Chichen Itza: It’s not the end of the world

You may have heard that the world is ending (again) this year. Conspiracy theorists are convinced that the Mayan calendar - more specifically, an inscription on the ‘Temple of Tortugero’ - points to a 2012 doomsday, when the God of war and the underworld will descend from the sky and essentially throw a spanner in our vacation plans for 2013.  As a journalist, however, I was taught to check my sources - which is how I found myself gazing at the ancient rocks of Chichen Itza in Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula earlier this year.

We were staying at Hotel Mayaland - about as far removed from it’s Disney-like moniker as
one could imagine. The World's oldest hotel inside an archaeological park, the main building is an elegant hacienda, constructed in 1923 by the Barbachano family, who own and operate it to this day. Peacocks wander over one hundred acres of gardens which surround the house, and the hotel has it’s own private entrance to the ruins at Chichen Itza, allowing guests to enjoy the incredible temples, columns and courtyards of this powerful civilization before the snap-happy hoards pull up in their tour busses.

I am by no means a morning person, but I rose at eight to meet Carlos, our guide, and entered a near-empty park where vendors were sleepily setting up their souvenir tables and the early morning sun was just beginning to warm the ancient stones of the temple of Kukulcan. Carlos, who has Maya blood on his mother’s side, was a fountain of knowledge, and reassured us that the end of times was definitely not on the table - at least not according to his ancestors. He explained that there were many different types of Mayan calendars, one of which, the “long form” calendar, measured time in chunks of 400 years, and that the end of 2012 simply marked the end of the 13th period of 400 years since the system was created.

With that cleared up, we continued to wander the breathtaking site - discovering that it was not actually the Mayans, but the Toltec, their predecessors, who built much of the pre-Columbian city. When we stopped to sit a while in the shade, our guide told us about the best local tacos (iguana) and some little-known local cenotes - underground rivers flowing through massive caverns, which were sacred spaces for the Mayans, and are now popular bathing spots for tourists.

Carlos could have continued for hours, but the mid-morning sun was unrelenting, and after four hours we ended our visit browsing beautiful hammocks, blankets, and carvings along Chichen Itza’s main dirt path. By this time, hundreds of visitors were swarming the site. We didn’t mind - we had taken stunning photos, touched carvings of jaguars, and shot some imaginary hoops on the empty mesoamerican ball court, all safe in the knowledge that the wonders of Chichen Itza -or anything else for that matter - won’t be destroyed in an armageddon any time soon.