When I plan trips, I like to try and have one or two pivotal points to structure my itinerary around. Sometimes these can be major events or activities that I have to book ahead of time. Like Spanish School in Guatemala, or visiting the Inishkea islands in Ireland. But others are just things I want to see or do that are non-negotiable for me. For my trip to the Yucatán in 2025, the main event for me was visiting Chichén Itzá.
I was pretty unfamiliar with all things Maya. Growing up in Wales, Mesoamerica in general was completely alien to me. But I’d seen photos of El Castillo in geography lessons growing up, and Mexico is always a country that has fascinated me ever since I was a little girl. So I was always going to end up coming here.
But trying to work out how the hell to visit to Chichén Itzá on a shoestring budget is hard.
The Yucatán peninsula is expensive compared to the rest of the country. Especially compared to nearby countries like Guatemala and El Salvador. Trying to research this before flying out to Mexico brought back mixed results. Do a tour, don’t do a tour, it’s not worth the cost, it’s a bucket-list item. All of these results, though, said the same thing. This is going to cost you a lot of money.
Eventually, after asking around friends who had been, various travel subreddits and a hostel in Madrid, of all places, I managed to work out where I at least had to spend the night.
Where to stay and getting there
When researching how to visit Chichén Itzá, you’ll probably read stories of people joining tours and coach trips as part of their visits to resort towns and tourist destinations in Quintana Roo like Cancún, Tulum and Playa del Carmen. It’s not a bad option, and it’s certainly a popular way to do it. But if you’re trying to do this visit on a budget, however, I’d recommend you don’t go with this option. It’s expensive, you don’t have any real control over your visit and traveling to Chichén Itzá from these places and back will be a very, very long day.
Instead, head to the beautiful colonial town of Valladolid
It’s just over the border in Yucatán state. This is the best place to base yourself in to visit Chichén Itzá. And, in my opinion, it’s a really lovely city worth a visit in its own right. It’s been popular on the backpacker trail for years and has no shortage of hotels, hostels and B&B style accomodation. I stayed at New Friends Hostel when I visited in March 2025, and I’d recommend it for a relatively cheap place to lay your head for the night.
From here, you’ll want to take a colectivo, a fixed-route shared minibus, to the park entrance.
I arrived in Valladolid after a very long, very sweaty colectivo from Chiquilá.
I arrived at my hostel to find the pool in the common area occupied by a group of Danish students who all seemed to know each other. This put a bit of a dampener on my plans to try and find someone to accompany me to Chichén Itzá in the morning. However I put on my big girl pants and went back downstairs to the hostels nightly free drinks hour. Here, I met some poeple who were planning to head over in the morning and invited me to tag along with them. Result! We all agreed to meet bright and early to head to the colectivo stop to get there as early as possible.
If, like me, you arrived in Valladolid by colectivo, you probably got dropped off at the big colectivo stop, a block east of the main square. There are a few stops around the city, each serving different destinations. However to get to Chichén Itzá, you’ll need to go to the colectivo stop around the corner from the ADO station. On Google Maps it’s listed as Transporte Colectivo (Chichén Itza y Pisté). It’s a little hidden – from the street it just looks like a gas station. But if you head on in there are signs telling you where to go, and you’ll find the attendant waiting.
A return ticket should cost you around MX$100 (£4.25 or $5.70), but they do also offer trips to Cenote Ikkil. This will cost you around MX350 (£14.85 or $19.85). It includes transport to Chichén Itzá, Cenote Ikkil and back to Valladolid, as well as entry to the cenote.
Regardless of what you choose, the attendant will hand you a ticket and directed on to a waiting minibus. There is theoretically a timetable here, with the first bus departing at 7am. But realistically you’ll be waiting until the bus is full. Remember though, Yucatán is one hour behind Quintana Roo. So if you’ve crossed from East to West to get here, factor the time change into your plans.
Don’t worry too much about committing this to memory. There are signs in Spanish and English at this stop explaining all this.
We all convened after our breakfast and headed over to the colectivo. I did debate booking the trip to Ikkil, but ultimately decided against it in favour of renting bikes to explore the cenotes closer to town in the afternoon. We boarded our bus and waited for it to fill with local commuters heading to Pisté, the closest village to Chichén Itzá. We picked up a few people en-route, and it was here that I got my true first taste of Mexican transport. A bus so full that people were sat on wooden stools in the aisles. And me and my three new friends made to share a seat meant for two people at a push.
Luckily, the drive only takes about 40 minutes. So before we knew it we were pulling into a surprisingly empty coach park. I thought this was supposed to be one of the Seven Wonders of the World, where is everyone? We thought that by leaving at 8am, we had stuffed up our chances of beating the crowds. But when we asked the attendant in the ticket booth, he told us that most of the big tour groups tend to start arriving from midday onwards.
Arriving at Chichén Itzá
Chichén Itzá is one of the pricier Mayan sites in Mexico and Central America to visit. According to their website, foreigners must pay MX$697 (roughly £29.45 or $39). Of course, Chichén Itzá is much more well known than, say, Tikal or Caracol. As well as being famous for being a World Wonder, it’s also in prime day-trip distance from the resort towns. I met a lot of people who felt it wasn’t worth it. But I do think if you’re in the region and you’re interested in seeing some ruins, you should go and see them. Personally, I don’t know if I’d ever get to be in this part of the world again. So it made total sense to front the cost and go!
Side note here, if you’re a Mexican citizen (and can prove it), you’ll pay MX$310. If you visit on a Sunday, it’s free. As far as I’m aware you don’t need to be a resident to take advantage of this. Just present your Mexican passport at the ticket booth. Score!
We paid for our tickets and headed in. We’d been told that if we were going to hire a guide, to wait until we got inside the park. Outside, the guides charge more (which makes sense, you’re fronting their entry fee) and the tour isn’t as good. But inside the park, the prices are a bit lower. Inside the park you can expect to pay between MX$900 – MX$1200 for a guide, not including a tip. Sounds like a lot but between a group of you, it’s not too bad. One guide quoted around MX$1000 between four of us, but we opted not too bad. However, we decided we’d like to explore and take photos at our own pace, so ultimately decided against hiring one.
I mentioned that the first bus departs from Valladolid at 7am.
And most people will tell you that you should aim to be on that bus. There’s a few reasons for this, the most commonly cited being that you’ll beat the crowds, which is kind of true. But if you’re arriving before midday, you’ll beat the coach trips and big tour groups. So getting here for the opening time of 8am isn’t entirely necessary. In my opinion, the biggest reason to arrive for opening time is the heat! With the exception of the parts around the cenote, there is very little shade on-site, and from about 10:30am onward, it gets unbearably hot here. There are a few spots to buy drinks and ice creams but, as you can imagine, they are extortionately expensive.
Inside the site
Beyond some water I’d purchased at the Oxxo a block from our hostel, I’d not really prepared for just how hot it would get here. I’d not long come from the coast so I really underestimated just how hot it could get further inland, and by about 10:30 it was unbearably hot in the central area of the park. There are a few kiosks dotted around the park where you can buy drinks, snacks and, maybe depressingly, Starbucks coffee. We reluctantly bought some ice-lollies here to try and cool down. Very refreshing, but equally very pricey.
Speaking of stalls, one thing to prepare yourself for is the merchants both outside and inside the park. If you’ve never been to Latin America before, or this is the first thing you’ve done since arriving in Mexico, you might find this a bit overwhelming. They can come across as a bit pushy and seemingly don’t take no for an answer. Sometimes, they’ll blow this jaguar whistle to make you look around then start trying to sell you this. It’s loud, it sounds like a real jaguar, it will make you wet your pants and it will make the merchant die laughing. It really does seem like the ultimate bit and I can’t really fault them for it.
Usually, they’ll take a no, gracias and move on to the next sucker.
There’s no shortage of tourists to sell to here. But you may need to be firm. Also, telling them you don’t speak Spanish won’t save you here! Most of these merchants speak good English and will just immediately change tack even if you crack out your best no hablo español.
We started at El Castillo, the famous pyramid that Chichén Itzá is famous for, before looping into the Sacred Cenote, the Temple of the Warriors, and skirting around into the trees to Xtoloc cenote, the Red House and El Caracol observatory. Then we looped back out to the main clearing at around 11:30 to see the Temple of the Jaguars and the Great Ball Court. By now the sun was truly out, the site was swelteringly hot and the coach trips had arrived. This had the double effect of being both great for catching bits of history and context from one of the seemingly hundreds of guides that have now appeared out of nowhere, and the negative effect of it suddenly being really hard to get up close to some of the structures.
This was the origin of one of my favourite stories of my whole trip.
A guide led his tour group into the Ballcourt, and was telling an incredibly detailed account of how the Maya ballgame worked. He explained the reliefs in the walls, what the rules were and ended by solemnly explaining how the winners of the game were usually sacrificed. This is up for debate, by the way. We know there probably were sacrifices, but scholars don’t really agree on who and why). The crowd awed appropriately and seemed expecetdly wowed.. Except for this one woman. She turned to her boyfriend and said, at the top of her lungs, “Oh my god, it’s just like quidditch! Isn’t that cute?”. This, of course, became our go-to joke for the rest of the day and late into the night.
Getting back to Valladolid
By about 12:30, we had pretty much seen the whole site, and were starting to really feel the effects of the heat. So, we decided to head back to Valladolid. There is a museum just off-site, all about Chichén Itzá. But we visited on Shrove Tuesday, so the museum was closed. To be honest, it probably wouldn’t tell us anything new that we hadn’t already seen in the park. So, we headed back out to the coach park, and immediately realised we didn’t know where to catch the colectivo back to Valladolid from.
Luckily, like with all major tourist attractions in Mexico, there is a guy here in a hi-vis looking completely disintereste. Ask him and he will point you to a small patch of grass across from the main entrance. If you bought a return ticket, you better have held on to your little ticket! You’ll be asked for it when you get on. The buses back to Valladolid arrive around every 30 minutes, with the last bus leaving Chichén Itzá at around 4pm. They also don’t seem to wait until they’re full as much in this direction. Probably because they’ve already stopped in Pisté.
The bus back takes slightly less time that the way there, and it dropped us off at the colectivo station in Valladolid. We decided to split up for a few hours to get lunch. I ended up at a food stand near the main square that exclusively sells cochinita pibil, a Yucatec dish of spiced stewed pork, and always has a queue. If you’re in Valladolid you need to eat here at least once. I’m not joking, it’s been over a year since I ate here and I think about it all the time.
Final tally
For those of you keeping track at home, how much do you think I spent on my day out. Not including my pitstop at the ancient Mayan Starbucks or the life changing Polcanes de Cochinita Pibil I ate crouched over the pavement like a rabid animal while on the phone to my poor suffering mother? If you answered MX$797 (£33.33), you’d be bang on the money!
Compared to similar sites like Tikal in Guatemala (I paid around 300Q or £30 for transport, tour and entry) and Copán in Honduras (around £15 for entry to the main site), it is a bit on the pricier side. However I do think it’s worth the money. Especially if you can do it on a budget like I did. Opting to stay in Valladolid allows you to experience a site to the region that you just wouldn’t get if you tried to visit from somewhere on the Riviera Maya on a day trip. And it opens you up to visit places like the multiple cenotes near town. Cenote Zaci is quite literally in the centre of Valladolid! Ek Balam is to the south, as well as the beautiful city of Valladolid itself!