Chichen Itza - New 7 Wonders of the World

Angela was keen to visit Chichen Itza (that’s chee-chen not chicken) as it’s one of the controversial New 7 Wonders of the World, so we booked ourselves onto a tour.
 

Ik Kil Cenote

Chichen is close to a 500km round trip so it was a long day. We were collected from the travel agency at 7.50am and didn’t get home till about 8.30pm. As well as Chichen we visited the Ik-Kil (Mayan for “the Place of the Winds”) cenote, and then the colonial city of Valladolid.

 

El Castlllo, the main pyramid of Chichen Itza, is quite spectacular and very well-preserved (or restored).

Its perfect alignment to the heavens causes the snake phenomenon at both the equinoxes. As the sun hits the side of the pyramid, it looks like a snake is slithering down it. The snake is Kukulcan, the feathered serpent, the Mayan name for Quetzalcoatl. He is everywhere on the site. There are good photos of the equinox effect on Wikipedia if you are interested in finding out more.

Temple of the Jaguar

The ball court is the largest known in Mesoamerica, and the carvings show the game and the sacrifice of a player afterwards. There seems to be disagreement between whether the sacrifice was the leader of the winning or losing team. Either way, they saw it as an honour to go to their death this way.

There are lots of other buildings including the temple of the Jaguar, the Platform of the Eagles, the Observatory and the Temple of the 1000 columns (which by the way has about 500 columns, just a slight exaggeration!) There are paintings inside many of these buildings, and in fact several of the pyramids have smaller pyramids inside them, and statues and carvings inside them. Unfortunately time and the environment has meant that many of these have been lost and the others completely closed off to the public, and even more unfortunately, there are no external copies on the site so that the public could see what they were like. It’s a real shame and it seems strange they haven’t done it, maybe a question of funding.

Kukulcan the Feathered Serpent

It’s a large site and the temperature is usually around 40’, so it can be tough walking around but fortunately there are trees for shade. I had seen Chichen when I travelled around Central America tour in 2008 and obviously nothing had changed but it was good to refresh my memory, and good to experience the tours first-hand so that I can recommend them to my visitors.