According to the ancient Maya, whose 1,500-year civilisation thrived in eastern Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula until about 1200AD, the end of the world is nigh. Or at least the end of the world as we know it. In December 2012 — probably around the winter solstice — something cataclysmic is due to happen that will bring the Great Cycle, a calendar that began in 3114BC, to a close, so finishing the Age of Materialism.
It's in the nick of time, then, that British Airways is launching a direct flight to Cancún, the gateway to the 180km turquoise Caribbean coast now branded the Riviera Maya. For there is — at least for me — no more perfect holiday destination.
This is a place of paradisiacal pale, powdery quartz-sand beaches; proximity to the Mesoamerican coral reef, second only in size to Australia's Great Barrier; abundant wildlife — iguanas, toucans, parrots, golden orioles and blue morpho butterflies the size of saucers; handsome colonial towns (Mérida, in particular); and the ruins of more intriguing 'lost' Mayan cities than you'll ever have time to visit.
Many visitors opt not to stir from their sunloungers or hammocks (on almost every developed beach you'll find colourful hamacas strung between the coconut palms). But it would be a shame to come here and not see at least one mysterious relic of the Maya civilisation.
The best known, Chichén Itzá, is now classified a new Wonder of the World but also make for Ek Balam — the name means black jaguar — which is, in any case, closer to the coast, yet remains unfrequented. It's a place of extraordinary atmosphere and grandeur, of temple platforms, fragmented palaces, pyramids, arches and, most strikingly, a squat tower of rising concentric circles that resembles a sort of inverted New York Guggenheim, whose architect Frank Lloyd Wright certainly toured this area.
I doubt, though, that he visited Ek Balam, for its principal attraction wasn't excavated till 2000, when a vast, intricate, almost perfectly preserved frieze, carved in stone and finished in stucco, was revealed two-thirds of the way up the six-storey acropolis, one of the longest and tallest ancient structures in the Mundo Maya.
The relief depicts the vast gaping jaws of a serpent, its eyelids held open by human figures seated within them. This terrible face, surely some kind of portal to hell, is flanked by crowds of other men, one of them club-footed, with a stunted arm and only four digits on either hand. For the ancient Maya venerated deformity: however lowly his caste, any male born with a disability was destined to become a priest. But it's the winged figures on either edge that really fascinate, for they look like angels, yet were made at least 500 years before the Spanish brought Christianity to this region. Proof, perhaps, that Yucatán has long had something of the heavens about it.
