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- cross-posted to:
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Summary
A German tourist was arrested and attacked after climbing the Temple of Kukulcan at Chichen Itza, Mexico, during the spring equinox.
Video footage shows locals shouting insults and physically confronting the man as National Guard personnel detained him.
The temple, a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the New Seven Wonders of the World, is off-limits to climbers due to preservation laws and safety concerns.
Violators face fines up to $16,000 and possible prison time.
The incident occurred amid a crowd of 8,000–9,000 visitors.
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Punks jump up to get beat down. Or I guess climb up to get beat down in this case.
If this isn’t the first Brand Nubian joke on Lemmy, I’ll be shocked. It might be the first for the whole Fediverse.
Lucky that he didn’t get his heart ripped out and the head thrown down the steps
A German tourist
Sorry for not sending out best. I hope the guys wore socks in sandals at least to properly represent our national outfit.
Eh don’t feel too bad, death valley will consume 10 of your countrymen by the closing of summer. Seriously there’s running bets on my area about how many Germans will die and from what, safe bet is 5 from heatstroke.
I think someone mixed up this one and the other recently arrested legalized US german immigrant.
Perhaps a swap at the border would do the trick. 🤔
I’m only German by heritage, not citizenry… but goddamn do I love socks-n-'stocks, aka Birck-n-socks.
I used to work in a tourist area of CA, and most German tourists are very friendly and usually have a good dry humor, only ever had one be rude, but I think he was an offical going to the military base and not a tourist. He didn’t like me walking past the lobby in a restaurant he was waiting to be seated in, I don’t know how it is elsewhere, but when your picking up and paying for a to go order in the US, you don’t wait to be seated, you just go to the front of house area and pay, typically front of house worker or owners aren’t seating people unless it’s an incredibly slow.
German tourists in Spanish resorts are the ones who will go out at night to put their towels on the pool chairs to reserve them for the next day, something which only ever works because other people are too polite to just thrown the towels away when they get there in the morning.
In my own experience living in a couple of countries in including big tourism destinations, people from bigger and wealthier countries have a bigger tendency to behave as entitled wankers who think that they own the place when out of their country than people from smaller or poorer countries, so in touristic places you get for example more Germans, Brits and Americans doing “I don’t care for others” stuff than say Dutch people or Greeks (whilst, curiously, in their own countries they tend not to behave like that, or at least not as overtly so).
You just happened to work in a tourist area that is above the budget of most of our worst offenders (sorry if this sounds classist, it’s absolutely not meant that way)
Every country has its idiots, but none moreso than America right now.
Not really, the thing with the US is just that it joined a long list of countries led by people who should be committed for their own good. The US is not unique really at this point.
US tourists have nothing on UK stag-doers. Those people are a plague.
Not an American tourist this time
Whilst being from a country with delusions of grandeur seems to make them more likely to exist (or at at least more likely to feel free to act like that), all nationalities have wankers.
There’s a weird moment where it’s “Fuck, here we go aga… wait… it’s not our fault this time?”
UN: “USA, NO!”
USA: “What? I’m right here.”
UN: “Sorry, force of habit. GERMANY, NO!”
It’s just a little corrupt, the democracy’s still good, the democracy’s still good
When pigs fly hahahahahahahahahaha wa what
Should I write those cheques to the poor now, sir?
I think I’ve seen this movie, the American runs in afterwards in a fedora. /s
It belongs in a museum!
SO DO YOU!
Throw him over the side.
It’s great that we’re enforcing laws that are there to protect our anthropological heritage. It’s not so great that it means this violator is attacked by the locals.
As an aide, I feel like Mexico themselves have quite a ways to go to protect the heritage site. The grounds of Chichen Itzá are absolutely overrun with “tour guides” telling dumbed down or outright fabricated stories and literally hundreds of souvenir stands with obnoxious sellers that don’t shy from any tactic to try to get your attention.
Walking around in that area should be serene, educational and immersive. Instead, it’s like being in a kindergarten, where hordes of salespeople are incessantly calling out to you (“where are you from, sir, where are you from?”), literally throwing cheap Chinese junk in your direction, playing drums and pan flutes or squeezing squeaky toys and gimmicks that are meant to sound like monkeys. It’s a cacophony of cheap garbage and harassment from locals (and nonstop clapping to hear the temple’s acoustic effect) that takes you out of experiencing your surroundings in an inkling of tranquility. In fact, only from specific angles is it even possible to capture a photo of the Temple of Kukulcán without the brightly colored eye sores of a hundred nearly identical souvenir stands visible directly adjacent to it.
Mexico should also take more pride in this site and treat Chichen Itzá with more respect.
It’s not so great that it means this violator is attacked by the locals.
It’s not?
Not for me; I don’t endorse violence.
Virtue signaling BS. That motherfucker deserves his ass to be beaten to shit
Honestly wish he fell from the top
Good grief, this is such a toxic community.
You can tell when someone never actually gets physical by the way they comment lol
No matter how much you try, Chichen Itzá will never be tranquil, it is visited by thousands of tourists every day, so it will always be crowded and full of voices.
Vendors are usually local indigenous people, and selling to tourists is their only source of income, it would be silly on their part not to take advantage of the situation.
Perhaps you’ve not visited this place, so for an impression: the area itself is very large and open and the site has restricted access with a fairly pricey admission fee.
Voices don’t carry very far in this environment, however the issue is that there are literally hundreds if not close to a thousand vendors literally screaming for attention. My objection is to the authorities who have permitted this kind of presence at a heritage site. Of course locals have taken advantage of the situation, that much is very clear.
I’ve been there many times.
“My objection is to the authorities who have permitted this kind of presence at a heritage site”
Not allowing them would wreck the local economy. It will not happen.
So that’s it? We concede that this is the acceptable way we as a species best want to present our anthropological heritage? Forgive my comments on how we can strive to do better.
If you want Chichen Itzá to turn into a quiet library it’s not going to happen.
It’s one of the seven wonders of the modern world, you have the same experience if you visit the Vatican or the pissa tower.
There are many other sites in Yucatan that don’t receive as many visitors like ek’ balam and mayapan. Those are usually less crowded.
I’m not sure why you’ve chosen to be obtuse and misinterpret my comments. I’ve not said that Chichen Itzá should become a library.
The Vatican and Pisa are actually terrific examples of sites that are not overrun with tour guide and market stand mafias running every tourist scam under the sun.
Good. Wish more locals in tourists hotspots would gang up on asshole tourists. Like Bali is infested with entitled westerners and asshole bogans. It’s the colonial mindset these tourists have.
I know a woman who is insanely entitled and is currently in Bali. I feel bad for the locals who have to experience her presence
How’s Bali
I hear it’s infested with westerners and bogans.
No shit, it’s the Paris of Indonesia. I mean, how is the place doing. During COVID they were struggling.
The rise of the digital nomad is just soft colonialism with tech bros.
Colonialism is about extracting resources. Living in a low cost of living area on passive income attained globally is quite the opposite.
Is it, though? You aren’t contributing anything to the local economy or culture while simultaneously stimulating gentrification…
How is buying local goods and services not contributing to the local economy? It’s the same economic effect as tourism.
Of course they are contributing to the culture. Enriching it with their own culture as immigrants.
They are strengthening the indonesian rupiah by Selling other currencies for it. Then they are spending idr on the local economy.
A developed economy is more expensive to live in. Gentrification just means that the area gets developed. The people that can’t stay there economically are people without education.
This can be solved however with policy. Policies that aim at social mobility like here in the EU.
Tax paid education.
Indonesia is a tax paradise, very attractive.
Very cheap labour. Very young population.
My brain can’t comprehend their cost of living, so I always tipped the Uber drivers in Batam with 100k idr. They often wanted to decline, but it’s like the normal price of transport where I’m from.
I see a lot of international companies there.
Their poverty rate has been in decline since the 80s.
Very friendly people in general too.
Globalism is the way, bruv
Colonialism is also about displacing native/local culture which is what a lot of these digital nomads are doing. One example I’ve seen are the digital nomads trying to stop locals from walking on the public beaches in front of their properties.
So the Turks are colonising my country 🌝 wolf or whatever they keep saying
If it’s a public beach then there’s nothing they can do about it.
Just go there with the whole family and let Karen frown
You’re not a digital nomad if you own property though, or my definition of digital nomad is wrong
I suppose the ability to rent or lease property is much easier for digital nomads than the locals. I think the definition is mostly about people who have the ability to just kind of go anywhere as their income isn’t tied to the local economy.
But, I don’t know. Read this article and maybe it’ll make more sense:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/digital-nomads-work-from-home-gentrification/
You got to wonder how much damage that thing gets just being constantly exposed to the weather
Normally ruins like that have jungle right up to the edges or its partially buried.
At any point would it be worth trying to put some sort of protective coating on it like a type of historically accurate stucco to recreate what it looked like in the past?
No.
Restoring historical artefacts in a way that is sympathetic to its age is more or less impossible.
You’re not protecting what’s there, rather creating something new.
Well, in 500 years it may be destroyed anyways. Isn’t it a little selfish to not try and preserve it in some form for future generations?
My point is, adding a protective coating would be the opposite of preserving it.
Yeah, I didn’t mean that’s the only thing that could possibly ever be done tiehr I’m not an archaeologist or whatever would be relevant.
Maybe it would be possible to just encase it is a giant glass cube, who knows. But is nothing the best thing to be doing? I’m just asking.
Yeah, I’m not an archaeologist either.
I’ve been to a few places where attempts to repair or actively preserve monuments have been made, it just never seems to go well.
We don’t have skilled artisans of the techniques used, nor the workforce. Operating on a budget is kind of antithetical to building or maintaining monuments like this.
I was watching something about the NESS of brodgar recently. A fascinating Palaeolithic site completely buried. Excavations have been ongoing for several years, but now they’re just going to re-bury the whole site so as to minimise any disruption. Most of the site has not yet been excavated. The thinking is, if you excavate it in 20 years time our tech will have advanced and more will be learned.
I’m just saying that steps taken to actively preserve something need to be very carefully considered and in almost all cases the solution is simply to not touch it.
Stucco is much more fragile and degrades rather quickly.
That’s why it usually hasn’t survived in these monuments and why it usually isn’t restored, it would cost way too much on maintenance.
Its just like strippers. You can see, but never touch or you’ll regert it for your next tattoo. No regerts!
Stripers! Things that stripe!
No regerts man
I guess I’m glad my parents took me in the late 80’s/early 90’s when you were still allowed to climb it.
I keep meaning to get my mom to dig out the photos we took from the top.
I went in the late 70s and was even allowed to pick up antique shards (and take them with me all the way back to Germany … oh wait
What an idiot not only for potentially damaging an ancient pyramid but also because those stairs are only about 3" deep and it would be incredibly easy to come tumbling off that when coming back down. I scaled one that was maybe 10 feet tall outside Playa Del Carmen (not a perserved one but one you can climb on) and even that was terrifying to come down as a tall person.
Would bet 5€ that the idiot is some kind of ‘travel influencer’ or something similar.
Wow, they made the temple in Forza Horizon 5 a real thing! How did the tourist get around the invisible walls though?
/s
E: fun fact actually, in the game it isn’t covered by an invisible cube, but rather a pyramid shape that starts at the X and Y of the temple corners but is about 1.5x the height of the temple. Strangely enough, other temples do use a cube/rectangle barrier that far exceeds the height of the asset it is protecting (mostly structures at Ek’ Balam). This suggests that this temple was unique and handled seperately, but the lower protection is really strange. Maybe just an oversight, maybe a requirement from Mexico officials, worried that the usual system wasn’t enough to keep players from messing with it - which, amusingly, allowed players to get above it, but other structures are immune.
Good. That’s what they get for being a jackass.
I have no problem with this.
I climbed that pyramid forever ago when it was still legal to do so.
Tons of people were going up & down. I didn’t realize things had changed and that it was also on the list of “new” 7 wonders of the world.
It was a bitch coming down though because it’s so steep.
Anyway, dude should have known better.
Yeah I was just thinking the same thing - it’s closed now?
All of these had to be closed off because jackasses who tried to take away a piece of the monument, or because they didn’t tread well and fell down.
I climbed the pyramid at Tulum in 1989. I hear its not allowed any more.
