Friday 8 May 2015

Chichen Itza

The next morning we headed out to the site of Chichin Itza, a Mayan site from around 100AD, which made it younger than the Teotihuacan site. The drive there took around 2 and a half hours from the hotel. 

After paying our entrance fee and walking past the gauntlet of people selling their craft wares (a lot of it similar to what we'd seen at Teotihuacan) we made it to the main site. Would anyone like to buy a Predator statue?


This is the main pyramid which is fenced off and not allowed to be climbed, but it made for better photos not having tourists clambering all over it.



We got lucky with the photos...

...because there was quite a crowd here today all doing stupid things like clapping at the tower (the echo makes a duck noise when it hits it) and rather strangely exposing their armpits randomly around the site.





I have no idea what they're trying to do. They looked stupid doing it.

A real Chac Mool. Now I'm a big fan of video game Guacamelee which featured a number of Chac Mools at which you could collect a special ability. I thought they just existed in the game.

The hero reaches one of the Chac Mool sites. just like I did. I failed to get a super power though :(

A pretty big lizard was basking behind it.


A short walk from the pyramid is this large centote which I hope nobody ever jumped into as there's no way of getting out. Reading up on it it turns out that it was used for sacrifices. What a horrible way to go.


This is the Pelota arena where points are scored by throwing a ball though that stone hoop. It's reported to be the fastest ball sport in the world so they'd have to be pretty talented to get a ball through that at speed.

With just the one pyramid really worth seeing our stay here was shorter than the pyramids at Teotihuacan and considering the drive time I'm not sure there was quite enough here to justify the journey (my opinion). Those salesmen are also cute annoying and it would make for a better experience if they were given a set area near the entrance rather than all around the pyramid grounds.

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