Day 8: Tikal

On Wednesday we once again woke up bright and early to catch a ride to the airport at 4am. Though technically at Guatemala City airport, our plane departed from what was basically a hangar with a little office for checking in. There was no security or anything. Paul assured me that the plane would seat at least 80 people, but it was actually about a 30 person plane:

This was by far the smallest plane I had ever flown in, so I was a bit nervous. It actually ended up being a very smooth flight, and we arrived at our destination (Flores) in about 45 minutes. We met up with the rest of our tour group and made the hour-long drive out to Tikal. There were five of us in the group, all young Americans. Our English-speaking guide immediately took us on the smaller trails rather than the big paved ones through the park, which was amazing. Tikal is located in a jungle filled with all sorts of wildlife- monkeys, parrots, snakes, and lots of strange bugs. Being right in the thick of it and hearing all the jungle noises was a great experience. After a small trek, we arrived at our first site:

 

Tikal was quite a large city back in the Mayan period (1000BC-950AD), and the Mayans chopped down all the trees in this area and basically paved it all to make their buildings and roads. Once they mysteriously abandoned it in 950, nature prevailed and grew right back to the way it was, regardless of what was on top of it. As a result, all of these pyramids and temples became completely covered in vegetation:

 

There's a pyramid under those trees and plants, similar to the one above. It's only after 30 years of excavating that they're been able to uncover these sites. Even now, only about 25% of the total city has been excavated. After walking through some of these smaller complexes, we arrived at a much larger temple that we were able to climb. After a long walk up some stairs, we had a breathtaking view Tikal:

I'm not a huge Star Wars nerd, but apparently there's a scene at the end of A New Hope that is filmed right here. I made a little Photosynth panorama from the shots I took up there:



Our next stop was an area called Mundo Perdido (Lost World), which is the oldest of any of the complexes:

If I remember correctly, this was a building used for astronomy purposes- the top is totally flat, so you can climb up there and lay/sit around to see the stars. We walked through a couple more complexes to see more temples and living areas. I don't remember which temple this is, but it's impressive looking:

 

After a bit of a walk, we finally came to the main attraction of Tikal: the Grand Plaza. This has some incredibly high temples, including the oft-pictured Temple I:

There are several other buildings in the main complex, including some that were used to house important officials and rulers in the ancient city. We were given the option of climbing another temple, but by that point we were pretty exhausted. The climate is incredibly hot and humid, so we were sweating like mad. We ended our tour with some lunch, though we quickly dipped back into the jungle to watch and listen to some howler monkeys. I unfortunately don't have many pictures of the wildlife that I saw, because they're pretty elusive. Howler monkeys sound terrifying, by the way. I thought it was someone screaming at first.

Once we made our way back to the airport, I was shocked to find that our plane would be even smaller than the first:

It seated about 15 people. This is the view from the very back seat of the plane:

There was also a pretty nasty storm rolling through, so I was very nervous about the safety of flying. We waited for the worst to pass by, and the flight ended up being very pleasant. I took some amazing pictures from my seat:

We got home in the evening and were naturally very tired. For once we got to get a full night's sleep before our last day in Guatemala. I'll probably do one more post to wrap up my experiences here, but for now I have to go pack.