Advertisement
No trip to Mexico would be complete without visiting the most famous of the Mayan ruins, Chichen Itza. We planned to visit Chichen Itza from Valladolid, a town about three hours by bus from Merida and a good location to also see some other ruins and sights.
Our previous bus experiences in South East Asia had left us sceptical that we would depart or arrive on time and expected numerous stops or delays along the way... how wrong we were! The public transport system in Mexico is brilliant and for a reasonable price we had an allocated seat on a modern air-conditioned coach which departed spot on time and only stopped at designated bus stations.
On arriving in Valladolid we found accommodation easily and set off straight away for Chichen Itza to see it by daylight and to also catch the light show put on after dark. Chichen Itza is the most well known of all the Mayan ruins due to its size and well restored buildings which includes a huge pyramid, an observatory, temples and ball court. Unfortunately you cannot climb the structures, including the big pyramid since it became a world heritage site. Again we hired a
guide so we could gain as much understanding of this mystical site.
The Mayans were brilliant astronomers and accurately mapped the sun, moon, planets and stars. They built their structures to reflect this with the main pyramid having 365 steps, they even adjusted their calendars to account for our modern day leap year. The main temple is aligned so that during the Spring and Autumn equinox, the rising and setting of the sun causes a shadow in the shape of a serpent along the west side of the north staircase. This is also reproduced each night during a sound and light show. It is amazing to imagine how these people aligned and built such magnificent structures with such precision so many years ago.
Before the light show we headed to the nearest town in a collectivo to have some dinner. A collectivo is a minibus which runs along a set route which can be hailed from anywhere and you can be dropped anywhere along the route. After dinner of tacos and a Sol, we headed back to Chichen Itza for the light show. We were pretty disappointed with the quality of the show and the commentary we received
through the headphones wasn’t as good as the information we had learnt from our guide, a waste of money really. Apparently the light show in Uxmal is better, if only we knew that earlier! The only real highlight was seeing the reproduction of the serpent which is pretty cool.
We struggled to find a collectivo back to the town we staying at, but after a long walk and a short wait we hailed one down and arrived back into Valladolid.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.076s; Tpl: 0.02s; cc: 15; qc: 28; dbt: 0.0424s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb
