It includes these peoples to the Honduras

the word "maya" is also ambivalent than our word "latin" when it is next to celebrities as diverse and remote in time as Julius Caesar, Godeffroy of Bouillon and Julio Iglesias. Since the maya world has never been an empire organized like that of the Aztecs who ruled from Mexico City. It includes these peoples to the Honduras. So far, the Maya are really in their walls in the Yucatán peninsula, this tip of the foot of the Mexican boot, where non-métissés descendants are thirty thousand. Last heirs of a culture that used a count to twenty figures and knew zero and the year of 365 days; troubling culture which we stuff also daily as the tomato (tomatl), chocolate (chocolatl) and bean (hayacotl), but the agricultural policy was based on the multiplication of human sacrifices.

Freshly landed, I leave behind me Cancún, in full repair after the hurricanes of the summer. Created from scratch in 1972, this resort site has been selected by a computer by bringing kilometre and tourist profiles, but forgetting factor... wind! Never our Maya would committed this blunder. The ridges of their temples were added to provide little decision-making cyclones: hundred and forty kilometres to the South, exposed to the same coastal dangers that Cancun, Tulum, old has not budged. When the conquistadors landed in the small Cove, the maya universe was decadent. The sober beauty of Tulum, they saw that solid buildings perched on gruelling marches. Most of the military art of the ancient Egypt, the Spaniards named it castillos (castles) what we call more pyramids. The highest of the peninsula, 42 meters, is in Coba, on the branch line from Tulum to stick to the inside. Dimmed by the canopy of the foliage, the temples of Coba are fighting against an insidious enemy: the seed of the tree. A disaffection incomprehension turned less shoot in strain, embedded in the masonry. "Green dusk", say archaeologists - as if the abandonment of the bloody fécondateurs cults had triggered the vengeance of nature.

Chichen Itza reached its height at the time of Charlemagne. From the plant fears of Coba, the most famous temple of the Mexico takes its comfortable on a lawn of the cricket field. With the help of a smooth rope, visitors climb assault by clusters. These constructions to degrees symbolized the visible solar cycle. They have their theoretical during in the soil where the Sun was supposed to spend the night. Under the castillo in the bottom of galleries where ramp heavy air, an ominous statue of jaguar roars behind a grid. And almost in the axis of the monument, four hundred meters to the North, opens a sacrificial well, yawning and sorry, pond rendered opaque by alluvial rainfall and hence the divers have recovered jewelry and human bones.

The men to be hybrid were fattened on the esplanade, recognizable by its friezes for heads of death podium. Just behind, flattened field in the form of "H" was used in a sinister sport: both teams had to pass a rubber ball in the ring of stone seen yet, wide as a basket of basket. The losers were passed over the Obsidian, offering their exciting hearts to the gods. Izamal is on my road. With its further arcades of yellow hemmed white honey, the atrium of the convent Saint-Antoine-de-Padoue is second in the world by size, after St. Peter in Rome. It retrieves the basement of the Mayan temple on which it was built after the missionaries, outraged by these "cult rendered to the daemon", were all razed. A little bitter, the Franciscan Toribio of Motolinia noted that one of the factors helping to the conversion of the Maya was that they themselves, in the host body of Christ, reminiscent of cannibalism. Uxmal, the next step, has finally nothing to envy to Chichen. Height or in Rennes, the view in turn highlights the "convent of the nuns", "pyramid of the magician", once coated in this rose tyrien which farmers like still paint their roof construction, and all these intriguing stone named legendary names, achievements through a sea of forests where prowling sometimes the ocelots. In addition to two magnificent temples, Kabah has a brimming with building of modernity: a trapeze, entered a arch way sacred unseemly width for a civilization that ignored the horse and Buda the wheel.

Despite their apparent repetition, each site has its originality. Not by are also distinct styles than the East of the baroque novel. The Toltec of Chichen, with these masks finishing stone beams, these scenes engraved as buffers of printing; Uxmal and hornbeams, proud of its geometric heads as the Chinese puzzle. the puuc aligns its rolls of pierre under friezes with drawings of snake skins, as well as to the "mirador" of Labna, small shrine wearing a comb of dikes and perched on a piton. But the stone enough to vary the types: black, red, dry, Mossy. Making a different voice when it disrupts, here a sound of Typha, a grinding of iron curtain. On well, these "pyramids" transformed by the tropical mystery evoke the temples of India.

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IN PRACTICE

Aeromexico proposes flights Paris-Cancún A/D, via Mexico, from 699 euros TTC.

If the season takes place from May to November rain, cyclone risk is limited to the months of September and October. Vacances Transat offers the fantastic "yucatán" circuit (8 days/7 nights full Board) from 1 290 euros. Another circuit, "Maya world", includes the Guatemala and Belize (15 days/14 nights), from 1 890 euros. In the travel agencies and www. vacancestransat.fr

Information: Council for the promotion of Mexican tourism:

Read: Chic Mexico, editions of the Pacific.