Chichen Itza - Maya Ruins

From Palenque we caught another overnight bus to Piste - a small town near the ruins - and it was quite an eventful bus journey!  At about 2 in the morning, while everyone is contentedly fast asleep on the bus, these Mexican soldiers are suddenly on our bus telling everyone to get off.  In my half-asleep state i was trying to ask him what was going on and he just said "bajar, rapdio" and first of all i think he's telling me that there's a faster bus that we can take, not realising yet that he's a military man.  Then i suddenly realise that we're at an army checkpoint and they want to search people's bags!  Trundling off the bus, there's a small row of bags to be searched on a table, and yes, our backpacks were both among them!  It was a bit of an intimidating experience, suddenly being woken up, marched off the bus and having our bags searched with lots of army people standing round with machine guns.  They didn't find what they were looking for - drugs i guess - and so soon enough we were back on the bus and on our way again.

Luckily we set off early in the morning to visit the Chichen Itza ruins as the site gets really busy with hoards of people in massive tour groups.  The ruins were very impressive and perhaps the most well-restored (though not as awe-inspiring as those at Palenque).  The city is actually really big so it took a while to look around all the various ruins, the most spectacular being a huge and perfectly symmetrical pyramid.