Chichen Itza, or Chicken Pizza as I like to call it, is probably the most famous and most visited of all the Mesoamerican pre-Columbian sites. It probably owes its fame to the perfect proportions of its main pyramid, The Temple of Kukulcan, also known as El Castillo, and also the largest ball court of any excavated city. Chicken Itza was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the 1980s and one of the "Seven Modern Wonders of the World" about a decade ago.

So what are the Seven Modern Wonders of the World? Well, they're a play on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, of which only the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt still exist, and most of them just aren’t very modern . I’m not sure how they were chosen but suspect it was some kind of popularity contest. Chichen Itza is a big one for me, though, as the last of the seven that I visited. The rest of the list and the year I got to see them are as follows:

Christ the Redeemer, Brazil – 2003

Colosseum of Rome, Italy – 2003

Petra, Jordan – 2004

Great Wall of China – 2006

Machu Picchu, Peru – 2013

Taj Mahal, India – 2013

Chicken Itza, Mexico – 2017

As far as modern wonders go, the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro is the only one that qualifies as fairly modern. It’s nice, but how a large statue of very average sculptural value made the list makes me wonder.

I had heard that Chichen Itza gets terribly crowded, so I came up with a strategy for visiting the site since I hate crowds . Since many foreign tourists visit on day trips from Cancun or Playa Del Carmen, it stands to reason that weekend days, especially Saturday, when people tend to arrive or depart on week-long vacations might have somewhat lower visitation. The other advice I received was to get there first thing in the morning for 8:00 opening and do a quick loop around for photography before doing a second loop for closer inspection. I got myself an inexpensive hotel room for $25 for the night in Piste, the tourist town about a mile from the entrance and made it out to be at the entrance to the parking lot about 15 minutes before opening. I was the fourth car in line. Wooohooo!

And my strategy worked. I got to photograph El Castillo from all sides in the relatively early morning light and was then the only person in the entire Ball Court. I saw a lot of ball courts at other sites like Tikal, Palenque, and Coba, which are all kind of small, more like basketball size courts. The one at Chichen Itza is more like a soccer field in size . It makes me wonder how the game was played and variations there might have been of it at different times and places. I mean, if you think about, soccer, hockey, lacrosse, and basketball are all fairly similar games using different equipment and parts of the body. The ball court at Chichen Itza is also supposed to have amazing acoustics where you can hear a normal decibel-level conversation from the far side of the court. Being the only one there, though, I didn’t have the experience.

You used to be able to climb El Castillo, but they changed the rules in 2005 after an elderly visitor tumbled down to her death. You actually can’t go on any of the platforms or pyramids at Chichen Itza, a contrast to all the other Mayan sites I’ve been to and the other archaeological sites elsewhere in Mexico. That’s probably a good thing, though. You can imagine the wear and tear on the ruins here if the massive crowds were allowed to climb up or walk around the temples. Everything is fenced or roped off, though, so strictly no touch .

That makes for a somewhat faster visit too than when you can climb up all the spaces and everyone is taking selfies from the top. In total I spent about three hours at Chichen Itza and felt I covered all there was to see. By the time I left the mobs had arrived, though, mostly in big tour groups following their guides around, especially heavy on Germans and French it seemed. I felt so glad to be on my own and not in a tour group even if I didn’t have a guide to interpret for me.

One interesting fact architecturally is that the most famous parts of this most famous Mayan city like El Castillo, the Ball Court, and the Temple of the Warriors, actually display very strong Toltec influences after a migration from central Mexico. The older parts of the site which date more from the Classic period like The Caracol and The Nunnery, though, are more purely Mayan. And while Chichen Itza was the most important Maya city on the Yucatan between about 900 and 1200 A.D., that peak civilization was several hundred years later than most of the other sites I’ve visited so far.

To a large degree Chichen Itza fit my expectation of a Mayan city site. Having some large grassy open spacesI have my own theory about Chichen Itza and who built it. It was the lizards, and they’re still living there. Yes, there are iguanas everywhere.