We did finally make it to Flores Friday night at 11:00 PM. Our hotel sent a taxi to pick us up, and we checked into our hotel and went up to our room. Apparently there was a club right next door, blasting reggaeton music. While this kept us up for a little while, we were so exhausted that we eventually crashed, waking up to the sound of wildlife outside and our alarm going off. We gathered our things and caught our shuttle to Tikal.
After a little over an hour, we arrived at Tikal Inn within Tikal National Park. We checked in and were shown to our pool-side bungalow. I was extremely impressed with the place. I knew beforehand that we would only have electricity (and hot water and wifi) a few hours a day, so I was expecting the most basic of accommodations, but the setting was beautiful, the bed comfortable, the pool extremely clean, and the wildlife surrounding it all was so unique. Not to mention, it was 75 degrees and humid, which is pretty much my ideal weather. We dropped our stuff off and got some coffee at the restaurant.
Then we started our trek to see the ruins! Tikal is an ancient Mayan city that was found deep in the jungle of Guatemala back in the 1800s. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site and is an absolutely amazing place to see. The park is huge, so it takes a day or two to walk through and see all of the temples and pyramids and shrines, but we got a good head start on it before lunch Saturday, making it to see the Grand Plaza and Temple V, along with a few smaller ones along the way.
This was my first experience with ancient ruins, so I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I loved every minute of it. It is crazy to think that a people who lived from 600 BC to 900 AD built these massive, amazing temples, the tallest of which stands 212 ft (64.6 meters) jetting out high above the trees.
After awhile, we were getting hungry, so we walked back to the hotel and ate lunch. We took a nap, got in the pool, and I took a cold shower. We also snapped some pictures of birds and took advantage of the short span of time with electricity and wifi to charge our gadgets and try to get in touch with the rest of civilization, and ate some dinner at the hotel. We tucked in nice and early, so that we would be rested for our tour that started at 4:00AM.
We woke up at 3:30AM, surprisingly rested and excited and grabbed our flashlights to meet up with the rest of the group.
We walked in silence through the jungle until we got to the Grand Plaza. I wish I could have gotten a picture of the temples in the plaza at this time to show how magical they looked with the only light being that from the stars above shining down on them. Our guide showed us how the sound of his clapping bounced off the stairs of the temple, sounding like the call of a quetzal.
We continued on our way, stopping only to look at a trail of leafcutter ants (which, according to Wikipedia, “next to humans, leafcutter ants form the largest and most complex animal societies on Earth) carrying their leaves to their nest.
When we arrived at the base of Temple IV, which is where we were to wait for the sunrise, it was still pitch black outside, so I had no idea how many stairs we were about to climb. I could only see a small stretch at a time with my flashlight through the fog. But apparently, it was a whole hell of a lot of stairs. I was panting about halfway up (and you’d think I’d be all in shape after that run through the Houston airport the other day, right?!). Finally we made it up, the first ones there. We climbed the temple steps to the highest part we could get to, and sat down. It was complete silence.
We saw above all of the trees and could hear it raining below us. We sat there for close to an hour, and the sun started rising about halfway through, though we couldn’t see it through all the mist. The sunrise isn’t what actually makes the sunrise tour so special though. The special part is hearing the jungle wake up. For quite awhile, I was afraid we weren’t going to hear it. Everything was silent. I started thinking maybe the animals didn’t know it was time to wake up with all the fog and rain below us. Then suddenly, we heard the call of a quetzal, as though it were telling the rest of the jungle “It’s time to get up!” After a while of that, some other birds started joining in. And a while after that, the howler monkeys started roaring. We all sat there listening for awhile, enjoying the peace of sitting above the trees with nothing but ancient ruins and the sound of wildlife and rain below us.
After we came back down, we started the actual guided tour. Our guide gave us a kind of behind-the-scenes look at the restoration process. Only a fraction of the structures in Tikal have been excavated so far, so it is an on-going process. The process itself is very slow and laborious. It was fascinating learning about it.
Shortly after that, we came across a complex of ruins with a shrine at the start. Our guide explained the different symbolism within the shrine as well as what the hieroglyphs meant.
We then ventured on to the “Lost World” portion of the park, a group of pyramids and temples set within the wilderness of the jungle. Our guide told us that at the time Tikal was built and inhabited, the jungle was not there. Seeing the place, it was so hard to believe that instead of the lush rainforest there now, there were cornfields.
He then took us back to the grand plaza to explore for awhile before heading back. Anthony and I had already explored most of it Saturday, but this time, we climbed up to the residential complex that ancient Mayan royalty lived in. We walked into the “bedrooms” and took in the views.
At last, our tour was over, about 4.5 hours after it started, and we walked back to the hotel to eat our free breakfast. The rest of the day was spent wasting time until our shuttle came, and then wasting more time at the airport for our flight that was delayed only one hour this time, and then shuttling to the beautiful colonial city of Antigua, which I will discuss next time!