Teotihuacan ruins

And so it was that we came to our final day trip of the whole two years…. 🙁 Yes, a visit to Teotihuacan – a place that I had once been a mere TWENTY SIX years previously…  yes we are old mochileros..

Anyway, Teotihuacan is an ancient city located about 40km away from modern day Mexico City. At its peak it was the largest city in the Americas, and around the 6th largest in the entire world – with a population of over 125,000 people. The site covers around 80 square km, and even the main visiting area is huge. This is probably a good thing, as not surprisingly the ruins at Teotihuacan are the most visited archaeological site in Mexico with over 4 million visitors a year.

To get to the site required a metro ride to the North Bus Station, and then a bus up to the ruins. We arrived at around 11.4oam and so not what you would call early by any stretch of the imagination! It was already rammed with visitors… as I said, lucky it’s a big site!

Our first port of call was the most famous pyramid – The Pyramid of the Sun – this pyramid is the largest at the site, and dates from around 100AD. For 26 long years I had thought that these pyramids were built by the Aztecs – but it turns out that they were built way before they arrived and were already abandoned when the Aztecs came and took over the city in around 1200AD.  It is still a bit of a mystery who built these pyramids…

As we entered the site we could see the Pyramid of the Sun in the distance, and it was already covered in a mass of people…

The layout of the site consists of a very long avenue called the ‘Avenue of the Dead’, with the Pyramid of the Moon at one end, and the ‘Ciudadela’ (mini city) at the other end. The Avenue of the Dead is FOUR kilometres long! Yes, so we were going to be doing a bit of walking… The Pyramid of the Sun sits along the Avenue of the Dead, and is located slightly closer to the Pyramid of the Moon than the Ciudadela. So we decided to first ascend the Pyramid of the Sun, then walk down to the Pyramid of the Moon and ascend, and then finally walk the whole 4km length of the Avenue of the Dead to arrive at the Cuidadela.

Having enjoyed the views from the top of the Pyramid of the Sun, it was time to descend and start walking towards the Pyramid of the Moon. The crowds were a little annoying, but it was still a very spectacular place – the sheer scale of it was very impressive.

After descending from the Pyramid of the Moon, we had a 4km walk ahead of us to the other end of the Avenue of the Dead – so to prepare for this we took our traditional tourist photos…

The 4km walk down the Avenue of the Dead was actually fairly enjoyable. The further we got from the two main pyramids, the quieter it got (or maybe it was just because it was late afternoon and everybody had gone home…) It was also well worth the walk as the Ciudadela area turned out to contain our favourite part of the site – the Temple of the Feathered Serpent.

This temple had really amazing carvings and was very striking, and supposedly they had discovered the bodies of hundreds of sacrificial victims inside the temple…

This temple was a great way to round off the day, and we left the site having thoroughly enjoyed our visit… it was strange to think that this would be the last ancient temple of the Americas that we would see for quite some time.. our trip was nearly over… so I will leave you with a few more pics…