Travels with Hayley

Up and out at 6am today to ensure we were one of the first arrivals at Chichén Itzá (apparently it gets incredibly crowded as the day goes on, up to 13,000 people at a time). We were hopeful for a nap on the way but got the worlds chattiest driver, who yabbered on in rapid fire Spanish to JJ for the entire 2 hour journey – you couldn’t be annoyed though, he was so happy and cheery about it. He could just have done with a volume down/off switch occasionally…

We met our guide for today, Fabiosa (‘just call me Fabby’) and set off to explore the site. Chichen Itzá is one of the 7 new wonders of the world – the others being:

1. The Great Wall of China

2. Petra

3. Machu Picchu

4. Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio

5. Coliseum in Rome

6. Taj Mahal

I’ve only seen the Coliseum so far but it feels like a list that I need to complete! But back to Chichen Itza for now at least…

So, Chichen Itzá was a Mayan city active from around 600-1200 AD and it’s most famous for it’s main pyramid and sports arena of all things. Cast your minds way back to the archaeology museum towards the start of the tour, and the daft American asking about Quidditch – she was asking if the game played here influenced it. It was really impressive to see actually in situ as it were, the stone rings attached high up on the walls are still completely intact and the carvings along the side show how the game was played. 7 a side with a 20cm rubber ball that you had to knock through a hoop with your hip or elbow – to make life even harder the hole for the ball is only 30cm and the hoop is about 15 feet off the ground! Apparently likely candidates for sports players were identified as children and trained up and given different food – consequently they were taller than the rest of the general population. So the opposite to when they take away the Russian gymnasts as children to train them up nowadays…

If you scored a goal, the game ended and you achieved what was believed to be the highest honour of becoming a human sacrifice to god – so you immediately got your head chopped off and your corpse interned in a special ‘winners grave’. Interestingly, bearing in mind the hundreds of years the site was active, they only found 20 sets of bones in the winners enclosure when they excavated. Now I know it was a tricky game, but don’t you suspect there were a good few sportsmen not quite sold on the party line of instant death being a good deal and were maybe not exactly bringing their A game to the field you know?!

Human sacrifice wasn’t exclusive to sportsmen, the surrounding ceynote’s were believed to be a connection between the human and underworld and all sorts of things got tossed in them as godly offerings – corn, beans, jewels, children between the ages of 5 and 12 (no, I don’t know why those were optimum kid offing years either…) and flowers.

It’s shocking how much they understood about the world, mathematics and engineering back then – the main pyramid has 365 steps to signify the days of the year and at every equinox, the sun of the late afternoon creates the illusion of a snake creeping slowly down the northern staircase – also, when you stand opposite said staircase and clap, the sound bounces back and sounds uncannily like a bird tweeting – which apparently was a planned design feature. By the by, this was loud and annoying enough with everyone testing it out at once (as you can’t take the person next to you’s word/clap for it obviously, you need to do your own) on a quiet day at a quiet time – 13,000 people doing it must be deafening/wildly irritating! As well as the tweeting and the cool snake, they painted all the buildings in nice cheery colours like reds, blues and purples. So aside from the omnipresent fear of death it was probably an ok place to live.

Funny moment with Fabby, I was standing alone talking to her and she said, don’t you want a picture pretending to hold the pyramid or jumping in front of it? I told her I didn’t think my leaping around would improve the sight of a great wonder of the world – whereupon she looked at me thoughtfully and said ‘yes, you can definitely tell you are not American’! She then went out to outline how she determines the nationalities of her guests:

1. Speaking Spanish and loud – Colombian or Mexican

2. Speaking Spanish and quiet – Argentinian

3. Speaking English and quiet, hands folded in pictures – European

4. Speaking English and loud, novelty pictures and jumping around – American

5. Selfie stick – Chinese!

Think she’s spot on don’t you!

As everywhere there were souvenir stalls every other step and one guy insisted on giving the girls in our group free souvenirs ‘for the princesses’. Very sweet and a pretty good business tactic as it got everyone to stop and look at his stuff but now I was stuck with a mini Chichen Itzá pyramid and no one in my life that I’m currently not liking enough to foist it upon. So I stopped a small American kid on the way out to see if he wanted it – he wasn’t so sure but his Dad confirmed ‘that’ll look lovely in his room, thanks!’ and whisked it away so that solved that problem…

After we left the site we had another 1.5 hours drive to Playa del Carmen, the final night of the tour. I have an additional 2 nights booked but in another hotel as when I checked the one we were staying in with Intrepid, the reviews weren’t great. Yesterday I decided that actually, I couldn’t be doing with unpacking for 1 night, repacking and then hanging around waiting for the new hotel to let me check in so I decided to treat myself to tonight in the nice hotel too – and with some canny juggling of reservations and negotiating I managed to spend the princely sum of an extra £5 to achieve this!

It was a really smart choice, the tour hotel looked clean but with only 4 sun loungers for the whole place, very dark cave like rooms and bad WiFi. And my new hotel is beautiful!! A vision in white, linen and bleached wood, rooftop pool with cabanas and a really cute restaurant on the ground floor.

Once I’d checked in I spent an hour by the pool then another hour in my room revelling in not sharing for the first time in a fortnight, dancing around naked and such like (not that I really act particularly differently when I share a room tbh but still…) and then walked the 40 minutes back to meet some of the others at the original hotel to go out for dinner.

Lynsey’s friend had arrived to travel with her for the next 2 weeks (Lynsey is travelling for 5 months and is alternating between tours and having friends come out to meet her – I feel inspired, who is up for it?!) and we went for dinner in the beautiful garden of a little restaurant next door with fabulously colourful artwork. I had delicious coconut shrimp on the recommendation of the waitress and disconcertingly the giant TV in the corner showed a revolving slideshow of London including the Barclays building in Canary Wharf – the universe is obviously trying to tell me the holiday is coming to a close!

But not yet! 2 full days and a bit left to go – what more can I squeeze in?!

Lots of love always xxx