Mexico – Matt Lakeman

Notes on Saudi Arabia

Published on November 22, 2022January 20, 2023 by Matt Lakeman32 Comments

Edits – Various comments based on feedback.

In August, I spent a week in Saudi Arabia. I started in Jeddah, drove to Taif, drove to Abha, and then drove 600 miles to Riyadh. I wanted to go to Mecca and Medina, but as a non-Muslim, it’s haram (at least for part of Medina).

Compared to my other travel writings, this one has a lot more on the history, politics, and economics of its subject. Saudi Arabia has been one of my top travel destinations for years because it’s one of the most unusual countries in the world and it’s currently undergoing a massive transformation. Four years ago, despite possessing a per capita wealth level comparable to Western Europe, Saudi Arabia had:

Complete gender segregation, including forced gender separation in restaurants, mandatory dress codes for women, and a ban on women driving
Prohibitions on degenerate Western practices, including music concerts, movie theaters, and most advertisements
Enforcement of Sharia law by paramilitary religious police who could freely beat people with sticks

Today, all of this stuff is gone. Most Westerners could witness the change with their own eyes in 2019 when Saudi Arabia began issuing tourist visas for the first time. Other restrictions, including complete alcohol prohibition and a ban on any religious buildings besides Sunni mosques (there are a few Shia mosques), remain.

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Notes on the Yucatan

Published on March 18, 2022March 29, 2022 by Matt Lakeman3 Comments

9 UNMISSABLE Things To Do In Riviera Maya, Mexico (2021 Update)

I spent eight days in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, primarily in and around the cities of Cancun, Valladolid, and Merida.

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Polygamy, Human Sacrifices, and Steel – Why the Aztecs Were Awesome

Published on June 25, 2020August 19, 2021 by Matt Lakeman14 Comments

Aztec Leaders: Rulers, Supreme Ruler and the Voice of the People ... — A Chadtec surveys his domain.

The Spanish conquest of the Aztecs was terrible. It was a prolonged period of pestilence, famine, torture, rape, plunder, destruction, conquest, cultural eradication, and general misery, with a short term death toll of something like 600,000 (including military and civilian casualties), and a long term death toll in the millions.

And yet part of me thinks it was totally awesome. That portion of my brain that grew up on Total War and Civilization games thinks the concept of a small number of hyper-technologically sophisticated foreigners led by a verified psychopath waging war on an empire of pyramid-dwelling, polygamist, slave-owning, human sacrificing pagans with the fate of a largely uncharted landmass at stake is incredibly cool. And no one can convince me otherwise.

There are surprisingly few books on the Aztecs, so I took a chance on Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend, which as of writing this only has four reviews on Audible (though 30+ on Amazon). I hope the book gets its due because it’s a fast, narratively-focused, and thoroughly enjoyable walkthrough of hundreds of years of little-understood history, from before the settlement of Tenochtitlan through the Spanish conquest, and over the following hundreds of years of Spanish rule. Townsend’s novel approach to the material is to rely heavily on history texts written by the Aztecs in their native Nahuatl language in the 20-50 years after the Spanish conquests, on top of well-studied archaeological findings.

My main takeaway from the book is that the Aztecs were a highly unique civilization that I desperately want to learn more about. They offer great insights into how a society with radically different structures and norms might function. Whether it was due to their relative geographic isolation, unusual environmental factors, or achievement of a high level of technology for a pagan tribal society, the Aztecs seemed to follow very different civilizational paths than the ancient Greeks, Persians, Chinese, and Indians, despite being at a fairly comparable level of development by the 1500s.

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