Another early rise! We booked a tour to Chichen Itzá before we left for our adventure and sorted out the details once we landed. We had to meet the tour bus downtown at 6am, but it was only a 6 minute walk from our hotel to 10th and Constitution, so no complaints there! These photos are all out of order and the blog is a pain to operate on a phone, so I’ll just use each photo as a launching pad to jog my memory. :)
At the end of our tour, we stopped in a small old Mayan town called Valladoid and had a tequila tasting. The man hosting our tasting said his family is one of 45 families that run this tequila distillery. He described the artistry and love that’s poured into each batch and how the tequila we buy in stores has been modified to reach the flavor most tequila reaches from aging, but in an expedited manner. He said these corporate brands use chemicals to create that aged flavor, which also most often leads to a harshness in flavor (and a rough next day). Their tequila is aged and created slowly without those chemicals - it was so smooth. He wouldn’t tell us the brand, but had some larger named tequila in a bottle and shook it up next to a bottle of his and the amount of bubbles was remarkably different - the handmade tequila had barely any bubbles and they disappeared very quickly - the big batch tequila had a “hurricane” of bubbles and they took a few seconds to dissipate.
Chichikan was a cute little resort/park with a buffet lunch, showers and banos, the Cenote of course and maybe some showcases that we didn't pay for... I'm not really sure.
Blue agave for all of our tequila drinks! (Such a pretty color and plant!)
Just and interesting spot outside the cenote. Can’t pass up a photo opportunity. 😉
Part of our tour after the tour of the ruins included a buffet lunch (probably could have passed on that - the only part I really liked was a Mexican lime soup) and swimming at a cenote or sinkhole. The Yucatán is essentially built on limestone and after hundreds of years and many underground waterways, parts of the limestone have fallen away. At this point in our trip, I don’t have a better description. 😂 All that to say, we got to swim in one! It was beautiful! Collin loved it, I wasn’t expecting to swim with so many fish (ew)!
There were so many old, slippery, uneven, wooden stairs! (SO MANY.)
Early morning smiles!
A mural of the ‘games’ they used to play at chichen itza.
The colors everywhere were so vibrant.
Our tour guide, Samy.
You can see the profile of the man the image is portraying. The artistry and perseverance of these pieces is incredible. They can't really protect them from the elements and they're still here over a thousand years later.
So freaking hot. So much sun. Samy was great at keeping us in the shade whenever possible, but whew!
This might be my favorite pic of the whole trip. It was so interesting to hear all the intention and math it had to take to create these masterpieces... and the function of them! I don't remember the whole story, but there was a bird that was present when the Mayans ruled this land and it had a special call - well, if you're standing in front of the stairs on any side of the ruin and clap, the echo sounds just like the call from this bird. So many details like that made up our tour! Another piece that really impressed me was how when we look at the stairs going up the pyramid, they look equidistant and parallel all the way up... this can't actually be though, because if they were, the stairs would be much more narrow at the top than at the bottom, the same thing was designed for each increment or level, the top parts are three feet wider on the stairs and taller on the levels at the top verses the stairs and level on the bottom. Wild.
This is where the sacrifices happened... at the top of this building the winner of the game would be laid down and precisely sliced open. The man performing the sacrifice or ceremony would then take his still beating heart out and lay it on a stone man as a gift to the sun god. This is just the tiny details I remember, it was a lot of very interesting information.
So pretty. It all kind of reminded me of visiting castles: so much beauty, but the reality was that to our way of thinking today, there were many barbaric acts that took place in these spaces.
I don't remember the significance of the snake, but you'll see he's represented many times in the corners of the monuments especially as we got closer to the arena.
So many skulls. They kept them after sacrificing people after the games.
We got to touch and carry one of the balls they used for these games at our first stop in a small Mayan village - they were 7 pounds of rubber that would get hit off their feet, knees, hips, elbows, shoulders, and maybe their heads too, so these parts all had padding, but can you imagine how hard you'd have to hit something that weighed nearly as much as a gallon of milk to get it up into that loop?! Wild.
Another snake.
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