After we left the Emerald Coast, we headed on up to Xalapa. This is a city with all the amenities including one of the largest collections of Olmec giant stone heads at their museum. It was off our track but the ladies wanted to visit with one of their friends that has a place down in Coatepec, which is just south of Xalapa.
So we arrive there late afternoon, settle in at the parking lot of a Sam’s store and spend the night. Next day the women head off to their friends place and I take a taxi half way across town to the museum. I got there at 10am and wandered around for 4 & 1/2 hours. Could have been longer but I was suppose to meet the women at 3pm and follow them to Coatepec to camp. Well, the road was so bad and the boondocking site so small in Coatepec that we decided to bag that excursion and stayed on the Sam’s parking lot for another night there in Xalapa.
The city itself is just your typical semi-modern Mexican city so I didn’t take any pictures of it, and we were having some rainstorms though the area so it was sort of gloomy.
When you first walk into the museum, this Olmec head is right there. They didn’t have any brochures to hand out so I’ll have to go by memory for this part, I think this head is considered the 7th best out of all they have:
This one is even better, it spoke to me while I was standing there, almost made me wet my pants, stupid ghostly Olmec head voice:
These guys were pissed at something:
These things weighed tons so they are not worried about a visitor walking off with them:
So you know, we are getting progessively older as these pictures take us for a walk through the museum. Starting over 800 years ago and going back to 4,700 years BPE. I won’t say much about these pieces since their descriptions were in Spanish so I don’t know much about them, occasionally there were brochures available in English so I can describe some pieces. This is a picture of the other wing of the museum, I’m still in the first part of this main wing when I took this shot out of a side door, just to give you an idea of the size of the place. They have some of the heads in their own alcoves with other pieces, they look like little courtyards in the tropics:
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This is a panther, stylized as you can see. The mouth is like a pathway to the other side:
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Here’s one of the altars:
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Can’t remember for sure…father holding dead son?
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One of the more interesting figures
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This is a clay figure of someone after they have had their skin flailed, no explanation of why you would want such a statue, maybe as a warning?:
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These following clay figures are all over 1,000 years old and are an excellent example of the type of creative art they had going on back then, wouldn’t I love to have one of these:
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Here’s a couple shots of El Tajin, where a lot of the pieces here in the museum came from, and that I visited a few days before:
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This piece is the most macabre in the museum, this is a clay representation of a torture victim. They would be tied up like the clay figure, with those big ropes, with arms placed in those cones (they’re hard to see, there are like horns near the ear and they are behind the head) so you would have your arms up behind your head and tied, with all the weight of the rock, the whole thing is made out of rock, except the rope then ?, shiver:
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These skulls and artifacts were presented here like they were found in a group grave; it may have been raided, not known:
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This guy with the huge woody is wearing the skin of a victim, seems happy about it:
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Anyway, hope you enjoyed the visit to the museum. Sadly, the Spanish did an excellent job of stealing all the gold so there are none of those types of artifacts here. There are some pieces at Chichen Itza and I’m planning on going there next, don’t know for sure where that museum is yet but I’ll try to find it soon.