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 Travel & Outdoors | April 2008 
Exploring Maya Ruins in the Yucatan
 Eliot Kleinberg - Palm Beach Post
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| | Exquisite skull sculpture at Ek Balam. | | |
Valladolid, Mexico - Black swollen clouds slid across the sky. Ahead of us loomed 55 stone steps, treacherous in their steepness and slick with the whipping rain.
Our guide, Carlos, didn't ask, "Do you want to do this?" He motioned, palm up, and said, "Let's go." So we went.
Lightning cracked the sky, jolting us in our ascent. Seconds later, thunder rumbled across the plains of the Yucatan. A wind suddenly whipped up and chilled the air. The rain gods roared, desperate to send us fleeing in terror. But we clambered on, crabbing to the top on all fours.
One last frightening step around an edge, and we were at the tomb of Ukit-Kan Lek.
For centuries, the largest building in Ek Balam - Mayan for "black jaguar" - lay partially hidden, its 480-foot-long, 96-foot-high walls peeking up from a snarl of thick vines and brush. Archaeologists knew it as far back as the late 1800s. But in 1997, explorers chipping away at the wall stood slack-jawed at what they saw - and what we now saw.
Looming in front of us: a 14-foot-high fresco, approximating the giant wide-open mouth of a jungle cat. Along the bottom "jaw" were foot-high stucco teeth. Above the mouth is a headless figure. At the eyes are the figures of two gods who hold up the world. On each side of the face, two guards standing watch. Surrounding the head: nine life-size jaguar heads, plus a series of figures.
A tarp now covers the gaping maw. A decade ago, the explorers walked through the mouth. Behind it, they found the 1,200-year-old body of Ukit-Kan Lek, the Snake Gourd King. Surrounding him were 4,800 pieces of jade.
How the man and his priceless trove, now in museums, remained hidden from bandits for 12 centuries is perhaps the greatest mystery of all.
But the most amazing aspect is the incredibly pristine condition of the soft and vulnerable stucco, protected all those years by the outside wall - even as its counterparts in Chichen Itza and Tulum have been decimated by the forces of sun, water and wind.
"They may be the finest stuccos preserved in the ancient Maya world," said Clifford T. Brown, assistant professor of anthropology at Florida Atlantic University, who worked at Ek Balam as a graduate student from 1986 to '89.
Our guide, Carlos, said there's been talk of building a visitor center at Ek Balam. The country's National Institute of Anthropology and History is studying the option. But the Mexican government appears in no hurry to see it go the way of Chichen Itza, where air-conditioned buses crammed with Yanquis pull up seemingly by the minute, and hawkers line a 600-yard-long road from the visitor center to the main ruins site, selling bowls, clothes and other items, some that are clearly made locally, others not.
Ek Balam and Chichen Itza are about 40 miles apart. To get to Ek Balam, you turn north at the quaint inland village of Valladolid instead of continuing west to Chichen Itza, then follow a road that narrows to a single lane, framed by thick woods, where vultures brazenly picked at a dead dog, scooting only for a moment to let us pass.
Where Ek Balam has only a tiny parking lot, Chichen Itza's giant visitor center has ticket windows, turnstiles, gift shops and a latte stand.
CHICHEN ITZA
At its height, Chichen Itza, populated in order by both Maya and Toltec Indians and showing the archaeological signatures of both, covered almost 10 square miles. The privileged lived in nearby palaces. Cottages in the surrounding countryside held up to 100,000 people.
By the time the Spanish arrived in the 1500s, the powerful Mayan empire had been gone for 500 years or more, replaced by scattered villages.
The Mayans settled in the area in the 9th century B.C. and controlled much of the peninsula for three centuries before their culture mysteriously disappeared. Today, however, millions of people in Mexico and Central America descend from them.
Its most stirring, and popular, monument, the temple of Kukulcan - the Feathered Serpent - rises 100 feet in a giant clearing. It is believed to be 1,200 to 1,350 years old. The temple's four sides approximate what the Mayans believed to be the four sides of the Earth. Each has 91 steps, for a total of 364; the top platform makes 365, a full year. Five adornments per side, times four, equal 20, the number of days in a Mayan month.
At the spring equinox, thousands gather to see an amazing sight. As the afternoon sun moves across the sky, the shadows and light form a series of triangles along the steps to the top. They approximate the segments of a snake: the Feather Snake.
In early 2006, the government closed off the steps to protect both clumsy tourists - several have died climbing the temple - and the deteriorating stone. Just our luck - centuries of access ended mere months before we showed up.
Wood fencing has been erected around some of the sculptures scattered around the grounds. The most recognizable: Chac Mool, a man sitting with knees up, his head turned sideways and a bowl in his lap to hold offerings.
Only 15 to 16 original Chac Mool figures survive, all in museums, including the most famous - hidden and protected for centuries inside the temple of the feathered snake.
Death is no stranger to this place. There's a temptation to romanticize the noble inhabitants of the Yucatan plains. Their far-sighted knowledge of the heavens was remarkable; as is the case in virtually every ancient civilization, the priests knew far more about science than they let on to the masses, allowing their wisdom to pass as magic. But this was also a nation of fierce warriors who practiced human sacrifice.
Surviving carvings along the walls of the temple depict players in uniforms and adorned with feathers. In some, the man's feathered head is not connected to his body. Instead, it's in the grasp of another player.
Our guide Carlos surprised us with the fact that the prize for winning was sacrifice: decapitation, with the head displayed on poles and the heart cut out and laid on a tray in the lap of the Chac Mool. And, of course, a shortcut to heaven.
While the temple is the most striking edifice, the most fascinating might well be the expansive "ball court," which is longer than a football field. A platform about waist-high runs along each side, and a wall rises above it. Twenty-one feet off the ground, a concrete ring is perpendicular to the wall. The hole in the middle is only about 7 inches across. The goal: to get a small object through the ring.
The king would have stood at what would be about the 30-yard line, in a skybox; the perfect acoustics in the field allowed all to hear his pronouncements. Priests stood in the end zone.
Walk down a road from the temples, and you stand at the cenote sagrado, or sacred well. This dramatic sinkhole, with high, slick sides and water depths to 70 feet, gave the place its name; "Chichen Itza" means "mouth of the well of Itza."
The Itza, the Mayan subgroup that populated this area, believed the well to be an oracle and made it a natural spot for human sacrifices. One archaeologist chewed up the bottom with an excavating bucket. Later, famed ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau dove the water, thick with silt and lime, and recovered some 100 remains and countless jewels and other treasures.
If your schedule is flexible, Chichen Itza's dusk light show is popular. We opted to hit Chichen Itza in the morning, fearing forecasts of heavy rains that proved dramatically true at Ek Balam. |
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