the hotel were not answering the phone, even though he redialed the numbers several times! After another half-an-hour’s wandering around, through trial-and-error I eventually lucked-in and stumbled upon Calle 66 and the hotel, overcome by a feeling of both being relieved and pissed-off!
▆▅▄▃▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▃▄▅▆▆▆▆▆▆▅▄▃▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▃▄▅▆
❈ although I did later read that Lucas de Gálvez covered an area of 156,000 square feet and over 2,000 vendors operated at the markets
✦ on second thoughts it occurred to me later that this was conceivably an altogether separate market to Lucas de Gálvez on the other side of 56T
₪ the streets running east to west are named by odd numbers, starting at uno, tres, cinco, siete and so on…the streets running north to south are numbered by even numbers, dos, cuatro, seis, ocho, etc ¤ this asymmetrical formation replicates itself all over the supposed simplified grid pattern of the city! For instance, it starts off as it should sequentially, Calle 19 next to Calle 17 next to Calle 15, then instead of Calle 13 being next in sequence, we inexplicably have Calle 63E! (numbers and letters adds an extra layer of bewildering complexity to the task of finding your way round!) Calle 127 is initially on the west of Calle 129 and then it ends and restarts on the east of it! Calle 28, without changing its direction, suddenly becomes Calle 49, and so on. Now maybe all this criss-crossing, number-jumping imbroglio is perfectly fathomable to your average, local Méridian, but to state the bleeding obvious it was ultra-confusing for someone spending only 48 hours in the city!
Leaving Palenque meant another all-night bus journey, this time to Mérida. The earlier overnighter, from Oaxaca to San Cristóbal, had been a bit of a “horror trip” for me – one long, draining and unpleasant ride. This time, as we wheeled our luggage along the uneven pebbly road surface to the La Cañada bus depot, I was feeling much more sanguine about the bus trip ahead. Mérida was only 480-odd kilometres and (hopefully) no more than nine hours away, The road in Yucatán especially Highway 190D was better than in Chiapas and we were going away from the hills of western Chiapas where the threat such as it was to vehicles from the Zapatista rebels seemed to be concentrated. It also felt reassuring that this time I wouldn’t be doing the long bus trek solo.
Mérida: town planning by numbers!
On this occasion the overnighter did go smoothly and incident free, arriving at our new hotel in Mérida in just over nine hours. After a bistro breakfast of eggs and pancakes the only thing to do was slip on the joggers for an exploratory walk around the new territory. In terms of acreage I discovered that Mérida was quite a big place. After initially traipsing too far the wrong way away from Centro and finding f-all apart from a host of big international hotels, I doubled-back towards the historical quarter. Being short on the MXN folding stuff I spent much of the morning searching the local money-changers for the best deal before settling for a hole-in-the-wall tienda in Calle 55 that was offering 18-something for the USD*.
“Lovers’ double-handlers” – for Amantes gigantes!
The cambio de dinero was next to a cute little park called Parque de Santa Lucia. Here whilst buying some lunch I spotted for the first time a unique and endearing feature of the city’s parks…Meridians were big on these quaint “double-handler” seats or as someone described them to me, “the lovers’ seats the colour of white doves”💕: two U-shaped seats joined and facing each other to form a reversed ‘S’, so that the couple were diagonally positioned at a slight angle to one another. I later found theses distinctive seats elsewhere, especially in Plaza Grande.
Pasaje de la Revolucion
Scouting round the pueblo Viejo, the old town still has lots of wonderfully grand and dazzlingly elegant large colonial buildings, many with recent face-lifts it seems. As always in the Hispanic-speaking world the focal point of the city’s buzz was around the zócalo, the evergreen Plaza Grande, AKA Plaza De la Independencia (sometimes also known as Pasaje de la Revolucion)☿. On the cathedral side of the Plaza a line of brightly decorated horses and carts stood round waiting to catch the eye of visitors attracted by the prospect of a romantic, twilight carriage ride around antiguo Mérida. The carriage route includes a slow jog along the famous Paseo de Montejo (more of the Montejos below) which is lined with 19th century mansions.
Casa Monteja: stamping on the subjugated natives!
Museo Casa de Mantejo: The colonial boot-print
Museums are high on many visitors’ “to see” list in Mérida City and Plaza Grande is an ideal place to start a quest of the city’s history…and Mérida has lots of visible history, dating from 1542 – just 50 years after Columbus’s mis-discovery of India(sic). Museo Casa de Mantejo, directly opposite the zócalo on the south side was my first stop on the history trail. The 470 year-old mansion at № 506 Calle 63 is beautifully renovated inside with classy period furnishings, but it is Casa Mantejo’s facade that makes it most distinctive and most talked about. The Montejo family (the conquerors of Yucatán) started building the house immediately after the city was founded (it was completed in 1549) and it wears its ancient lineage in the weathered (albeit recently patched-up) character of the facade⊙. The unusual sculptural ornamentation surrounding the entrance is what marks it out for comment…two Spanish conquistadors armed with halberds stand – literally – on top of the heads of smaller figures, that of crushed down native Americans. The complete lack of subtlety of the carvings are a stark symbol of the absolute colonial power imbalance in force between the old and the new communities during that era. An odd assortment of other decorative symbols adorn the friezes of the entrance and the two front windows, including cherubs, monsters and demons.
Montejo courtyard
Special mention should be given to the interior courtyard of Casa Montejo. The austere fawn and white balcony walls of the mansion look out on to an attractive and tranquil setting – a central courtyard consisting of a series of fountains with a knob-ended cross design and native plants and bushes nestling round them.
Olimpio Cultural Center
Olimpo Cultural Center, Calle 61 x 62, Centro
I checked out two other museums also adjoining the Plaza Principal square. Heading back north from Casa Montejo I passed a couple of Dairy Queen stores catering for Mexican sweet tooths (DQs are almost as prevalent a sight in many Mexico cities as Oxxo stores) and came to a long, modern white building on the corner. This building, looking a bit like a beautiful but sterile government office building, had a lengthy corridor leading to an interior central courtyard that had a simple elegance in its all-white layout. Before I got to see the courtyard’s contents, a lethargic and apathetic looking official at the front desk made me sign-in to a visitors’ book (same as with Casa Montejo)❃. Upon entering the circular courtyard there wasn’t much to see other than space, freshly polished white and grey marble floor…and space! There was also nobody else there visiting at the time, so I was the only one looking at what was essentially blank space. This was not entirely true…inside the impressive arches of the patio were a scattering of exhibits of small colourful but unexceptional paintings, the sort you’d see in a community art centre or in a school exhibition…the abundance of unencumbered space reminded me, on a vastly smaller scale of course, of the famous Museo Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, and with even fewer exhibits than Bilbao!✧
Courtyard of Museo Fernando GPM
The Ateneo Peninsular building, Calle 58 x 60, Pasaje de la Revolucion, Centro
The third of the museums fronting the verdant zócalo – all of them gratis si se carga 🙂 – that I visited is on the cathedral side of the Plaza. Museo Fernando Garcia Ponce Macay is housed in a 16th century, light grey neoclassical building that bears the name “Ateneo Peninsular” chiselled into its facade. The Museo which specialises in modern and contemporary art is contained within a part of the complex that historically held an executive function, the Governor’s Palace. After you sign in at Security and stand in the courtyard’s decorative garden, you can get a glimpse of what is the best reason to visit Museo Fernando GPC. On the lime green and white walls of the first-floor balcony are murals that are part of the museum’s permanent exhibition.
Ateneo Peninsular, next toEl CatedralCastro’s ‘Conquista’
PostScript: Mérida and the Muralistas
The murals at Museo FGPC and the other enormous paintings of the same scale on display (strictly speaking not murals because they were not painted directly on to the wall) are part of a Mexican Muralistas tradition, and of course instantly reminded me of the great history murals of Diego Rivera that I saw in Mexico City. And like Rivera and the other Muralistas, the artist responsible for them, Fernando Castro Pachero, upheld the ethos that art should be publicly available, not restricted to the exclusive domain of rich private collectors. Castro’s mural works in the museum exhibit the very distinctive style of the artist – sombre and sparing choice of colours, monotone contrasting of dark and light, sketchily pencil drawn outlines of figures. The paintings of the battle scenes convey an almost claustrophobic intensity in the proximity of each side of combatants.
In a long, rectangular room of the former palace you can find the bulk of the Castro artworks on display, all painted between 1973 and 1975. Thematically similar to Rivera as well, the canvasses depict scenes from turbulent and bloody episodes of Mexico’s history – eg, the Conquesta, the Caste War, the 1860s overthrow of the imposed emperor Maximilian I, Gonzalo Guerrero (credited with parenting the first mestizo in Mexico). The Castro murals are well worth a look, especially as you won’t need to part with any pesos to view them!
Plaza De la Independencia (Zócalo)
﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎
* after Oaxaca I had given up on banks as a source for Mexican currency…one frustrating, totally wasted morning in Oaxaca I tramping all over the joint, trying Scotia, Santander and even the non-Mexican HSBC, none of them would exchange my USD, all ridiculously insisting I had to open an account first?!?
☿ Mérida’s zócalo was one of the most picturesque public spaces we saw in Mexico, a veritable oasis of green palms, bushy trees and ferns erupting as it were out of a concrete foundation
⊙ in architectural terms Casa de Montejo is a civic Renaissance building in the Spanish Plateresco style
❃ entry to all three Mérida museums I visited was free of charge
✧ with more information acquired after my visit I would happily concede my first impressions didn’t do the OCC full justice…there is a little more to it than the sparse scattering of unexceptional paintings – the building contained a planetarium, showed films and had a beautiful outdoor arched balcony with checkerboard floors (not open when I made my visit)
Carlsbad Caverns, NM.
Mexican F-tailed Bat-cave, Carlsbad
B-27 Liberator flying over Carlsbad National Park
1943: Army Bat Bomb test goes haywire!
Dugway Proving Grounds, Utah
Dentist-inventor Adams was extremely disappointed when the Military pulled the plug on the project. Adams maintained that what happened with the atomic devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could have been avoided if the US had stuck with his bat-delivered bombings: (would have caused) “thousands of fires breaking out simultaneously … Japan could have been devastated, yet with small loss of life” [‘Top Secret WWII Bat and Bird Bomber Program’, 6-Dec-2006, www.historynet.com].BF Skinner’s pigeons of war
Aquanauts of an ancient cénote!
▆▅▄▃▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▃▄▅▆▆▆▆▆▆▅▄▃▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▃▄▅▆
Leaving Palenque meant another all-night bus journey, this time to Mérida. The earlier overnighter, from Oaxaca to San Cristóbal, had been a bit of a “horror trip” for me – one long, draining and unpleasant ride. This time, as we wheeled our luggage along the uneven pebbly road surface to the La Cañada bus depot, I was feeling much more sanguine about the bus trip ahead. Mérida was only 480-odd kilometres and (hopefully) no more than nine hours away, The road in Yucatán especially Highway 190D was better than in Chiapas and we were going away from the hills of western Chiapas where the threat such as it was to vehicles from the Zapatista rebels seemed to be concentrated. It also felt reassuring that this time I wouldn’t be doing the long bus trek solo.
