Worship of a feathered serpent deity may have begun as early as 200 B.C. at Teotihuacan near present day Mexico City, but it reached its pinnacle at Chichen Itza, the Mayan cultural capital in the north central plains of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. Named Quetzalcoatl by Nahua residents of Teotihuacan, to Maya the plumed serpent was Kukulcan, … Read more
Well rested from my previous three days at the amazing Hacienda Xcanatun Resort, I set off with renewed vigor to discover more of the northern Yucatan. As with so many of the other locales I had visited in Mexico, there is so much to do in the Yucatan that it is difficult to choose which … Read more
I followed the bellman down a long covered portico, where lustrous marble floors gleamed like polished bronze in the slanting rays of a late afternoon sun. At the end of the terrace he stopped before a massive set of wooden doors and jiggled a large metal skeleton key in the lock. Shifting my backpack impatiently, … Read more
The demonic eyes in the stone mask stopped me in my tracks. This was Chac, the Mayan rain god, the most important deity in a land where the only source of fresh water was infrequent rain. I could easily imagine its hawk-like beak flaying the flesh from my bones. The stone visage guarded a stairway … Read more
I pressed my nose to the bus window as we rolled into Merida, one of the places in Mexico that I had yearned to see for years. My brow furrowed in disappointment; the city looked nothing like I had envisioned. With its location in the northwestern corner of the Yucatan, just inland of where the … Read more
