The Joneses Visit Mexico: Chicken Pizza.... Make That Chichen Itza

Tuesday was our first day of visiting ruins. We started with Chichen Itza, one of the most visited of the Mayan Ruins. We went with a group and a tour guide.

 

There are believed to be somewhere around 11,000 Mayan settlements. Mayans built ten times more structures than Egyptians.  It's hard to describe the thickness of the Yucatan jungle. I think if you took all the trees in Billings and put them in one block, that would be about how thick the vegetation in Cancun is. Most Mayan cities are completely undiscovered, out there in the jungle.

To walk into this open space of soaring buildings was incredible.

This is the back of the most famous Chichen Itza building, El Castillo (the castle). It is in serious disrepair, but is currently being restored.

The pyramid is made of stones, covered with a stucco-type material, and brightly painted. 

The "brightly colored" part surprised me. I never imagined these pyramids in living color. The colors most used by the Mayans were red, black, green, and white. Red was the favorite and made out of the squished bodies of a certain bug.

This picture shows the repaired side and crumbling back.

These buildings are full of Mayan symbolism. The Mayas were big believers in Kukulkan, a feathered serpent god. If you stand in front of the pyramid and clapped your hands, the echo sounds like a chirping bird. Amazing!

Everywhere we went, we were reminded by the guides that Mayans were big into opposites--life and death, dark and light, etc. (....it musts needs be that there is an opposition in all things....).

This serpent's head is a detail at the bottom of the center stairway. During the June and December equinox, the shadow cast by the main stairs looks like a feathered serpent. June is the start of rainy season, and being able to predict that rain was coming made you pretty important in Mayan society.

This picture from here shows the spring equinox, and the way the shadow looks like a wiggling snake, complete with snake head at the base of the stairs.

The Mayans were master astronomers, and each side of the building has 91 steps that when added together, 

and including upper platform as the final step, totals 365- the number of days in the Mayan calendar.

Every 52 years the Mayans built a new temple. I guess it's easier to rebuild than remodel?

Chichen Itza was an active, growing city between 200 BC and 900 AD. The castle was built around 300 AD (according to our guide, some sources disagree). For unknown reasons, the city was mostly abandoned and all new building stopped 300 years before the Spaniards came. 

Mayas, however, are alive and well in Mexico. They are easy to spot, like this tour guide. They are distinctively short, with thick bones. Most of our tour guides attributed this to the high calcium content in the water.

The semi-ancients in front of the very ancient. Kent brought along a borrowed wheelchair so that Dad didn't have  to walk long distances. 

Some of the buildings showed Aztec architecture influence, such as this one.

This is the platform of Venus, likely used for ceremonial purposes.



 When the Spanish priests arrived and saw all the serpent depictions, they freaked a bit. Okay, a lot. One priest wrote this was the "Kingdom of Satan". I guess they skipped the parts of the Bible where Moses held the staff with the serpent's head representing Christ that all were to look at to be saved. Although the civilization was gone, no new building happening, the Spaniards cheerfully dismantled buildings to build their own structures. It's a wonder there is anything left at all. It probably helped that most of the city was buried by overgrown jungle.

This part of Chichen Itza is called "Temple of Warriors". 

There are around 1000 round pillars, all the same height.

It may or may not have had a roof. One thing I learned as we visited ruins is that not a lot is absolutely known. There are a lot of guesses and conjecture, but archeological and historical understanding is still evolving.

 

Stan eyeing the warriors. A decade ago, you were allowed to climb the pyramid and wander the buildings, but no more.

Although preservation groups have done much to save what is left of the city, they haven't stopped the ambitious vendors from setting up shop around the structures and buildings.

 

Other buildings include this snake-covered beauty.

 Detail of the snake-covered building.

This one is covered with skulls. NOW I get all those ceramic skulls of sale. Our guide said this was to represent kills, but a later guide poo-poohed that and said it was meant to scare off enemies.

All of our guides made references to similarities between Mayas and Egyptians. They both used hieroglyphics and favorite the elongated head look.  This one is Mayan, indeed to make the person look more like God, and reminds you of

 

this one.

 

Here is a statue in well-worn condition uncovered some years ago. 

No worries, his handsomer brother lounges in front of a bar we passed.

 

About this time it began to rain. And by "rain" and mean torrential downpour for the next hour. It wasn't long before we were standing in a lake.

 

For unknown reasons, our guide decided after we'd been standing in the rain for quite awhile, huddled under vendor awnings, to herd us back to the bus, totally bypassing the famous observatory. We sat on the bus for 20 minutes, waiting for other groups. I wish we'd insisted on seeing everything.

Our last stop of the day was to see a cenote (sen-oh-tay). Cenotes are sinkholes the Mayans used for fresh water. They are beautiful.

After sitting soaking wet on the overly air-conditioned bus for 20 minutes, I opted out of jumping into a cold pool. HOWEVER, if you look closely, you can see Cliff and Stan jumping in tandem off of the 15 ft platform.