Chichen Itza is one of those mega temples you just have to visit. It’s up there with Stonehenge, the Hypogeum and the pyramids of Egypt; going to this part of Mexico and not visiting would be a travesty.

I climbed the unnervingly steep sides of El Castillo alone and stood at the top, master of all I surveyed for just a moment as the priests for the god Kukulkan must have been over 1,000 years ago

Of course, since everyone is thinking like this, it gets a little busy down at the temples, much more so if you go by bus because all the tours depart around the same time from the Cancun area and thus disgorge gadzillions of tourists simultaneously. To say that this kills the atmosphere is somewhat of an understatement.

Having experienced the bus tour the first time round (tortured by Gloria Estefan on a loop on the way there and back), I opted for the hire car the second time, and arrived in a beaten up Beetle, slightly poorer but well ahead of the pack.

It was worth it. The place was deserted and enveloped in a cool, early morning stillness that allowed my imagination to wander without being constantly stepped on, crushed or otherwise diverted by Nancy and Jack from Ohio, splayed facedown halfway up the main pyramid and having a long, loud debate about whether or not they might be stuck, followed by a prolonged rescue attempt by their tour group.

Instead, I climbed the unnervingly steep sides of El Castillo alone and stood at the top, master of all I surveyed for just a moment as the priests for the god Kukulkan must have been over 1,000 years ago.

They made decisions about life and death here, sacrificing men, women and children in exchange for rain and prosperity. It’s also thought they even used the temple as a calendar, with each of the four stairways having 91 stairs, which conveniently adds to 365 days.

Beneath my feet, deep in the heart of the pyramid, there is another, more secret altar which I’d climbed to several years previously, up slippery, dank and narrow stairs.

At the top, a candle had flickered on the reddish jaguar throne of Chac Mool, inlaid with jade and set in a desperately claustrophobic, airless alcove.

The spirits of the Mayans had crowded closer there than in the sun-filled courtyards and airy colonnades above. Entrance to this inner sanctum is forbidden now though, and sadly, the government stopped people climbing the outside of the pyramid too after a tourist fell to her death; presumably that didn’t do much for the atmosphere either.

On my descent, I passed the carved serpent head at the base. During the equinox, the shadow of the sun falls in triangles on the side of the pyramid so perfectly that the rest of the serpent appears in rippling silhouette, snaking back up the pyramid; this gives just a hint of the level of expertise the Mayans reached in astronomy and precision architecture.

The first trickle of visitors was starting as I walked over the dusty Great Ball Court. The aim of the game here was to get a very heavy rubber ball through the ornately carved loops on either side of the court. Getting hit in the face by the ball was enough to kill, but presuming you made it through the match, this was a game where winning was something of a liability.

The victors had the honour of being sacrificed to the gods by ritual decapitation; the head was apparently placed on a rack nearby, although it’s hard to imagine that this would do much for the motivation of the next players.

By way of compensation, their likeness was carved in relief onto exquisitely beautiful wall friezes that tourists like me would gaze at hundreds of years later. As I looked, the quality of the carving brought those dead men to life and for an instant the roars of the crowd filled the silent, empty court.

Depending on which Mayan-reading-doomsayer you believe, the ball court is the site of one of the more apocalyptic Mayan prophecies.

On December 22, 2012, some claim that Kukulkan will arise serpent-like from beneath the court and bring the end of the world with him. So if you’re thinking of booking, it might be prudent to get a move on.

The apparent frequency of sacrifices here is just one aspect of Mayan life at Chichen Itza that is baffling to us. It seems that life was, if not cheap, then expendable, as the human remains in the cenote (well) attest. It’s easy to feel a shiver of fascinated revulsion for the Mayans as violent and bloodthirsty.

But they were also highly organised with complicated writing which we haven’t fully unravelled. They were capable of building observatories such as El Caracol (‘the snail’, so named for its shape) aligned to the heavens and the path of Venus.

They could equally well have been a peaceful people living at one with the environment and hoping against hope that an offering to the well in times of drought would appease the gods.

And they had probably abandoned these extensive temples well before the Spanish arrived for their smash-grab-and-church-building extravaganza. We still don’t really know why.

Next stop on the Mayan tour shed little more light on the matter. Being early at Chichen Itza meant that we hit Tulum at the peak of tourist activity.

The city was a port and one of the last places inhabited by the Mayans, surviving about 70 years after the Spanish arrived before diseases such as smallpox took a final, deadly toll.

Getting hit in the face by the ball was enough to kill, but presuming you made it through the match... the victors had the honour of being sacrificed to the gods by ritual decapitation

Groups jostled each other, tempers frayed in the hot sun and it was hard to find a quiet corner to experience the beautiful setting of this temple, on cliffs overlooking the beautiful Caribbean Sea and facing the sunrise.

The profile of one of the gods scowled down at the carnage of gawping, pushing interlopers; my sentiments exactly.

But the occasional gap in the shuffling march of the tourists gave us a chance to take some stunning photos so, oddly, the temple is more satisfying in retrospective photo viewing than it was in reality.

When we’d had enough, we retreated for a swim in the sea below, to admire the temple from an entirely different angle.

As we left the heaving crowds of Tulum behind us, an additional, unseen benefit of the hire car revealed itself.

This part of Mexico is littered with other more minor temples like Coba. Most tour buses roar past them in a cloud of dust but we stopped in the late afternoon.

Until the 1970s Coba was buried in jungle and the greenery still presses in on all sides. With archaeological work still ongoing here, it’s still possible to stumble across mounds of stones on jungle trails and you are free to wander pretty much wherever you want, climbing the crumbling pyramids in relative peace.

We stayed until closing time, watching as the shadows got longer. The scale and grandeur of the architecture at Chichen Itza was unmissable; but it’s Coba at twilight that my memory returns to whenever I remember this trip, away from the maddening Mayan seeking crowds, peaceful, a portal to a lost people.