Caught a shuttle at 5 a.m. from the hostel in Flores and headed to the jungle location of what was until recently the largest Maya ruin in Guatemala. After a long sleepy ride, we arrived at the park for a guided tour.
It was a 45-minute hike in to the first temple, so the guide entertained us with some wildlife as we went along. First we met a baby crocodile in a pond by the entrance. The guide clapped and the little guy swam over to the shore where we stood. Cool. Then he found us some howler monkeys way up in the trees. My telephoto managed to get some not bad shots of them. He had a howling fest with them, and then some park staff found a boa and tarantula to show us. The spider was creepy but he said it didn't have any poison in it (don't know how he knew this). Needless to say I didn't volunteer to hold it.
We wandered on and explored some smaller ruins. Way off in the distance we could see some high templos (temples) looming above the tree cover. The ruins are all built from limestone in the Classic Maya period, and date back as far as 400 BCE. I don't know how a soft stone like limestone could last that long but the buildings are incredible. The tallest are 70 storeys high and simply magnificent. The site is huge. The part that's excavated covers 16 square kilometres and it goes on far outside of that - the national park covers 575 square kilometres. There are 3,000 structures onsite. It has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site and costs a lot of money to excavate because of the constant battle to keep back the jungle.
We hiked up steep stone steps of several templos...all spaced a fair hike apart. I was pleased with how well I did at this. One of them had crazy steep wooden steps built - practically vertical - because (I read in my guidebook) a couple of hundred people had fallen to their death here. I told a couple of 20-somethings to go ahead of me because I would hold them back, but they insisted I go ahead and I found that I wasn't holding them up at all. Kudos to me! I made it to the top and the view was spectacular.
We finished the tour at La Gran Plaza. What was most profound for me about this site was the awe that it inspired. I don't know what the civilization was like who lived there, or what they did, but there was a peace that made me want to come back when there were a lot fewer people, and just sit and absorb the wonderful vibes. The plaza is an enormous complex of several buildings, with spectacular twin temples rising in the east and west, defining the space. The base of the complex itself, covered in grass and trees, is actually part of the structure, which rises quite high from the jungle floor - you can see how perfectly flat this layer is in pictures, built from a solid limestone base.
During the tour I met a woman named Amie who is an art curator in England. She is quite successful and travels the world finding interesting art. Her goal is to be the curator at the Tate, which I could totally see her doing...We got to chatting and ended up planning to spend the following night at one of the three hotels onsite at Tikal - right in the jungle!! She did some checking and one option was sharing a somewhat bare bungalow at the Jungle Inn for about $20 each. We planned to meet the next morning and take a shuttle back to Tikal in the morning for our last night (and my birthday!). Once there, we would go to the Tikal Inn - which we'd heard was really nice - take a look at a room, and see if we could negotiate a similar price...
No comments:
Post a Comment