Martin um die Welt: 3) Chichen Itza and a horrible tour trip

Freitag, 2. Januar 2015

3) Chichen Itza and a horrible tour trip

7 am in the morning (02.01) the tour bus picked us up from our hotel in Cancun and the worst tour trip started that we ever had. 3 hotel pick ups later we had to wait 45mins because someone was getting a coffee at Starbucks and didn't feel guilty about letting everyone in the bus wait. This let us arrive a bit late at the connection terminal in the Hotel Zone (if we knew about that we would have come there directly, instead of sitting 1.5h waiting in the bus to get there). There we had to wait for the next big tour bus to come. We then started 9:20 am to go to Chichen Itza. The ride was supposed to be 2.5 hours starting from our hotel and we ended up taking 8! hours to get there. Our guide, a Maya himself, started to explain us about the Maya culture. He was desperately trying to sell us that child labor is a good thing in Maya culture because the children love to help their parents. The very common incest in Maya village culture leaves Mayan people with many handicapped children, especially children with down syndrome. However, we were to learn that this was not a burden but a blessing to all the families as down syndrome children are only born to good and friendly families - aha! He then told us that the bus would stop for several shopping stores. That way Mayans would no longer sell their goods on the streets to tourists with high risks of being driven over. So for the peoples sake we stopped at vendors selling touristy crap goods. On the way we also stopped for a short sightseeing in the city of Valladolid. The city was not really worth visiting. At least we knew now that we wouldn't have missed anything if we skipped the city as planned. The last stop before Chichen Itza brought us to the lunch buffet place. But this stop was not without trying to sell Mayan Shaman medicine, Mayan miracle stones or our names written in Mayan language - only 20 bucks each^^ About 3pm we finally arrived in Chichen Itza. Our guide was super boring and we quickly left the group and explored the place on our own. It was packed with tourists but the main pyramide still looked really great! We then had fun making pictures with the pyramide and bargaining for some souvenirs I would bring my niece and nephew. I thought going down to 40% of the first price announced was a good deal. After sunset all the vendors tried hard selling their goods and we found out that going down to 10-20% of the original price would have been a really good deal. We didn't return on the tour bus but took our luggage and went to the local bus. However, entering the local bus right after sunset is no good idea as everyone tries to leave the place. With difficulties we made it into the bus while some other people had to wait for the next one (1 per hour). Cramped in the bus we met a french couple Fabio and Lorie. They came on a day trip from Merida, the city we were going to now. As they were interested in exploring Mayan places and a huge limestone cave around Merida, we would meet the next day to share a taxi for this trip.

On arrival in Merida we went to our hotel Maria del Carmen, which we also can highly recommend :) We then walked around the town a bit and had dinner at Los Trompos near Plaza de la Independencia before we went to sleep.