Alright, so picking up at the drifting off to sleep part. We wake up mostly rested (but really groggy in Flores at 6 am) to a guy saying "Wake up!!! Good morning, welcome to Flores." <-- First indicator you might be getting hustled: English. He continues "The green bus across the street will give you a free ride to Tikal." <-- Rule 2: There's no such thing as a free lunch, or in this case, a free pre-breakfast bus ride. Continuing on, Meghan and I groggily hop off the bus and try to decide what we want to do, as we originally planned to hang out in Flores for the day. The sound of a free bus ride to the park sounded really good to a couple of tired kids, so we hop in to the nice man's green van with 8 or so other people, mostly white. Eventually, the doors close and we take three, count 'em, three trips across the same bridge before arriving in front of a travel agency and being prompted to switch buses to go to Tikal. The same enterprising man tells us that its actually going to cost 100 Quetzales to go to the park round trip (for reference, the Linea Dorada ticket cost 160 Quetzales, or around $25.) We're sort of pissed as we begin to wake up, but still tired enough to believe the promises of the man that the chicken buses are sketchy and the other microbuses (15 passenger vans) don't leave for hours. <-- More signs we're probably getting hustled. We cough up the 100 Q and hop on the bus.
An hour and half later we're in the park, which is pretty clearly in the dead middle of Nowhere. Or more exactly, a small clearing in the jungle that surrounds the dead middle of Nowhere. But this nice jungle at least has 4 or so hotels to choose from, and so we ask the nice guys at the information desk what they recommend. We choose the second cheapest hotel because it has a pool and a couple of sweet deals on tours and food. This hotel also happens to be the farthest from the park entrance.
By now its around 7:45, the sun's been up for two and a half hours and the temperature is inching up to a really humid 80 degrees, sun shining brightly. oh boy! After trekking across the gravel clearing where all the hotels are centered at, we walk up to our hotel, hidden amongst all the trees. We end up with a sweet deal that for $20 US each, we can have a room, a dinner voucher, a breakfast voucher for the next day, and a sunrise tour of the ruins. <--What not getting hustled looks like. No arguing from here. The room's not quite ready because well, its like 8 am, so we go chow down on some breakfast.
Around 9 or 10, our room is ready and so the nice guy from the hotel shows us to our room. We've already scoped out some of the hotel and we notice the cool little bungalows by the pool and some more that line the path leading out to the jungle. We get pretty excited, thinking that's what we got for $40. We were slightly wrong. We walk past alllll the nice bungalows and a two story building with 10 or so rooms in it, then on to a very springy wood-chip path that goes through the jungle. The path arrives at a white building with probably 6 rooms in it. 3 minute walk in total, not so bad in the daylight. However, it also means that we're in the farthest room of the farthest hotel in the middle of the jungle that surrounds the middle of Nowhere. And the room only has electricity from 6 pm to 10 pm. And hot water from like 11 am to 2 pm, or something equally as random. Despite this, we're just excited to finally be there, some 15 hours after we left the clinic the previous day.
Bellies full and bodies sort of sore from sleeping on a bus, we decide to keep cool by the pool in lieu of air conditioning or electricity anywhere. The pool was nice and cool enough to remind you how hot its getting as it approaches noon. Eventually the pool stops keeping us cool for very long and so we decide its lunch time. We didn't want to pay for the kind of pricey lunch at the hotel, so we opt to trek back across the big, bright, hot clearing to a comedor on the other side. (Comedors are cheap, family-run kitchens that usually have tasty, but slightly questionable food.) Lunch was good, but even sitting in the shade we were working up a sweat.
We head back to the hotel and grab a shower while the water's still hot, and then chill in the room till it "cools down" a little, although with the humidity and the clouds, I'm not sure it really did. But whatever. Sunset at the park is supposed to be spectacular if you can catch it, so around 4 we hike back across the park once more to the actual park entrance. We pay the entrance fee and start walking, alone, through the jungle. This is real jungle too. What we had at the hotel was like a nicely manicured version of the jungle. This one, the trees were much more dense, there were vines and stuff hanging down from the trees, signs warning about snakes, and an assortment of strange jungle noises. Pretty cool on its own. OH! And mosquitoes. Possibly malaria-bearing, blood sucking monsters that were up to the size of a finger nail and sounded kind of like airplanes if they buzzed your ears.
Ambling about on mysterious jungle roads, it takes us almost 30 minutes before we come across our first ruin. Creatively named Temple 5, it was a temple at one of the far corners of the park. It wasn't completely uncovered, but did have a few doors with fences over it that you could look in, kind of cool in the we-haven't-seen-anyone-in-20-minutes kind of way. The entire time, Meghan seems slightly pre-occupied with the possibility of jungle animals or bandits lurking amongst the trees. Me, I'm slightly pre-occupied too, but mostly with snakes and these guys:
Temple guards. From one of my favorite game shows as a little kid, Legends of the Hidden Temple, these dudes would pop out of the middle of particularly creepy places and kidnap contestants and ending their chances at the grand prize unless they had the pendant of life, which made them immune to one attack. Needless to say, I left my pendant of life back in Pana, so we were pretty much up a certain proverbial creek as far as they go.
Oh well.
Anywho, we walk another 20 minutes or so to the royal palace. It was pretty grand in the sense it had fifty-eleven different rooms (<--fictional number), however it was interesting to see, because everything they have is made out of limestone blocks that are more or less twice the size of your head, so there wasn't much in terms of actual living space because the blocks took up a lot of room. I still think there was enough room for a temple guard though.
Onward now to the Great Plaza, which lives up to its epic name. It has two awe-inspiring temples across from each other, both at least 120 feet tall, a continuation of the palace on one side, and an acropolis for all the dead kings and queens and other assorted important people on the other. We explored around there and soaked it all in a little bit before heading off to Temple 4 for the sunset. No luck on getting a real sunset, but at 270 feet tall and being built on the highest point in the area, Temple 4 was an awesome place to sit and look at the rest of the jungle and the park. We even managed to see a few spider monkeys and hear a few howler monkeys while we were up there.
The next morning we woke up at 3:40 am <-- not a typo, for our sunrise tour. Getting dressed by the light of a small flashlight (left my headlamp in my apartment) and walking through the jungle by flashlight was pretty surreal. Especially with all the fog that had set in. We walked up Temple 4 again with the tour in hopes for an awesome sunrise, but instead we got fog. But the fog had its own effect. It made us sit there and look out at the few trees we could see, from the top of a temple build over a thousand years ago, and listen to the jungle wake up. Packs of competing howler monkeys howling, birds beginning to chirp, bugs buzzing, it was possibly one of the most powerful things I've experienced.
For that matter, all of Tikal was really mind-blowing to me. I could tell you the rest of the details of our adventure, but it was all pretty uneventful, so instead I'll try and capture what is so crazy about Tikal.
Tikal is an ancient city built over the course of 16 centuries by people who had no metal tools whatsoever. All of their tools were rock or on rare occasions, jade that was acquired by trade with other Mayans. In the oldest known temple in Tikal, a giant slab of stone fell and almost killed an archeologist exploring it in the 1960's. On that stone was a master plan for the major structures of the city, many of which were the same as the ones we see in the park today. This means that the Mayans were working off of the same blueprints for literally thousands of years, trying to engineer the city the way someone long before them saw it. They built temples out of stone that were hundreds of feet tall, completely under human power. They didn't have horses or any other animals to move stone for them. Men did it all. It was all painted in either blue or red, or left with a white stuco that covered the entire city, and there are thousands upon thousands of stones and carvings throughout, some still preserved today. The tops of the temples once had giant faces for their gods on top. Almost all of their resources not devoted towards food were devoted towards construction or scientific discoveries such as the calendar or predicting to within .5 days, how long a solar year was.
I could go for days and days about how cool it was, but I'm about to get kicked out of the internet cafe. Tikal was a truly spectacular place, and if you ever get the chance, you MUST go. To see where people from thousands of years ago lived and worked still standing today is astounding. I would post pictures but there's a virus that attacks flash drives floating around, so I don't want to risk losing my pictures from the trip. I will most certainly post them when I get back to the States. In the mean time, google it, its really something to see even in pictures.
Hasta Luego!
