Tikal!!

Disclaimer: This is a long post so if you don't want to read it all, feel free to look at the pictures:)

Tikal is one of the oldest Mayan cities and is situated in the middle of the jungle! We got there in late afternoon and started exploring the ruins in the middle of a rainstorm - It was incredible!

The stormy skies chased away the tourists and what was left was wildlife and the imposing ruins. The park is full of parrots, toucans, another bird that is black and gold with an amazing sound, oropendulas, and weird shaped animals that look like bears, with a pig snout, and a squirrel tail - coatimundis. And there were spider monkeys playing in the trees!

Back to the ruins, this city started in 700 BC and started getting going around 500BC, its hay day was 700 and 800 AD. There is a main plaza with the huge Great Jaguar Temple that housed the remains of a very famous king, across from that is the Temple of Masks built to honor his wife. On the south side of the great plaza were living areas and offices for the elite and one of the first archaeologists to this area, a man by the name of Moler, lived here while he was excavating the area in the 1900s (an archeologists dream!) And of course ball courts for the famous Mayan ball games. The rest of the city stretched out over a huge area with more temples, market squares, ceremonial areas, and burial grounds. What’s amazing is how well these civilizations documented daily life and history.

Remains of the living areas The sheer scale of these is huge - thats me!





After Tikal’s fall from grace in the late 800s AD, the city was abandoned and it was taken over by the jungle it was only rediscovered in the 1850s. Looking at pictures from the first re-discoverers of the area, the views look the same but the temples are covered in palms, vines, with only some foreboding rocks sticking out. The national park system has excavated some of the areas, restored others, and has left some mounds just as they were found.

View from temple IV - the tallest one



















The jungle is protected rainforest and it is over 222 square miles, further in, there are many more temples and civilization, some require a 3 day hike through the jungle to see (Although Mel Gibson flew his helicopter to one) and they think there could be many more still undiscovered.

Not quite Mel Gibson style, but for a 50Q (6$) “tip” you can go with a guard at night to check out the ruins. We decided to go for it, when else will you have the opportunity to check out ruins with only a few other people, by the light of the moon. Our guide showed us the jungle at night, which is full of snakes (the red and black ones can kill a person in 15 minutes - we saw 1!), frogs, toads, huge spiders that are somewhat sparkly, bats lightening bugs that stay light and don’t flicker, lizards and more. Jaguars exist in this parts of the jungle, as well as alligators, but likely we didn’t see either! I have to admit it was a little scary. In the dark we clambered up Temple IV, the largest temple and sat up top where there w as a strong wind that you could smell the scent of tropical flowers and looking out over the jungle and seeing the other temples lit up by an almost full moon - it was breathtaking.

We made our way down and spent the night sleeping in Jungle Lodge - a lodge in the jungle. Between being eaten alive by mosquitoes (I went with unnatural DEET and wasn’t bitten too bad) and waking up to the sound of howler monkeys! They sound like huge cats wailing - it’s a scary sound and definitely woke me up with a start a few times, but where else can you sleep in a jungle next to World Heritage site?

We started the next morning at 6am - to try and beat the heat and catch a sunrise - while it was a tad cooler, no luck on the sunrise. We explored more ruins, including an area called the lost World (El Mundo Perdido) that was my favorite. They are ruins hidden back in the jungle and were from 500 to 100 BC, while the were shorter and weren’t as well decorated it was just amazing that some of thee structures and carvings were older than Jesus!


After hiking for 5 hours in the heat we stopped for much needed popsicles and salads. Its really amazing the amount of engineering, mathematics, architecture and science that went into creating these structures and they are still around 2500 years later, can we say the same for the skyscrapers and bridges we build?

I have more photos and even a video that I'll post soon!