The ancient steps of the snake

Although I’m allowed to relate my admiration for such an ancient, yet splendorous city like Chichen Itza in Mexico, it’s not compared with the possibility I luckily had to penetrate in the deepest vessels of the Mayan culture with a prying desire to see by myself if I could be astonished whatsoever.
When I first trampled into the ancient Mayan city of Chichen Itza, I could realize the air I was breathing was fully loaded with the mystical smell of smoky incense, myrrh, and the funny shrieking of a monkey being chased by a group of locals. I could also find irresistibly tempting the 40 degrees I faced within the city, laughing about a woman desperately trying to fan a group of mosquitoes out of her hair.
The first time I foot-crossed the calzada –a stone-made road to access the main plaza- towards the inner city, I suddenly felt shrouded in a mystic halo of herbal smells, nature sounds and timeless sensations all together, along with the ancient, welcoming music of a wooden flute and a leather-made drum played by some old men, which plunged me into a slow-motion trance, transforming the world around me into a vivid image of what would have been like for the pilgrims or caravans to reach the great city of Chichen Itza.
The smell of breeze and sweat grows more intense as I walk towards the Castillo, –a local name for the main pyramid built to worship Kukulkan- a pyramidal temple standing in the middle of the plaza like a city’s timeless keeper, with its four edges partially crowned by staircases and the recognizable shapes of the feathered snake Quetzalcoatl, watching over all those feet that have been imposed on its ancient rocks in order for the people to reach the nah k’uh or temple at the top of it, and also be able to admire the beauty of Yucatan rainforest and a complete panorama of the whole sacred enclosure.
I could also keep talking about the other magnificent constructions within walls, such as the mysterious Temple of the Thousand Columns, each of which tells us a bit of the city’s history through a mythical hieroglyphic writing, old paintings and stone carvings; or the city observatory, also known by the locals as El Caracol, protected by a cover of moss, sand and some tree trunks mingling between the spiral stairs and those branches or bushes entering through the holes in the walls.
But the real, spicy and exquisite part of this travel is so simple to realize knowing beforehand all those sensational stories surrounding the city walls, along with its ancient placidity, giving us once more a proof of every desperate desire or dream about all those who made this pre-Hispanic city become a perfect blend of harmony with nature and material grandiosity within an almost fictional reality that blows your mind as soon as you step into for the first time… and for me, that was the great part of it!