The Maya

When I first decided to go back to Mexico last month, my idea for an itinerary was fly to Cancun, stay at an all inclusive resort property on the east edge of the Yucatan Peninsula for a few nights, take a day trip to the ancient Mayan city of Chichén Itzá and then kick back and chill for the rest of the time. Sounds fun, right? Especially when it gets me out of cold Washington, D.C. in late January.

But the more we started looking into the value of visiting the Yucatan, the more we became convinced that the right thing to do would be to immerse ourselves in the old land of the Maya and take in as much as we could in our three full days there. That meant swimming in some cenotes which first allowed the Maya to settle in the area; chasing some pink birds before visiting the ruins at Ek Balam north of Valladolid; and spending three nights right outside what we hoped would become the crown jewel of our trip: the old city of Chichén Itzá. 

This was not my first visit to this part of Mexico. I was down there about eight years ago doing exactly what I originally planned to do on this journey, namely spend time at the beach drinking all included beer and margaritas and taking a quick car ride down to some old ruins (Tulum, on that trip). But after that first trip, I regretted not going to Chichén Itzá, thinking at the time it was too far to go for the day. I think my regret was understandable. After all, it's supposed to be one of the new seven wonders of the world; it had to be pretty good, I assumed. 

This year, I found out. 

Looking west toward the Platform of the Tombs. The platform of Venus is beyond that.

The earliest origins of the Mayan civilization can be traced back to about the third millennium B.C. At its height, there were Mayan villages and cities all over the Yucatan in present day Mexico; throughout Belize and Guatemala; and into parts of Honduras and El Salvador. The glory days of the civilization started around 250 A.D. and continued for about 675 years when they were discovered (and conquered) by the Toltecs from present day central Mexico and absorbed into the Toltec culture. 

The Mayans were incredible people (notwithstanding the whole human sacrifice thing). They emerged from a nomadic hunter-gatherer culture and spread across the jungles and plains of central America. They studied the stars extensively and understood the relationships between our planet and the cosmos, particularly the planet Venus, which they knew synched with the Earth's orbit every eight years. They used their knowledge gained from the study of the skies to tell them when to plant crops and when to harvest.

They also were skilled mathematicians and keepers of time. They were the first known peoples to conceive of the concept of zero and they kept a remarkably accurate calendar, consisting of 18 twenty day months with a remaining five days each year reserved for celebrations and rituals. And for sure they could build. The pyramids and other structures they left are scattered all over central America and are still standing today.

I'm writing here about the Maya as if they no longer exist. Indeed, they are still around today and enriched our own journey this year. I expect that most of the employees of our hotel and the many many taxi drivers that carted us around the region identify themselves as Mayan.

Mayan peoples started living around the site of Chichén Itzá as early as 150 B.C. In the formative centuries of the Mayan culture, the groups living in the southern area of their territory developed faster, having plentiful building materials in the jungles of what is now Guatemala to create shelter. But as technology and building techniques advanced, the proximity to large amounts of available limestone (the Yucatan Peninsula is essentially an enormous limestone shelf) allowed the people located in the north to build the Maya's greatest cities.

Chichén Itzá started to be developed in a serious way in the middle of the sixth century A.D. and about 150 years later it had become established as an important political and economic city. But its real heyday started with its absorption into the Toltec culture by the Itzae peoples who arrived in the year 918 (before their arrival the place was named something different; Chichén Itzá means "at the mouth of the well of the Itzae"). Later that same century the Itzae consolidated Chichén Itzá as the capital of their empire, which I suppose accounts for its impressive size. 

The city's importance outlasted the independence of the Mayan empire but at around the year 1200 the site was abandoned for good. Nobody understands exactly what happened but it is most often thought that the Itzae were defeated in battle as the result of some dispute with one of their neighbors. Regardless of what exactly occurred it seems pretty certain that around the turn of the 13th century the old city of Chichén Itzá started to be absorbed back into the jungle. 

Serpents' heads at the base of the north stair of the Ossuary, or Tomb of the Great Priest.

As the base for our Mayan pilgrimage, we elected to stay at the Lodge at Chichén Itzá, which is located directly adjacent to the property. So close, in fact, that they have their own private entrance to the ruins. For a full Mayan experience, this place was about as perfect as we could have wished for. Sure the backdoor to Chichén Itzá was fantastic but beyond that the property was lush, the staff were great and we could see the old Mayan observatory from the hotel bar where we ate a couple of meals and kicked back with a Sol beer or two (or three). Definitely worth the price of admission.

We elected to get right to it the day after we arrived, entering the Chichén Itzá property just 30 minutes after opening time at 8 a.m. Our walk that morning took us along a path through the jungle and into the main space of the city dominated by the massive pyramid called El Castillo. Our first impression was that the place was huge. Way bigger than similar ancient places we had been like the Roman Forum, Stonehenge or Herculaneum. After a couple of hours walking around about half of the property, we were wrong. It's not huge; it's whatever bigger than huge is. We wouldn't leave the place for five hours.

As a generalization, Chichén Itzá is pretty much a ring of temples arrayed around an extremely impressive and remarkably still together central pyramid. But spend some time exploring and you'll find more than that, including warehouses, an observatory, markets and steam baths. These folks that built this place were pretty sophisticated. We often praise the Romans for their advanced technology when it came to construction; the Maya were pretty close to that standard.

One of the difficulties of visiting cities like this one is that the only buildings remaining are civic in nature, presumably because private homes or shelters were constructed from less permanent materials. That's exactly what you will find at Chichén Itzá. Usually the buildings at these sites have been looted at some point and everything of value or aesthetic interest has been stripped away for repurposing or sale to some antiquities collector or museum. But here Chichén Itzá is different; there are an extraordinary amount of still in place carved panels throughout the property that give us glimpses into Mayan life. It's actually really impressive the amount of intact carvings. I guess that's what happens when you build a city in the middle of the jungle and then abandon it there for centuries.

So what did we do in almost five hours at Chichén Itzá? Well for one thing, we saw everything they would let us and maybe one building beyond that. We started at El Castillo and walked west to the Temple of the Warriors and beyond before circling back counterclockwise to the sacred cenote where human sacrifices by drowning were offered to the gods. After managing to avoid buying anything (well almost anything; couldn't resist the necklace with my Mayan zodiac symbol on it) from the gauntlet of vendors on the way to and from the cenote, we hit the Temple of the Jaguars and its adjacent ball court before heading south to the observatory and the buildings around that structure.

In between all of that, we visited every building between those monuments; hydrated; watched iguanas scamper over the ground and sun themselves on the ruins; and managed to wander down a closed to the public path and found the Akab Dzib, one of the oldest buildings on the site.

One of the things I found most confusing about visiting the old Roman Forum when we visited there in 2015 was the overlapping and overwhelming nature of the narrative around the site. There was everything from foundations to partially intact buildings of every century that the Romans had built and rebuilt near the Palatine Hill. It was very difficult to get a complete picture of what the site was like at any one time because they have tried to represent every building ever standing in that spot, even if some buildings were demolished and replaced by others in the exact same locations.

Not so at Chichén Itzá. What you find here is a snapshot in time of what the place was like at the end of the 13th century. The relationship between buildings and spaces is so clear because most of what was built there was done in a really permanent way and is still there for you and me to see today. As an architect and someone interested in history, I was impressed by a number of things about the old city.

First, I find it impossible not to be awed by the sheer size of the place. All told, there are about 30 large to very large structures on the site in various degrees of ruin from a few columns on a foundation to the three pyramids on the property which looked to me to be either completely intact or maybe just a little bit less than that. There is a lot to see here.

Secondly, the quantity of carvings at the site are incredible, most notably the skulls at the Tzompantli shown at the top of this post, the jaguars and eagles on the nearby Platform of the Eagles and Jaguars and the warrior carvings which ring the immense ball court. The jungle must have kept people who would have been inclined to steal these things from taking them, either by just hiding them completely or by making it so difficult to transport really heavy stone panels over a hundred miles through dense brush that they just didn't even try. There's a lot of carvings to see, including at the more recent, Toltec-built Group of the Thousand Columns near the Temple of the Warriors.

But as awesome as the size of the property and the intact carvings are, the star of the show is clearly El Castillo, the massive pyramid around which everything else revolves and the single building most associated with the name Chichén Itzá. Rarely do I fall for the most popularized building on a site like this but here I can't help it.

El Castillo translates into English as "the castle" but the real name of the pyramid is the Temple of Kukulkán, the winged serpent which served as one of the primary deities in Mayan mythology. It stands 24 meters (or just shy of 80 feet) high which is clearly the highest building on the campus. Each side of the pyramid has 91 steps; multiply 91 by four sides and add a common top step and you get 365, which is the number of days in the Mayan calendar. 

The north side of El Castillo is the most intact today which is fortunate because it is the most important of the four sides. At either side of the stair on this facade is a stringer with a carved serpent's head at the bottom. This is an important design feature. The structure is aligned with the sun such that the stepped sides of the pyramid cast a shadow on the stringers during the spring and autumnal equinoxes that make it look like there is a serpent on the sides of the stairs on this side of the building.

The Temple of Kukulkán can be seen throughout the ruins of Chichén Itzá. It was clearly the singular focus of life one millennium ago. There are a couple of smaller pyramids on site that have a similar form as El Castillo but nowhere near as impressive, although the serpent's heads on the Ossuary just to the south are probably better preserved. I was shocked by the impression the Temple made on me. This alone was worth a trip.

The observatory with the Temple of the Carved Panels, and a Mayan arch, in the foreground.

As impressed as I was with El Castillo, I think it's worth spending a paragraph or two on the observatory at the south end of the site. This was the first part of Chichén Itzá we saw on our arrival at our hotel stunningly framed by the front door opening. My first thought here was "Why does it look like a modern observatory? It's not like they had telescopes way back then, right?"

My first thought was correct; the Maya did not have telescopes. And I had that thought all the way through our day on the property. But one of the advantages of traveling rather than reading a book or watching TV is how you gain information from the place which reinforces what you see. In the case of the observatory, our learning came from an unlikely source: a planetarium style presentation about Mayan mythology located on our hotel's property. It cost $9 U.S. per person and took just 30 minutes but it was enormously valuable. It described both the Mayan creation myth and the importance of the stars and planets in their annual cycle of life.

But most importantly, it told us that the observatory was built to observe the planet Venus. It is aligned 27.5 degrees north of west which corresponds to the direction where Venus is at its highest point in the night sky. Marks related to the movement of Venus have been found in Mayan buildings in a number of locations and the cycle of Venus corresponds to the death and resurrection cycle of Kukulkán. 

The Mayans were almost obsessed with the planet Venus and built an entire observatory just to track it and its relationship to the seasons and their own myths. If I wasn't impressed with the Mayan calendar and the equinox serpent on El Castillo (I was), I sure was impressed with this dedication to study of the night sky. It all hit home that night towards the end of dusk when we walked to the hotel bar and saw the observatory outlined against fading light and Venus shining bright up in the sky. Never would have understood all this without being there.

The observatory at dusk-ish; Venus is the bright dot in the upper left.

When I think back to that first trip I took to the Yucatan back in 2009, I no longer regret not visiting Chichén Itzá. In fact, I'm glad I didn't. After the full day on site and the couple of extra days staying nearby rather than at some all inclusive resort on a beach somewhere, I'm glad I decided all those years ago it wasn't worth a day trip. Because ultimately, it isn't worth a day trip; it's worth a whole day and more. Being able to come back to the hotel each night and see the observatory with Venus high overhead is worth way more than a few hours sandwiched between a two hour plus each way bus trip. Chichén Itzá is best when explored for more than a rushed guided tour.

Before I end this post, I thought it worth sharing a few final thoughts on Chichén Itzá.

First, the ride from the Cancun airport to Piste (which is right near the ruins) was a long one. It's about 200 kilometers from the airport to the site which takes about two and a half hours in a Mexican cab. On the surface of things, that's not an overly long period of time and it's also not that expensive (about $120-165 U.S.). It's the road you have to travel that makes it long. The highway is the same all the way from the airport until about 5 kilometers from the hotel: straight, flat, empty and bordered by about 25-30 foot high trees on each side. No breaks, nothing different, nothing to see. Just monotony all the way. I think if I were doing it over again, I'd try to fly to Mérida on the western side of the Peninsula rather than Cancun on the eastern. It's a little closer and maybe there's more to see?

Take a cab from the Cancun Airport to Chichén Itzá and you are in for 2-1/2 hours of this view.

Secondly, when we checked into our hotel, we were offered the opportunity to hire a guide for two hours to show us around Chichén Itzá for a $45 U.S. fee. After a few minutes thought, we decided to pass on this offer. As luck would have it, we picked up a guide book called "Chichen Itza History, Art and Monuments" at the hotel gift store for M$136 (that's about $7 U.S.) which served us just as well as a guide if not better. Also, I don't know how fast we would have had to walk or how much we would have had to skip to get through the whole property in two hours because it took us between four and five to do it with our guidebook we picked up for seven bucks. I think declining the guide was completely the right call for us.

Closing point three: Mexico is hot. So get an early start. I imagine this comes as no surprise to those of you who have been to Mexico before. I remember it being hot in Tulum when I visited there in 2009 but that was in May. We went this year in January! By the time it got to 10:30 in the morning, it was hot. By the time noon rolled around, it was pretty unbearable. I was moving from the shade of one tree to another very quickly and then resting while in the cool spots. I wouldn't start my visit Chichén Itzá at any time other than early in the morning.

El Castillo at night.

Finally, there's a nighttime light show at the property which is interesting. The gates open at 7 p.m. and it's about $20 U.S. per person. Your $20 gets you into the property after dark to view the place on a controlled route lit up with L.E.D. lights which change colors. That self guided walk is followed by a video projection directly onto El Castillo which details the history of Chichén Itzá while also relating it to the Mayan creation myths.

Two things here. First, the audio of the projection portion is all in Spanish. We'd already studied up on Mayan mythology in our hotel so we could follow along pretty well. Secondly, the actual presentation starts at 8. We didn't understand this so we rushed through the self-guided walk and ended up sitting in our seats for about 30-40 minutes waiting for everyone else to finish. If we'd have known the show was starting an hour after the gates opened we would have taken our time in the first part of the activity or showed up a little later.

I'm not sure the light show was worth the full $20 but what else are you going to do at night when you are in the center of the Yucatan Peninsula? I think it's worth it to do once. If nothing else it shows the friezes around the property in dramatic lighting which improves their readability and there's a part of the projection which shows El Castillo overgrown with virtual jungle which makes you think about the condition it must have once been in. It was definitely cool enough to do once. And again, what else do you have to do at night in Pisté?

Frieze at the ball court lit up at night. Improves the carved detail in my opinion.

Flamingo Hunt

I suppose it all started just after I got home after my December 2014 trip to southern Florida. We took that trip primarily to drive to Key West at the end of U.S. Route 1 and to find some alligators and maybe some birdlife in the slowly moving river that is the Everglades National Park. When we got back home we discovered there were flamingos to be spotted in the Everglades and we completely missed it. Yes, I know there's a visitor center called the "Flamingo Visitor Center." Just didn't notice it. Darn! Would have liked to have seen some flamingos.

Now as luck would have it, this would not be my only shot at seeing a flamingo or two in this five year quest. We thought we might have a chance at seeing some in Africa but we went to the wrong part. I mean it's understandable, right? I mean Africa is a continent, not some National Park on the end of a state. Darn, again!

Then last summer, after missing albatrosses and penguins in the Galápagos Islands, we ran across two (yes, just two) flamingos the last evening before heading back to Quito and mainland Ecuador. Three trips less than two years apart all theoretically with an opportunity to check out some pink birds and just one hit. I thought that was it.

Then we decided to visit Mexico and in the process of our research discovered there were more than 50,000 non-migratory (note: non-migratory) Caribbean Flamingos living in two nature preserves on the north shore of the Yucatan Peninsula. We had to get to one, right? I mean, I know we didn't necessarily plan to make a portion of this five year quest about getting close to these birds but after a (unbeknownst) near miss in Florida, a total whiff in Africa and a little taste in the Galápagos, we just couldn't not go, right? Right!

So on our second day in country, we decided to head to Rio Lagartos which would serve as the central point of departure for the Rio Lagartos Biosphere. Flamingos, here we come!

Rio Lagartos is a long way from Chichén Itzá where we were staying. It took us about 35-40 minutes in a taxi cab (that's about 25 miles and 500 pesos or $25 complete with tip) to get over to the city of Valladolid where we hooked up with MexiGo Tours and our driver / guide for the day, Gilberto. From Valladolid, it took a little more than two hours before we arrived at the water to meet up with our boat, an eight person or so flat bottomed motor boat anchored right in front of the El Perico Marinero restaurant. A quick transfer to the boat and we were off, about three and a half hours after we left our hotel. This better be worth it.

Cormorants sunning themselves as we whizzed by searching for flamingos.

We started out heading west in an environment that is very much like the Everglades, meaning mangrove swamps with shallow to sometimes very shallow waters connecting each mangrove stand to the next. It's a perfect environment for wading birds like herons, egrets, storks and yes, you guessed it...flamingos. Rio Lagartos seemed far less dense than our Florida experience but that may have been just the areas we went to. Overall the trip seemed far more like open water and less swamp-y.

Considering the grand total of wild flamingos seen in my life before this trip was two, the first 20 minutes of this journey was like hitting the lottery. Literally five minutes after we pushed off, we spotted our first flamingo, filtering shrimp through his bill as he (or she, I suppose) slowly ambled from a sandbar towards a stand of trees. Minutes later, we found another seven (at least that's how many I count in the photograph below).

This first mass (yes, I'm calling eight a mass) sighting was awesome and an opportune time for some quick flamingo facts from Gilberto. Flamingos get their characteristic pink color from the tiny shrimp they eat while striding around with their beaks in the water (I knew this already). To get enough food for a day they need to filter 200 liters of water through their bills (OK, didn't know that or anything else he told us). They can live as long as 40 years or more in the wild, can start mating around six years of age and are monogamous for a year at a time. Sort of the serial daters of the bird world I guess, although we learned this past summer that blue-footed boobies do the exact same thing. Survival can be tenuous; flamingos lay just one egg per season which incubates for 28 days.

Now that we knew all that, let's keep going again. Let's find some more (like hundreds or thousands) and get way closer.

That's when we got stopped. The waters in the biosphere are tidal and the tides cause some parts of the park to be especially shallow. Too shallow, in fact, to use the motor on the boat. You can sort of see that in the photograph above, taken in probably ten inches of water. So after an attempt or two at pushing the boat forward with a big stick, we turned around and away from our flamboyance (look it up) and headed back east, hoping that wouldn't be the last we'd see that day.

Pushing the boat desperately towards the flamingos.

Despite the self-professed singular focus of our trip to Rio Lagartos, there was a whole lot more birdlife and wildlife to see. We motored past numerous great egrets, lesser egrets and snowy egrets in addition to at least two species of heron (great blue and green) and a few pelicans, common black hawks and cormorants. We also found four crocodiles along our west to east journey and got up close and personal with two, getting me to within about a foot or two of one's head and getting close enough to another to allow our captain to take a swipe at the croc's tail with his hand (he missed). And all that was well and good (and actually some really good looks at some incredible animals and birds), but we had come to see flamingos. And 90 minutes in, our tally still stood at eight.

Common black hawk...

crocodile (this was the closest and coolest of the four)...

and green heron. All really cool, especially the green heron, but we came for flamingos, darn it!

Our tour that day included a Mayan mud bath, which was basically a stop by the side of the river near a muddy patch where you could spread some exfoliating white mud all over your skin. We passed on this experience; I knew it would not be one of those regrets I'd have later in life, like chickening out on eating snails in Marrakech or driving into residential neighborhoods to get a closer look at the Hollywood Sign.

The Mayan mud bath location was in a part of the biosphere that is being used for salt farming, with a man-made canal cut into the white earth to separate out a pinkish-brown river of what looked like very unclean water with some salty foam floating on the surface. Not appetizing at all and not really relevant to this story. On the other side of the canal though is where we found our final sighting of flamingos for this trip. No, there weren't thousands or even hundreds, and no, they weren't close, but if nothing else, I can say there were more of these birds in the wild in any one spot than I have seen before. We counted about 34 or 35 all the way from the closest maybe 100 yards from us all the way into the distance a lot further away than that. Gilberto claimed he had a few more; whatever. It's not hundreds or thousands. The quality of our encounter is reflected in the photograph below.

If it seems like I'm griping about our flamingo quest last month, you'd be correct. Mostly. I mean yes, we were disappointed by the quality and quantity of the bird we sighted. I mean there are supposed to be upwards of 50,000 of these things in this area and we got less than 100. 

But also no. If there's one thing I've learned from seeking wildlife or other natural phenomena in Iceland, Florida, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana, Hawaii, Ecuador and a number of other locations in the world in the last three plus years, it's that with nature sometimes you win and sometimes you fail. If we wanted to guarantee sightings of these birds really close to us, we could just go visit a zoo. And after seeing elephants in the wild in 2015, there's no way I ever want to do that again. I feel lucky just to be able to continue to get in boats and go search for birds like these, and we were really fortunate in the quality and quantity of other wildlife we saw in Mexico last month.

I can't imagine I'll go flamingo hunting again before this blog hits five years when I said I would stop writing about my travels (spoiler alert: I may not stop), but if I do, I hope I'll see more than I did in the Yucatan. Below is the best flamingo picture I took that day. Looking into the sun while that first flamingo we saw goes looking for shrimp so he can remain pink. Below that is the best picture I took all day. Considering the close up crocodile photo I took that day, I feel extremely fortunate. For my part, I'll continue to explore nature whenever I can. Maybe I'll be luckier the next time.

Swimming Holes

Once upon a time, Earth looked a lot different than it does today. It was wild and primordial and completely uncivilized. If you were to take a time machine back to let's say 80 million or so years ago, you would not find a single person on the surface of our planet. But you might find between a few and many many species of dinosaurs, creatures far far larger than any living animal today.

It is estimated that the first dinosaurs appeared on Earth between 230 and 245 million years ago and were the dominant lifeform on our world for almost 200 million years. If that seems like a long time, it is. Both actually and relatively speaking. The earliest evidence of man on planet Earth is about six million years old and the first civilizations date back only about 6,000 years. 200 million years is about 28 times longer than man has even existed.

So let's stop here because I know what you are thinking: what do the introductory paragraphs of this post have to do with a goofy picture of me floating in some water against a background of rock and vines? Well, read on, please. And we'll stick with the dinosaurs for a little bit.

I assume the emergence of the dinosaurs was a gradual sort of evolutionary process and not just a group appearance of enormous vertebrate animals. But when it was time for the dinosaurs to go away (about 65 million years ago as it turns out), it appears there was something that caused a mass and sudden extinction of all species.

The event that led to the dinosaurs' death has been a subject of great debate but eventually most scientists agreed on a common cause: the striking of the Earth by some giant meteor that would have caused a global climate change from which the dinosaurs couldn't recover. The meteor theory seems to have been agreed upon by the middle of the twentieth century even though nobody could point to exactly where the thing hit the globe.

Then in 1978, a geologist working for Mexican oil company Pemex named Glen Penfield noticed a large semicircular arc along the north edge of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula on a magnetic survey map of the area. He had accidentally stumbled across one of the largest craters on the planet, one so large that it is imperceptible when standing on the ground. The only way it could be discovered was with some kind of large scale map of the area that would show more detail than something like a satellite photograph. If the crater wasn't difficult enough to spot already, the fact that more than half of it is in the Gulf of Mexico made it even harder to make out.

The depression in the Earth's surface would ultimately be named Chicxulub (pronounced CHEEK-she-loob) Crater and would be found to date to pretty much the exact same time in history that evidence of dinosaurs stopped appearing. It is now generally accepted that this was the meteor that caused a global blackout of the sun for years, effectively killing off the dinosaurs. For perspective here, the meteor is estimated to be six miles in diameter; that's huge. The impact on the surface of our planet caused an explosion of an estimated 100 million megatons of force, about 2.5 billion times the power of the atomic bombs dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined at the end of World War II. The crater itself is about 110 miles across. It's impossible to see in person.

Last month, I traveled south to the Yucatan to visit Chicxulub and see for myself some of the evidence of what caused what is likely the greatest mass extinction on our planet. Now, obviously I couldn't see where the meteor struck our planet; I mean I just finished writing about that and I'm nothing if not prepared when I explore a new part of our world. So to visit the remains of Chicxulub, I went underground. Well, barely.

The sacred cenote at Chichén Itzá. No swimming here.

When the dinosaur-killing meteor crashed into present day Mexico, it hit a part of the world that is pretty much a huge flat limestone surface, and the impact caused a series of underground caves or open basins (sort of like sinkholes) to form which subsequently filled wholly or partially with fresh water filtered through the limestone below the surface of the Earth. These caves or sinkholes are known as cenotes (pronounced se-no-tay) and have played an important part in life in the Yucatan for centuries. The Mayans used these things for religious ceremonial and sacrificial purposes but more importantly in a part of the globe without rivers, the cenotes provided a reliable source of fresh water to simply survive. They quite literally gave life.

Today the cenotes are not used as a water source. After all, there's bottled water on trucks for that sort of thing nowadays, right? But they are a reminder about how the first peoples in the area came to settle there and they provide awfully convenient and somewhat otherworldly cooling off spots on a hot Mexican summer day. Or even a hot Mexican winter day. And since they are the only real way to connect as a tourist with the event that killed the dinosaurs all those millions and millions of years ago, I had to have one or two of these things on my vacation itinerary. 

Our first encounter with cenotes occurred on our first full day in Mexico during a visit to the ancient Mayan city of Chichén Itzá. Head north from El Castillo on that site and you'll find (after a gauntlet of souvenir vendors) the sacred cenote of the old city, a place associated more today with ceremonial sacrifice to the gods than a spot to cool down on a sunny day. From the description in our guidebook, it appears the locals at Chichén Itzá used to regularly throw their enemies in their local sinkhole as sacrifices to the gods. Once you were in the sacred cenote, there was no way out, the sides are pure vertical; no matter your age (and more than 50% of the bones recovered there have been those of children), you would eventually drown. Nice, right? 

Considering the macabre and archaeological significance of the sacred cenote, not to mention the fact that we too would drown if we jumped in, we had neither the desire nor the opportunity to cool off in the Mexican heat in the first one we saw. We'd go farther afield for that.

Cenote Ik Kil near Chichén Itzá from the water's edge.

To today's residents of the Yucatan, the hundreds of cenotes scattered about that peninsula are literally like local swimming pools. Some are publicly owned and some are privately owned, but most are well used as escapes from the temperatures. We debated visiting a number of different cenotes within about an hour's drive of our hotel near Chichén Itzá but ultimately settled on two close to home: Ik Kil, which ended up being within walking distance of where we were staying, and Yokdzonot, about 10 kilometers or so west of town. Let's go swimming!

There are three basic types of cenotes in the Yucatan: those with vertical walls; pitcher shaped cenotes where the water surface is larger than the opening in our planet's surface; and cave cenotes, which may extend a little bit or a lot into the depths of the Earth. Ik Kil turned out to be pitcher shaped and Yokdzonot had purely vertical walls. Both had manmade staircases leading down to the deep water at the bottom and were ringed with vegetation whose long dangling roots extended from the ground almost all the way down to the water below, an estimated (by me) maybe 100 feet in some spots.

If I were to characterize the difference in character between the two, I'd say Ik Kil was marketed towards tourists trying to grab a piece of local flavor after a bus trip to the pyramid and ruins at Chichén Itzá and Yokdzonot was a local hangout providing a place to cool off for the kids and adults living around the town. Yokdzonot looked very natural with unaltered rock walls and a rough stone and steep wooden staircase to get to the water. Ik Kil had clearly had some work done; some of the walls of the depression in the Earth looked like they were injected with concrete to shore up the sides. Yokdzonot admitted more light and the water looked clearer; Ik Kil was probably a little more picturesque with the diffuse light entering through the narrower-than-the-water opening above.

Yokdzonot cenote. Watering hole for the locals. Felt worlds away from touristy centers just to the east.

The most surreal part of swimming in these deep (I think we heard estimates of about 60-70 feet) pools is swimming underneath and around the roots and stalactites that crowd and form around the perimeter of the top openings of the cenotes. At Yokdzonot these form a curtain around the water's edge, with about five or ten feet behind them to the walls of the basin. At Ik Kil because the hole in the Earth is smaller than the pool below, the roots of trees form a ring in the middle of the water that you can swim around and look up to the bright sunshine. I imagined the long roots hanging in space to be connected to the Tree of Life in Mayan mythology while I swam around them.

As a calm place to cool off on a hot day, I think I'd pick Yokdzonot over Ik Kil, which is built for tourists, complete with restaurants, a hotel and lockers and changing rooms. While the lockers to store our stuff were nice, it was obvious on our way out that it would be getting very crowded in the late morning. We got to Ik Kil just after 10 am and found the place comfortably used; there was more than enough space for the dozen plus swimmers in the water and we spent a pleasant hour or so relaxing. But on the way out we walked past busload after busload of arriving tourists at just 11 am. If all those folks were piling into the pool, I could see it being more busy than comfortable.

We fled to Yokdzonot right after Ik Kil and found a calm emptyish pool mostly used by locals and it stayed at that level of use for the entire time we were there. I'm not saying Ik Kil wasn't worth a visit; it totally was if for no other reason than they have a platform about 15 feet above the water for diving or jumping into the water. I've never jumped off anything that high into a swimming pool, lake or anything else and looking down at the water was a little daunting. But hitting the surface and then popping back up quickly was exhilarating.

Thumbs up ready to go. Here goes nothing!

Hitting the water. Hooray!!

The point behind visiting these spots for me was not to feel a connection to the death of the dinosaurs and think about not only how tenuous life on Earth can be but to spend a few moments thinking about what a meteor about a quarter the size of Washington, D.C. could create 65 million years after the fact. What I ended up getting out of them was so much more. 

We read a little bit about Mayan history and culture before we arrived in the Yucatan. But being immersed in that world for a few days really got us an appreciation of how advanced and sophisticated that culture was. We got glimpses into their understanding of mathematics and astronomy and their religion and culture in ways that we couldn't have by reading books. It all started with the cenotes. Without these things there would have been no Mayan settlements on the Yucatan Peninsula. Spending a morning bobbing about in their waters provided just one more way for me to connect with the Mayans. Plus I got a break from the heat.

Water's eye view looking up at the sunlight at Ik Kil.