The Sunny South # 6: Epic Bus Ride to the Distant Past

My motto for this post perhaps ought to be, "Don't do as I do, do as I say."

When my cruise made its second port call at the Mexican island of Cozumel, my one thought was to take advantage of being within striking distance to visit the epic Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza.  That was my big mistake, right there.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying that Chichen Itza isn't worth visiting -- far from it!  It's an incredible place, and all 47 of us on today's tour came away with exactly the same thought: "I wish I had more time."  Here's why.

Cozumel is a sizable island (actually, Mexico's largest island) located some 6 miles off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula.  To get from there to Chichen Itza, you have to:

[a] walk for some 8-10 minutes from your cruise ship to a not-too-swift catamaran ferry.

[b] wallow across the strait for approximately 45 minutes from Cozumel to Playa del Carmen.

[c] line up and get on a tour coach.

[d] drive for 2 hours and 15 minutes on major motorways to reach Chichen Itza.

Notice that you started from the ship when the docking was finished at 9:00 am.  It's now afternoon, and you haven't even gotten where you're going yet.  At least your tour includes a small bag lunch on the bus -- be thankful for small mercies.

Next, you navigate on foot between long lines of tour buses, desperately struggling to keep visual contact with your guide's neon-green hat waving in the air.  You get a few minutes for a washroom call, and then wait five more minutes for the tickets to be ready.  

Now, it's time (not surprisingly) to go through the entrance gates and security.  You actually hold two tickets stapled together, one with a standard bar code in English, and one with a computer code in Spanish, and you have to get one ticket scanned, go through a security check, and then get the other ticket scanned.  Who knows why?

You then walk for five minutes along a narrow, treed path with a very irregular, dangerous stone surface, while continually dodging the blandishments of dozens of vendors of cheap souvenirs ("only one dollar!") -- mostly marked, "Made in China", no doubt.  Brings to mind the ancient Greek myth of Scylla and Charybdis.

Suddenly, you emerge from the trees onto an immense open clearing surrounded by extraordinary buildings, and it all becomes worth the hours of hassle.  Almost.  Because it's right at this moment, that your guide tells you that you have about 20 minutes to take pictures and roam around before it's time to head back to Cozumel.  

This, of course, is because the cruise ship's port call only lasts from 9:00 in the morning to 6:00 in the evening -- and you still have to retrace the entire 3.5 hour journey in reverse.  Princess Cruises (or any other cruise line, I suppose) can't possibly make their port stop even 30 minutes longer, let along an extra hour.

Princess Cruises calls this tour "Chichen Itza Express."  It really ought to be "Chichen Itza Hit and Run."  Not the least maddening is the realization that you paid $70 in admission fees alone for the privilege of spending less than half an hour actually seeing this extraordinary site.

I think I did well to get as many good pictures as I did in the very limited time allowed.  If I could run, I would have gotten more.

The moral of the entire story is simple:

Do not take a one-day tour to Chichen Itza from a cruise ship.  Ever.  Period.  End of sentence. 

Instead, as our guide recommended, stay in one of the hotels which have their own private entrances to the site, and you can finish breakfast and be out roaming around among the awe-inspiring remains of an extraordinary civilization before the daily tour coaches from Cozumel, Cancun, and Merida even begin to arrive.  Lesson learned, the hard way.

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Well, that's enough of my well-founded cynicism.  Even the short time we had was enough to excite me and overwhelm me with the sheer power of this unique place.  As our guide so aptly put it, the Maya who built and lived in Chichen Itza and many other cities of the Yucatan, Guatemala and Belize, were the ancient equivalent of the classical Greek civilizations -- city states of high social, scientific, and cultural development which were continually at war with one another.  The much later Aztecs were Mexico's equivalent of the Romans -- an imperial, conquest-driven state bent on ruling as many others as possible.  Not a bad analogy.

We started with the ball court, its entrance guarded by this imposing structure.

We know from the carved walls that the ball game played here, with a 6-inch rubber ball, involved slinging the ball with a racquet or throwing stick not unlike a lacrosse stick through the stone hoops high up on the side walls.  What we don't know is why the game mattered.  Sport?  Entertainment?  Religious ritual?  All of these theories have been proposed.

We also know, from this detailed carving on the right-hand wall, that the game ended with one of the players being killed -- as a loser?  As a ceremonial sacrifice?  Again, we don't know.  But once your guide points it out to you, you can't miss the beheaded body to the right of the sun disc, with the blood fountaining upwards from the severed neck.

There are a number of stone platforms, apparently intended for some ceremonial purpose.  You can clearly see the carved heads of jaguars or serpents on either side of the stairs.

Beside one of the platforms stands a heavily-eroded statue of the god Chac Mool, complete with a live dragon perched on it (well, an iguana if you want to be fussy).

Another stone temple pyramid stood off to one side, still surrounded by trees.

Beyond that temple, arcades of columns stretch off into the forest, showing the location of an ancient marketplace, apparently reserved for royalty.

At the east end of the cleared space which must have been a ceremonial plaza, there stands this impressive temple.  It's called the Temple of the Warriors, simply because so many of the columns have warriors carved on them.  Whether that was its real name we do not know.

In the centre of the temple stands another statue of the Chac Mool.  If you were to stand here on the equinox, the sun would rise directly above the statue's curved stomach section, and appear to be cradled on the statue.

The most incredible sight of all is the Sun Pyramid towering in the centre of the plaza.

There's a very good reason why the pyramid is always photographed from this point, showing the northwest corner.  The south and east sides have suffered considerable damage, including damage from stones being removed for construction elsewhere, or by souvenir hunters.  This photo at the southwest corner shows the damage of the south side compared to the well-preserved west side.

The damage is even more clearly visible in this one, if you can see around the grinning fellow partially blocking your view of the pyramid.

Speaking of damage, climbing the pyramid has been forbidden for some years because of idiotic tourists who defaced this extraordinary monument by carving their names into the stones at the top.

The most curious feature of the Sun Pyramid is this.  If you extend the four staircases to an imaginary point where the lines meet, and then build a complete pyramid to those four angles, the proportions (although not the size) would be almost exactly the same as the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.  And it would, like the Giza Pyramid, be steeper than a 45-degree angle.  I'll just end my visit to Chichen Itza with that final puzzle.

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Okay, on a less serious note.

Our last sea day was, again, beautifully sunny, and that meant crowds of people and all kinds of activities up topside around the pool.  The cruise staff ran a bartending contest for passengers, and this was followed by one of the ship's show-bar staff doing a balancing act with multiple glasses of different coloured liquids.  He was pouring all the drinks himself with one hand, as well as adding the platforms and glasses.  Quite the show.  The first pic shows the perfect control he exhibited.

In the second pic I captured, quite by accident, the epic moment when he tried to add just one more glass and then lost it all.

By the way, take a look in the second picture at the bottom of the entire structure.  The bottle was resting on the side of the cocktail shaker, with the first wooden platform balanced on top of the bottle.  He had a couple of fruit slices in there to help hold the bottle steady, but even so it was damn impressive.