It is difficult to know what the Mayans did for a good time. Their chief sport — known to us simply as the ball game — was a kind of cross between football, basketball and hara-kiri. Rules stipulated you weren’t allowed to use either your hands or your feet but instead manoeuvred the ball — it weighed up to 8lbs, and was not allowed to touch the ground — with your shoulders, your hips, your buttocks or your back to get it through one of the two hoops on the side walls. Defeat didn’t mean dropping three points. The losing team were lined up and sometimes — the ultimate hairdryer treatment — decapitated.
The Yucatán peninsula lay at the heart of the Mayan world, an entity that spilled across present-day national boundaries into Guatemala, Belize and Honduras. Its sun-baked landscapes are dotted with the ruins of an empire whose sudden demise sometime in the ninth century, known as the Mayan collapse, still mystifies historians and archaeologists.
The Yucatán sticks out into the Gulf of Mexico like a sore thumb. Historically, it has always been somewhat separate from the rest of Mexico, more linked by sea to Europe than by bad roads to Mexico City. Today it is famous for the resort hotels of Cancún that litter 80 miles of its eastern coast. But Cancún has no connection to the rest of the peninsula. In Mayan, Cancún means “nest of snakes”. I was heading for the interior.