After yesterdays shemozzle with shitting through the eye of a needle, I was looking forward to the new day bringing change of luck.
As we were leaving at 7AM, I was up at 4AM as per normal, packed up my gear, grabbed the laptop and headed out to the 24-hour Café La Habana for spot of breakfast and to update my Blog.
Not two blocks from the café, a garbage truck pulls up & loads up and then starts compacting its load as I walk past. You wouldn’t read about, but something exploded and I got covered with the foulest smelling liquid you’d ever have the misfortune of being sprayed with. What can you do other than grin and bear it? I get to the café, order a coffee and head to the men’s room to try and clean most of the crap off before eating.
We arrived at the world renowned Chichén Itzá site just on 9AM and my first impression was – wow there’s a shit ton of people here. We were met by a very knowledgeable local guide, who lost my interest after taking ½ an hour just to explain the Mayan’s time-line in history, so I simply wandered off to explore on my own.
I ended up with most of the site information by listening to the various English speaking guides delivering their presentations to their respective groups, a trick I learnt years ago when not wanting to pay exorbitant guide costs in Bali.
I was done and dusted with the site in an hour and a half, then waited another two hours for the rest of the group to be done and arrive back at the bus. In speaking with our group, it looks as if they missed out on seeing the back 1/3 of the site due to time constraints.
Our departure corresponded with a huge influx of tour buses loaded with cruise ship passengers from the resort towns of Cancún (2½ hour drive) and Playa del Carmen (2¼ hour drive), which turned the joint into an absolute zoo.
My impressions of the site??? If it was the first pyramid, I’d have been impressed, but after 4 previous sites, Chichén Itzá would be way down on the list. Unlike the previous sites, you cannot go exploring in & around the site as you are kept well away from everything. The experience is also lessened by all the trinket and souvenir vendors that virtually encircle the entire interior of the site. The management and official facilities of the site seems to be somewhere in the Gordon Gecko “Greed Is Good” and government corruption mantras of “Give ‘em nothing, Take ‘em nowhere and Make ‘em pay for the lot”.
We got into the adjacent town of Valladolid and our accommodations at La Aurora Hotel Colonial around 2PM, which left the rest of the day to explore the town of approximately 50,000 in which I enjoyed strolling the colonial facades of the Calzada de los Frailes.
