We woke up early – I woke up very early, around 5, as I was unable to sleep – and took a taxi to Chichen Itza. We arrived ten minutes after the opening hour and there were already about 100 people queuing for tickets. Luckily the line moved fast and it was still cool, so it wasn’t too bad about by around 8.40 or so we were inside.
We had decided to come early, heeding the Lonely Planet warning about touts and tour groups swarming the site. Though on the way we saw huge numbers of touts pushing wheelbarrows of souvenirs through another entrance, they were still setting up when we got inside and indeed didn’t become really annoying till around 11. In the meantime we walked through to find a few scores of people – almost all individuals, no large groups = wandering around the immense field surrounding the main pyramid. We wandered around for a bit, saw the cenotes, slightly disappointed after the monumental places of SE Asia. Then we realised we hadn’t actually been to any of the most dramatic bits: the nunnery, with its carvings, the huge tumbledown steps and, most dramatic of all, the ball court with its carvings of the executed losers feeding the tree of life. Lovely. By now tour groups had arrived and the place was starting to fill up. There was a constant sound of clapping as tour guides demonstrated the various echoes (very striking, of course, but the clapping was an annoyance), and we could eavesdrop on the occasional explanation of the carvings.
We came back for lunch and a cool dark room, a good day’s work. I downloaded the In Our Time podcast on the Maya.
Meanwhile, the Mueller report is out and of course there is a great deal of fuss around it. It seems to me quite clear that not acting on it is yet another axe blow to the foundations of rule of law in that country.
And in Pakistan the finance minister has resigned, the whizz kid who held all the answers to the oncoming crisis, and there is a major cabinet reshuffle with new entrants including Firdous Awan, a career lota, as the information minister, replacing the joker Fawwad Chaudhry who is now, of all things, the science and technology minister. Which really tells you all you need to know.