Travel to Central America

Time Among the Maya: Travels in Belize, Guatemala, and Mexico

Format: Paperback
Author: Ronald Wright
ReleaseDate: 30 September, 2000
Publisher: Grove Press
Rating:

Essential guide for Maya lands -
Don't leave home for Maya lands without it. Classic, essential, practical.

Time among the Maya
This is a great travelogue with lots of history included. Ronald Wright takes us to Belize, Guatemala and the Yucatan, visiting various archeological sites and people along the way. It is well researched including a glossary, notes, bibliography and index for the reader who wants to delve deeper. Good reading if you're planning on going to this part of the world.

The Maya Never Left

However, he seems infatuated with antiquity and the signs of its persistence and fails, sometimes in serious ways, to account for the nobility of the modern Maya's grim and successful struggle to survive. Wright has done the modern Maya a service by calling attention to their continued existence.

Wright also can't help slipping in "green" comments and digs at multi-nationals, stupid governments (oxymoron), and exploitative ladinos. These targets are too easy. For example, he sloughs off milpa agriculture almost entirely and even comes close to lamenting the "death of the forests" that some misguided types think it causes.

What causes over-farming is over-population and neither I nor Wright will convince the Maya to let infant mortality assert itself again since its virtual demise in the last two decades.

Wright does, however, have a feel for the Maya and that makes his book a worthy contribution. His search for X-Cacal Guardia and the resultant events should lead readers to study Yucatan's Caste War and further consider the Modern Maya's view of themselves.

Related products:
click image or link for details on these Central America travel books.

	Guatemala Map (Travel Reference Map)
	The Rough Guide to Guatemala 3 (Rough Guide Travel Guides)