September 16 - Chichen Itza , Valladolid , Mayan Cuisine

 Tuesday, September 16th

Chichen Itza

As the Coba trip the previous day had whetted some of our appetite for Mayan ruins, I was bit more at ease today with the Chichen Itza trip and was kind of okay even if we could not cover everything in Chichen Itza. We had ordered a room service breakfast if I remember right and set out pretty late. 

 We used the internet and got details on the drive to Chichen Itza. As long as you have a general sense of your destination, the boards help you get to your place pretty easily has been my experience in Mexico. 

La(s) Mestiza(s) restaurant

We did not want hunger to cut short our Chichen Itza experience. So we stopped at the Las Mesitzas restaurant in the town of Piste five minutes before Chichen Itza.

 We had the following typical mexican dishes based on what I had read from my research so far.

Sopa De Lima

  Which is chicken lime soup.

Cochinita Pibil(Chicken in plantain leaf)

Carnitas Pibil(Pork)

Horchata ( Rice water sweet drink)

    

It was a nice mexican cuisine experience and Divya echoed my own experience that the mexican food is easy on your stomach.

Chichen Itza is a touristy place and as we were wasting the little time we had struggling with managing the kids, further challenged by rain, somewhere along, I decided to get a guide for this one as well. 

    

So an old sixty six year old guide who was apparently an archaeologist earlier explained about the ruins in the site. Planning to capture all the Mayan historic details in a detailed separate page. He did give us quite some information and I mostly had my iPad out and was video graphing so that I could refer back to the notes. The main castle at Chichen Itza is strikingly impressive. 

Valladolid

As I was running short on pesos again as well as on petrol, we decided to go via the nearby colonial town of Valladolid. It was a nice town with lot of remains to it and we stopped right next to an old looking church which impressed with it’s old time charms. Niya found a mexican girl for a friend and played around the church, ending with a nice ‘ Adios’.

  Taberna De Los Frailes Restaurant

This was a Fodors choice restaurant and we went around in struggled and finally found the spot that serves authentic  Mayan cuisine in a Mayan setting with thatched roof and the like. 

Tixin xic - I ordered the spicy grilled snapper

while Divya ordered 

Pavo en relleno negro(turkey medallions stiffed with pork and hard boiled egg in Mayan pepper sauce) 

We shared the dishes and really liked the mayan culinary experience. 

While I was walking near the garden in the restaurant trying to put Amey to sleep, a passion fruit fell off from the tree as if as a gesture and I took that home. 

More drive left than the one yesterday and this one did see me dozing off once in a while. The challenge that this drive offered was what made me decide against going to Merida which is even further than this. 

http://cnatatlanta.blogspot.com/2014/09/tulum-september-17th.html