Highlights of Mexico (15): Chichen Itza
It was the last full day of our holiday – Day 12 (Sunday) – and Cox and Kings had managed to organise the programme so that effectively the best had been saved to the last: a visit to the famous Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza.
Roger and Vee were awake at 5.45 am (the clocks had gone forward an hour in the night) which gave us plenty of time to pack and have breakfast before Raul collected us at 8 am. The weather had changed totally overnight: the temperature was down to 29C/84F and it was cloudy and rainy, so it felt much cooler and much pleasanter.
We drove due east to Chichen Itza which is mid-way between Merida and Cancun, a journey of about an hour and a half. Since it was drizzling, an enterprising local was selling yellow plastic ponchos for $5 each but we were delighted to have such more equable weather conditions which enabled us to spend a comfortable three or so hours touring the site.
Chichen Itza was a ceremonial centre of the Mayans over several centuries and was inhabited for about 800 years, so the oldest buildings date from 600 AD and are Classical Mayan, while structures built after the Toltec conquest of 950 AD exhibit Toltec stylistic elements, and it is this blend of Mayan and Toltec architecture that makes it such an extraordinary site.
The most famous of the many notable buildings on this vast site – only a small proportion of which is open to the public – is the Temple of Kukulcan, the Mayan name for the god Quetzalcoatl who is usually represented as a plumed serpent. It is a pyramid reaching 25 metres (82 feet) high with a temple at the summit. It is the not the tallest pyramid that we had seen (and since 2010 one cannot climb the steps), but it was the most interesting because of what the construction represents.
The whole thing is a giant calendar. It consists of nine levels faced with a total of 52 panels – the number of years in the Mayan-Toltec cycle. The staircases on each face of the pyramid have 91 steps making a total of 364 which, with the square platform at the top, totals 365 – the number of days in the solar year. At the spring and autumn equinoxes, the shadow cast by the sun on the northern staircase appears to cause a massively long ‘snake’ to crawl down the building and link with the stone serpent’s head at the foot of the staircase. You can see the effect in a short video on YouTube here.
AnotherIt was the last full day of our holiday – Day 12 (Sunday) – and Cox and Kings had managed to organise the programme so that effectively the best had been saved to the last: a visit to the famous Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza.
Roger and Vee were awake at 5.45 am (the clocks had gone forward an hour in the night) which gave us plenty of time to pack and have breakfast before Raul collected us at 8 am. The weather had changed totally overnight: the temperature was down to 29C/84F and it was cloudy and rainy, so it felt much cooler and much pleasanter.
We drove due east to Chichen Itza which is mid-way between Merida and Cancun, a journey of about an hour and a half. Since it was drizzling, an enterprising local was selling yellow plastic ponchos for $5 each but we were delighted to have such more equable weather conditions which enabled us to spend a comfortable three or so hours touring the site.
Chichen Itza was a ceremonial centre of the Mayans over several centuries and was inhabited for about 800 years, so the oldest buildings date from 600 AD and are Classical Mayan, while structures built after the Toltec conquest of 950 AD exhibit Toltec stylistic elements, and it is this blend of Mayan and Toltec architecture that makes it such an extraordinary site.
The most famous of the many notable buildings on this vast site – only a small proportion of which is open to the public – is the Temple of Kukulcan, the Mayan name for the god Quetzalcoatl who is usually represented as a plumed serpent. It is a pyramid reaching 25 metres (82 feet) high with a temple at the summit. It is the not the tallest pyramid that we had seen (and since 2010 one cannot climb the steps), but it was the most interesting because of what the construction represents.
The whole thing is a giant calendar. It consists of nine levels faced with a total of 52 panels – the number of years in the Mayan-Toltec cycle. The staircases on each face of the pyramid have 91 steps making a total of 364 which, with the square platform at the top, totals 365 – the number of days in the solar year. At the spring and autumn equinoxes, the shadow cast by the sun on the northern staircase appears to cause a massively long ‘snake’ to crawl down the building and link with the stone serpent’s head at the foot of the staircase. You can see the effect in a short video on YouTube here.
Another impressive structure is the Ball Court, a common feature in Mayan cities but in this case the largest in ancient Mesoamerica. This would have been the scene of a complicated game in which small teams of players attempted to pass a heavy rubber ball through a stone hoop high up on the wall. The ball weighed 3-4 kg and could not be touched with the hands or feet, so it had to be kept in the air with elbows, knees, hips and backside. A score could take hours so one score was sufficient to win the game. We know that some the games concluded with the beheading of the losers. As Raul put it: “This was a brutal place”. A bit different from soccer but perhaps not so different from the behaviour of some English football fans abroad.
Many of the other structures on the site have exotic names: the Temple of the Jaguars and Shields, the Platform of Skulls (festooned with carvings of 2,000 skulls and eagles tearing out the hearts of human victims), the Platform of the Eagles and the Jaguars, the Temple of the Thousand Columns (actually ‘only’ about 860), the Ossuary, and the Snail (a kind of observatory).
Another remarkable feature of the site is one of the 7,000 ‘cenotes’ in the Yucatan peninsula. These are sink holes created by water wearing away the limestone terrain. The one at Chichen Itza, called the Sacred Cenote, is big: 60 metres (200 feet) in diameter and 35 metres (115 feet) wide. Apparently, on one of the explorations of the bottom of the green water, they found the skeletons of 127 children aged 11-13 – the only such case of human sacrifice known in the Mayan world.
Lunch was at a nearby restaurant called “El Jardin” which was more popular for being the site of another cenote called Ik Kil and this one – as we saw – is where you can go swimming (although the children use life belts because the water is very, very deep).
Finally, at 3.30 pm, we arrived at our sixth and last hotel where we said farewell to Raul, the best of our guides. It was a place called Hacienda Chichen whose cottages were originally the homes of archaeologists of the Carnegie Institute, who established their headquarters here in the 1920s, before they were extensively refurbished and redecorated for tourists.
On the last evening of our trip, Vee and Roger invited fellow traveller Susan to join us for dinner at the hotel. Roger – who is not noted for his alcoholic consumption – decided that he should conclude the holiday with a shot of the national drink tequila and chose something called ‘hornitos reposado’. A happy holiday ended with a happy man.
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Tomorrow we fly home from Cancun to London Gatwick so effectively our holiday is over. I hope that you have enjoyed these daily accounts of our travels. When we are home, I will copy and paste all these 15 postings into a single narrative with some hyperlinks and later some photographs.