Sometimes you're just lucky-Chichen Itza.

March 22nd- Puerto Morelos

I spied a sign in town advertising Chichen Itza and decided to look into taking a tour of the famous Mayan ruins. I don't take many tours when I travel unless I can pay locals to take me to their special places. One principle of eco-travel is to spend your dollars in the local community, so I avoid the large hotel chains and the grand tours. I'm also allergic to large crowds and like to find ways around that hassle whenever possible.
But, I was amazed to discover that a trip the next day to Chichen Itza would coincide with the Vernal Equinox and a demonstration of an ancient Mayan show of astronomical and architectural mystery and acumen.
A year ago, purely by chance, I was thrilled to find myself in the Galapagos on Porto Aurora on Darwin's 200 birthday, attending one important and Very funky celebration . So I couldn't help but feel that the universe was nudging me here.

At Chichen Itza on the spring and autumnal equinoxes , the steps of the main temple,which forms a perfect 365 day calendar, are transformed in the fading light into their totem, the serpent, which runs from 'heaven' at the top of the pyramid, down the side of the steps to the base, where it joins the stone head of the snake with fangs barred.
I suppose that it was meant as a message to all the populace to 'get busy', with either spring planting or fall harvesting. How they accomplished this though is still bit of a mind boggle and the phenomenon went unnoticed by archeologists until fewer than thirty years ago.
It is quite impressive, as are the grounds themselves which are vast and imposing, surrounded by multipurpose pyramids that contain a few "how'd they do that?" technical tricks. The serpent somehow hisses and if you stand in the center of the large plaza and clap your hands, the noise reverberates and raises in pitch until it sounds like eagles screaming. Eagles are another totem, they don't exist in this area but their symbol was introduced when the Mayans were conquered by the Toltecs.
Although the serpent runs the steps for three days, most people travel from around the globe to catch that special Mayan energy on the twenty-first of March, the vernal equinox. Approximately 55,000 people share the rapture on that day. I was happy experiencing my Mayan energy one day before, with a reasonable crowd of only 6,000.
The Mayans had extensive libraries written in their Hieroglyphic language which was only cracked by incredible chance just, after WWII.
Thanks to the Spanish priests, who were appalled by the blood sacrifice of Mayan religious practices, and to the Mayans, who could comfortably integrate Catholic expressions of suffering, pain and blood sport into their own cosmology, the religion was doomed. When they melded the two into a really bloody religious expression, the Spanish panicked and destroyed all but four books of their ancient and complex culture. Not defending blood sacrifice here, but we lost the knowledge of a culture that had a calendar that more accurate than our own and that could predict astronomical events 26,000 years in the future. That's a big loss. A lot of over-kill.

Like I said, I don't like crowds ,so I went on the day before and I think that I still felt plenty of that special energy. In fact Spring has always made me feel pretty frisky, serpent or no serpent.