Tikal, amazing.

Tikal was so much more impressive than I even imagined it would be. An outline of our day (April 9):

• 4:00 am wake up
• 4:30 on the bus, picking up others from various hostels around Flores
• 6:15 arrive at Tikal, have first cup of coffee since leaving San Francisco (instant, no problem), meet Luis, our awesome tour guide who had the craziest accent I´ve ever heard - a mix of Australian, English, American, and sometimes Irish)
• 6:30 to 11:00 tour the park, which happens to be almost completely empty.
• 12:30, exhausted, bus back to Flores.

I´m usually suspicious of tours - a bunch of tourists crammed on a bus, being overcharged, not experiencing the ¨real thing¨ - however the tour of Tikal was wonderful. We lucked out with the weather and the timing, as we were informed that the week before (Easter week) the temp had reached 40 degrees Celcius (hot hot) there had been as many as 5,000 people visiting the park per day. The day we went, it was comfortable and cool compared to the heat to which we´ve become accustomed, and I don´t think we saw more than 30 other people in the park all day. We saw lots of wildlife: howler and spider monkeys, beautiful birds, big spiders, the Mayan tree of life and tree of love (which bore quite a resemblance to the tree of souls in Avatar...) cuys (like guinea pigs, we hear they taste like chicken), wild turkeys, and more (we didn´t get to see the toucan, aka the flying banana, but others in our group did. The only reason they got to see it and we weren´t there was because WE were busy climbing a temple...so really, we didn´t feel too bad). We climbed all the temples that we were allowed to climb, the views from the top were amazing. Luis said Tikal is the city of sights and sounds, and we could see why. Clapping your hands in front of the temples results in an echo that sounds like a quetzal.

It´s hard to imagine how people were able to build these enormous solid stone structures thousands of years ago, and without the aid of complex machines. The temples were built to be very tall in order to be close to the gods. It was very special being able to climb all over them and see the many structures from so many vantage points, unlike most ruins that I´ve ever visited. It was all very accessible, and without the feeling of being in a theme park. My personal favorite of the pyramids was the Temple of the Grand Jaguar - not sure why. I´ll let the photos explain the rest: