It was December 21st, 2012—the day the world was supposed to end. I was living in Mexico and my three children had come to visit for the Christmas holiday.
We got up early and dressed light, it was going to be hot. I piled everyone in the car and we set off down the coast road towards Tulum.
Tulum is a small town about an hour south of Cancun along Mexico’s Caribbean coast in a tourist area known as the Riviera Maya. The town is named after the very famous Mayan ruins of Tulum that sit near there on a cliff overlooking the sea. They are beautiful, with foamy waves crashing against the rocks and black iguanas sunning themselves on the clipped grass between the ruins.
But we were not stopping there on this day.
We got to the stoplight on the coast road just at the edge of town and turned right, away from the sea and into the dense scrub of the peninsula. Very quickly, we were out of town and there was nothing but short trees, jungle vines, and brilliant blue-morpho butterflies along the way.
Eventually, we came to a tiny pueblo with a few dilapidated houses, a small store, and a pottery shop selling brightly colored, hand-painted Mexican sinks and tiles. We stopped to get cold coconuts from a man beside the road and then stopped again and bought mango slices dipped in chili powder and lime.
Then we headed into the jungle again.
Did I mention it was the day the world was supposed to end?
The Mayan calendar is very old—26,000 years old. It is divided into five sections of 5,250 years each. It is an amazing calendar predicting cosmic events with incredible accuracy. So when we found out that the last of the 5,250-year segments was at an end on that very day and the entire 26,000 was over, we were a little curious about what would happen, if anything.
Some say the Mayans were not smart enough to create their own complex and forward-seeing calendar. There is a theory that aliens dropped by, handed them some cool stuff, and took off again. Honestly, there are some pictures carved into the walls and stones in the ruins that seem to support such ideas. I saw them. They depict what appear to be spacecraft. But for me, the verdict is usually out until all the evidence is in.
So I took my children deep into the jungles of the Yucatan to stand on top of the second tallest Mayan pyramid in the Americas on the day the world was supposed to end.
Who knows, maybe we would be picked up by aliens.
The thing is: there is some laughter in this, and then there is that niggling thought in the back of your brain that refuses to rule out anything. I am a very spiritual person and, at first, I thought my spirituality and aliens didn’t really go together. Now, I am not so sure. I will not bore you with the whole of my philosophy, but let’s just say that there are suggestions in ancient scripts, including the Bible, that a race very different from ours was once here. It even goes so far as to say that we may still have some of those very different being living among us. Who knows, maybe the Mayan’s information did come from other beings. If you factor that in as a missing puzzle piece, it does help explain a lot.
I have learned that keeping my mind closed gets me nowhere. Admittedly, we are living in a time of shift and I think much truth is coming to the forefront that we did not have access to before. (Well, very few of us did.)
So, we drove into the jungle until we came to a large lake—lagoon really, cut off from the sea—where crocodiles hid in the rushes waiting to be fed by small girls for ten-cent donations from tourists. We paid the obligatory ten cents and watched a dark-haired youngster feed an eight-foot retile. It was probably not too smart of me to lay down on the dock with my face a few feet from the beast in order to take a seriously close-up photo, but I'm stupid like that.
The lagoon was at the base of a rise in the land that the ruined city of Coba was built on. It was just a short drive up the road to the entrance of the park gates. Yes, it is a protected park now, although only two percent of the ancient city has been reclaimed from the giant sacred ceiba trees and suffocating strangler figs.
We paid a small fee and walked through the crooked, wooden gate and into a different world.
Giant structures loomed on all sides. Stones carved with ancient symbols adorned mammoth structures. The ball-court where they played a deadly game—the winner losing his head—stretched out on our left. The mezzanine with its pillars and missing roof was on our left too. In the tangle of underbrush, smaller stone buildings hid, asking us to come explore them. But we had no time for all these things. It was early in the day and we wanted to climb the tower of Nohoc Mul before it was swarmed with tourists. So, we rented bicycles and chased each other down the flat path through the ancient city and through the stunted palms trees until we rounded the corner and saw the temple.
There she stood, one-hundred-and-seven steps high. Giant steps, not stairs to walk up but rather to scramble. On her top was a simple square edifice where priests used to perform their other-worldly duties. We stashed our bikes in the trees and my two twenty-something-year-old boys raced each other to the top. My daughter and I climbed at a little more human pace. Stopping once (OK twice), to catch our breath along the way.
The view from the top swept across acres of unbroken jungle. We could hear howler monkeys off in the distance and see that sparking lagoon where the crocodile lay.
After catching my breath (and pretending not to need to) and allowing the enormity of the scenery to wash over me, I turned to inspect the details at hand. A small, shallow room topped the temple like a bride and groom on a wedding cake. Before it was the blood stone—the alter—the place where those ball-game winners lost their heads. There was a carved channel in the stone to allow the blood to drain, probably into an ornate cup. You would think it would be a gruesome sight, but it wasn’t. I suppose time had eroded more than just the stones.
The boys discovered everything there was to see in about three minutes flat. They then pretended to push each other off the temple and into the receiving spiked plants below. They never grow up, those boys of mine. But other than a little jesting and admiring, nothing significant happened. Yes, we stood on top of the second tallest Mayan pyramid in the world on the day the world was supposed to end. But the world didn’t end. And the aliens didn’t stop by and pick us up.
I have a hunch they may have been watching, though.