Chichen Itza

Our other venture away from the resort during vacation was to Chichen Itza. I was really excited about getting to go see it. It is one of the new seven wonders of the world. We booked a tour online that picked us up at our hotel and took us to the site (2-3 hours each way), provided lunch, and had an english speaking guide to show us around the site and tell us all kinds of interesting things. It was a really good tour and our tour guide guy was really good. The other people on the tour with us included two couples from England, one couple from Poland, and another couple from the U.S. The couple from England were really nice and interesting to talk to. It was super hot the day we were there.
The Mayans were very advanced for their time. They followed the cycles of the moon and of venus, they even had their own observatory. The buildings and carvings were very interesting and very planned out. It is hard to explain it all on the blog but if you are interested in hearing about all the amazing things let me know and I can tell you all about it. One of the crazy things is that they had an exact 365 day calender and had their calender planned out for all future years as well. The crazy thing is their calender ends in December of 2012, that is the last date they had planned out and our guide said some people say it ends then because that is when the Mayans believed the world would end. It was supposed to all have to do with Venus in relation to the Earth and moon.

Here is our tour guide, he is part Mayan. He was really good. One of the questions I asked him is how accurate he thinks the movie Apocalypto (I really like that movie) was because it is supposed to be based on the Mayans. He said it is only about 20% accurate.


Here is the pyramid. It has 365 steps, I wonder what other thing has 365 things in it.





This was their observatory for watching the planets and stars.


Another building.


Some carvings.


This was their ball court, which was the biggest one in Mesoamerica.