There are two Chichen Itzas.

There's the one most tourists see in the early to mid afternoon... the one with thousands of sweaty bodies, fanny packs and tour buses. Then there's the one you see if you're lucky enough to arrive when the place opens at 8am... while the tour buses are still loading up in Cancun.

I got up before seven at the hostel in Valladoid (which, by the way, is simply fantastic and I should write more about it) along with three Aussies who were going the same day. After deliberating over which of Valladoid's two bus stations we should go to, we caught our second class bus on time at 7:30. We were in Chichen Itza before 8:30 and walked straight in without any waiting.

There were maybe a dozen people on top of the main Kulkukan pyramid, so I went straight to the top of it first. The view from there is simply amazing, looking out over the mammoth structures and the never ending jungle of the Yucatan. I checked out a few of the sites we'd either missed or breezed by on the last trip and met a couple from Atlanta I'd talked to in Valladoid the day before.

At 11:00 it was time for the big event. The big Kulkukan pyramid was built right on top of a previous pyramid in the same place.

The Jaguar and Chac-Mool Inside the Main Pyramid

They've excavated out a little stairway up to the top of the interior, where there are amazingly well preserved sculptures of a jaguar and Chac Mool... a reclining thing that I think delivered sacrifices to the gods.

So about this little stairway... you go in at the base through this tiny passageway about 6.5 feet tall and four feet wide. I'm very claustrophobic. I got maybe 20 feet in and freaked. I turned around and forced my way back out. So I went and ate my lunch... a bag of Doritos I'd brought from Valladoid, a good spicy green kind you can't get in the US. After seeing everything in the older section of Chichen Itza, which we'd completely missed before... I psyched myself up to go back into the pyramid.

I convinced myself that once I got past the initial tight passageway, it would open up and be a much wider stairway to the top. So I took some deep breaths and kept my head down and made it to the beginning of the stairway. It's even tighter. A straight, narrow, steep stairway all the way up. I dunno how far... maybe 90 steps. And it kept getting hotter and hotter and damper and damper. I got through it by not looking up, keeping a distance from the person in front of me, and hoping a room at the top would open into a larger area. Not so. At the top there's a tiny room and the guide makes everybody jam in because it's the only way to get turned around and headed back down. That was very bad. And the trip down wasn't much better because I wasn't able to keep my head down. I was forced to look at the tight walls and imagine a huge person above me falling and smothering us all under a mass of flesh and fanny packs. But I got out with a photo to prove it. Phobia conquered... or at least averted.

I caught a ride back with the Atlanta folks who were also staying in Valladoid. They had a little rental car and warned me they would be making many souvenir stops on the way back. They weren't lying. And we stopped at a cenote... an underground lake/river we hadn't seen on the Christmas Eve trip. The guy started a mini-melee by handing out a dollar or two to the swarming kids. That wasn't fun.

On to Izamal, the yellow city, tomorrow... then Merida for New Years.