Dianne Boardman appreciates the mysteries of the Mayans in Mexico
Dianne Boardman enjoys an unforgettable exploration of the monuments of Yucatán’s Mayan history.
IT wasn’t how I had pictured our 35th wedding anniversary. David and I were standing side by side in a dark cave, deep underground, with the only light coming from the neon reflections of a bottomless cobalt pool.
We closed our eyes against the smoke from a censer of burning herbs as a Maya priest of small stature but big charisma circled, anointing us with a brush of leaves and mysterious words.
We were standing at the entrance to the ancient Maya underworld, and this was a privileged blessing.
We’d begun our exploration of Mexico’s Yucatán with one of the New Seven Wonders Of
The World, the iconic city of Chichén Itzá, setting off at four a.m. to arrive at dawn, before the crowds.
The impressive hundredfeet-high Temple of Kukulcán looked modern and clean. It isn’t, of course. This monument to Mayan timekeeping was built between AD 800 and 900.
Our guide, José, showed us copies of drawings made at its discovery in 1843.
“Since then,” he declared, “it has been blown up by archaeologists looking for the kind of treasure they’dy found in Egypt, but our pyramids are solid.”
Luckily, those early drawings and the old stone that was left on-site meant it was possible to restore the pyramid to its original glory.
The four staircases on four sides of the pyramid total 364 steps. Coupled with the platform, there is a step to represent every day of the year.
At the time of the spring equinox, sunlight creeps down the pyramid to hit the carved serpent’s head at the base, indicating crop-planting time.
In September it reverses: leaving the serpent’s head, travelling upwards to signal harvest time.
As the sun began to burn through the dark clouds, we wandered around the rest of the half-restored city.
Maya hieroglyphics are only just starting to be deciphered, but it is clear their knowledge was vast.
“The ancient Maya,” José said, “could predict a solar eclipse, save your life with a surgical operation and give you chewing gum to clean your teeth.”
At this, he whipped out a penknife, made an incision in a nearby tree and produced a rubbery gum.
The Maya also played a lotl t of f sport. t At 545 feet f t long and 225 feet wide, the Great Ballcourt of Chichén Itzá is the largest Mesoamerican ballcourt to have been discovered.
The stone hoops stand next to a frieze with a decapitated head indicating a perhaps grislier endgame than today’s football.
Our next encounter with the ancient Maya was deep in the forested interior at Cobá.
As the road ended, locals arrived with bicycle tuktuks, bundling us in to hurtle over mulchy roots with a welcome breeze in our faces.
When we emerged into a clearing and came face to face with a sun-illuminated, crumbling pyramid, we felt like one of those early explorers.
Little excavated, Cobá is 39 square miles, full of structures, most of which are still just green mounds.
It was one of the most important cities in the Mayan world, and we had tantalising glimpses of carved stones lying as they’d fallen centuries ago, sucked into the ground by the fingers of the jungle.
This really felt like an abandoned city.
The pyramid, Ixmoja, is a 90-feet-high drystone structure with a rope as a grab-rail.
We scrambled up to the platform, where the Maya made offerings to the gods, with far less dignity than those ancient priests, and looked down as they had on the polka-dot people below and the forest
stretching to the horizon.
The Maya had already begun to decline in the 16th century when the Spanish arrived.
Many inland cities had been abandoned, but one that held on much longer was Tulum.
Built on a high cliff over an aquamarine Caribbean Sea, it was protected on three sides by jungle and on the fourth side by a coral reef that was impassable by Spanish ships.
Yet the Maya moved freely, because they’d built a temple window where sunlight highlighted a safe passage through the reef.
Tulum felt like an urban park, yet, despite all the visitors, iguanas gulped down giant grasshoppers and we even saw a tiny bear.
After walking around in the heat, we visited the cenotes, or entrances, to the Maya underworld.
Many were sinkholes, where collapsed limestone has exposed green-blue subterranean water that the locals swim in, but one entailed a precarious descent through giant stalactites and stalagmites and lumps of black volcanic obsidian rock.
It was here that the presiding priest offered us the anniversary blessing that gave us one of the most surreal and emotional experiences since our actual wedding three and a half decades ago.