Guatemala is home to some of the greatest ruins and wonders of the ancient Maya. Theirs was a civilization astoundingly advanced for its time. The Maya enjoyed an epic reign, developing an impressive attentiveness to astronomy, mathematics, and architecture, among other things. And even now, hundreds of years later, their monoliths and temples still stand majestically in the jungle. I had to see them.
From consulting my Guatemalan Lonely Planet guidebook, several experienced friends, travel agencies around Antigua, and my professors in Centro Linguistica Maya, I had decided that I would need a full week to fully take advantage of a trip to Peten, Guatemala’s northernmost province. Here there are fewer people living there per capita than anywhere else in the country. And there also are the vast rainforests hiding forgotten Mayan ruins. It would be an eight hour bus ride. I decided to make it last Friday.
After making a reservation with a travel agency in Antigua for a seat on the Linea Dorada bus, I packed anxiously. There were several departures everyday, and I chose to take night bus in hopes of sleeping during the trip to save time and also to avoid the agony of such a lengthy bus ride during the increasingly warm days. I was on the corner outside of my apartment at sunset on Friday when a small white shuttle pulled up, already laden with backpacks strapped to the roof, and travelers within. The driver was nice but in a hurry; apparently I was the last stop.
We got on the road east out of Antigua heading for the capital city at about 7:30 p.m. The Linea Dorada (Golden Line) bus station is located there, and as we rode I listened to what I think were conversations in both Dutch and German between other passengers behind me. Halfway through the trip it started raining. We stopped on the side of the steep, busy mountainside highway in the dark rain to cram the backpacks into the van’s backseat. After this rearranging, I found myself riding shotgun. Sandwiched between me and the driver was a middle aged woman from Michigan. We began talking, and in a surly, rusty smoker’s voice she told me about how she had been stationed in Alabama while serving in the Marines long ago. She was a delightfully vulgar and wrinkled lady, and the first of many new interesting people I would meet throughout my trip. She got off in the rain in the middle of one of the shabby, dilapidated sprawls of the capital, shortly before the bus station, tipping the driver well.
I waited in the crowded bus station in Guatemala City for an hour or so, watching movies badly translated into Spanish with everyone else, and then got on the bus. Whoa. Air-conditioning. Forgot about that stuff. I actually suffered for cold during the long night journey.
They turned the lights out after a while, and I slept brokenly. Even in a bus where the chairs lean back a bit, there is little legroom in Guatemalan buses. We stopped at the border of Peten to be inspected by state customs officers, more or less. I stumbled outside with the rest and read a list of about eighty fruits that were not allowed to cross into Peten for fear of bringing in foreign plant disease. I had heard of maybe twelve on the list. Guatemala has forever changed my concept of “fruit”.
I woke at dawn. We had reached Flores, a small city built on the ruins of a Mayan settlement on an island in the middle of Lago Peten Itza. There is now a man-made causeway that crossed the water to Santa Elena on the mainland. But I’m getting ahead of myself; I learned all this later. On that Saturday morning I just threw my bag into a small shuttle headed for Tikal and left Flores minutes after arriving.
The shuttle was designed to hold around nine, and by the time we got to the gates of Tikal there were around fifteen packed inside. To wake myself up I started a conversation with a guy named Hugo sitting next to me. He turned out to be one of the official guides that work at Tikal. This was around six in the morning, and the whole shuttle was full of people commuting to work at Tikal. I made acquaintance with Hugo, and after an hour when we arrived at Tikal, he offered me a heavily discounted day of guiding around the park. I accepted, and we worked out the details while eating a quick typical breakfast of coffee, black beans with cheese, eggs, and fried bananas in a small comedor at Tikal. Afterwards, Hugo led me to the campgrounds (I had read that you could camp for cheap on the edge of the jungle at Tikal, and was packing my hammock). The attendant’s name was Enrique, and he showed me where I could store my bag for the day and told me that I could (and should) rent a mosquito net from him. After a little bit of organizing, I slung on my daypack and Hugo and I were off.
In a more recent Guatemalan guidebook I had borrowed from a friend before leaving Antigua, I had read that the entrance fee to Tikal was fifty Q per day, per person. About seven dollars. However, when I got to the gate, I saw that the price had been upped to a hundred and fifty. Roughly twenty bucks. My friend’s guidebook had been published in 2006. Apparently the Guatemalan government realized what an attraction it has on its hands. And hey, it’s not like you can get to the gates of Tikal, see the entrance fee, and say, “Nah, I guess I’ll just have to skip it.”
At the gates I met two more travelers who were looking for a half day’s tour, and we worked out a deal to split the cost of Hugo’s guidance. During this conversation, I heard a noise like no other: the song of the Oropendula. Like an echo in a wet cave, or the amplified sound of a drop of water. I recorded it while watching these large birds nesting overhead in a colossal hardwood tree just at the gates. Oropendulas build nests like long woven sacks that hang from high branches. And as I watched the large, striking species sing, I discovered that for every enunciation of this strange song, the bird pitches itself forward from its perch on a limb, but maintains grip with both feet and thus swings into an upside down position, as if to better throw the sound of its’ call. Quite curious, and fantastic. I checked the book: they were Montezuma’s Oropendulas.
We got moving into the depth of the jungle at around seven a.m. The birds and animals were still active before the mid-day heat, and while wandering the wide shaded trails, Hugo was happy to help identify those we saw. He was a really knowledgeable guy, spoke the entire day about anything I could ask, (although only in Spanish) and was a great guide. He told us that the site of Tikal had been chosen because beneath the Mayan made elevated sections, there was a natural rise in the land that helped the ancient city avoid standing winter rains that covered the lowlands. As he was explaining this we began climbing a noticeable incline, and at the top we reached the first set of ruins.
Amazing! There was a short temple, about thirty feet in height, but stout and wide, with worn, ancient gray stone stacked and centered in the typical step-shaped pattern of the Maya. At the foot of the stairs running up its face were several marker stones called stelae, shaped like oversized oval tombstones. Hugo explained that this was essentially their intended purpose, placed to commemorate the reigning kings during the time of the construction of this temple, or to acknowledge those buried within. Originally, there had been glyphs carved into each in the Mayan written language, but these had since faded over the years.
Apart from this first temple, there were several other low structures set facing one another, resting on the four sides of this artificially raised plateau. All underbrush had been cleared away, but there were many massive exotic trees shading the majority of the space. Here we saw several new bird species: Red-Lored and White-Fronted Parrots, Social Flycatchers, Masked Tityras, and Collared Aracaris. All of the above are strange looking creatures, but the Aracari was the most striking. It is a bird shaped like a toucan, with the same oversized bill and forward posture, but all black, red, and yellow. Very strange.
We kept walking. The park of Tikal is big: they say it takes two days to see everything, but that is probably an underestimate. Only a small portion of the ruins are “clean,” as Hugo described it. In other words, only some have been fully excavated from the ground. Many others are partially or completely underground, with ancient trees and roots growing throughout. From the looks of it, it is a massive undertaking to clean even a single site. The colossal central plaza of Tikal, for example, took years to excavate fully, and a few minutes later we turned a corner to this very sight.
The central plaza of Tikal is vast. It was the Mayan style to orientate temples along the lines of the cardinal directions, and often in corresponding and facing pairs. Temples One and Two on the east and west sides of the central plaza are good examples. Hugo led us through on a wandering path through a series of low level ruins, when suddenly we stepped out onto an elevated terrace on the south side of the plaza, overlooking everything. The view blew me away. The pair of temples was enormous, reaching from the floor far below and towering above the surrounding jungle canopy. Both are over 35 meters high, and were built in the first century AD.
Tourists wandered in pairs or small groups among the structures on the north side of the plaza, or were sitting or lying in the well-manicured grass in the center. There were wooden stairs leading up one of the temples, and from a platform at about three-fourths of its full height people were simply staring in awe. We spent some minutes doing the same before making another move.
I took so many pictures, partially for the fact that I realized that the temples were too large to fit into the frame of my camera from any close distance. And wandering through the park later that day and the next, I know I took many of the same pictures twice or even three times, simply because it’s impossible to avoid a picture of an ancient monolith angling out of the jungle, even if you know you’ve already taken it before. I had never seen such impressive architecture, regardless of age or style. However, the fact that these pyramids were built by hand and without motors or electricity is enough to shake the mind.
Hugo led our group of three around for most of the day, and after bidding him a sincere and thankful goodbye, I climbed Temple Five to watch the sunset. This temple is on a plateau apart and to the south of the central plaza, and is taller than the rest. It is forbidden to scale the original stone steps up to the crown of the temple, but there are wooden stairs that climb to the same height. I say stairs, but they functioned more like a ladder because they were so steep. More than one person has died from the fall, and Hugo told me he once witnessed an inattentive woman take one step too far at the top, looking through her camera lens, and fell to her death. After hearing this I took my time with the ascent.
At the top, I basked in the glow of the setting sun and the uninterrupted wind above the jungle canopy. In very few places have I experienced such a strong feeling of spiritual significance. A religious mountain of stone in the middle of the Guatemalan rainforest, with a view of the crowns of several other Mayan temples, surrounded by exotic birdsong and the eerie calls of spider and howler monkeys reverberating through the air. Charged. Temple Five is forty-four meters high. That’s over a hundred and thirty feet. I watched as the brilliant sunset light faded on the faces of the opposite pyramids, and listened to parrots cackling through the sky.
Tikal closes at sunset. I walked out just ahead of the elderly, slow-paced security guard who was busy trying to empty the park. On the path out I met a young Israeli named Hagai, who was in the middle of traveling around Central America and who told me about another Mayan ruin called El Mirador. He said something about a multi-day hike through the jungle to get there. It sounded interesting. With the fall of full dark, I was asleep in my hammock slung between two posts under an open-air thatched roof on the jungle’s edge. I could hear the mosquitos bumping against the netting inches from my face, searching for a way in.
I woke up at dawn to the deafening howl of big black monkeys in the trees just outside my hammock. Howlers. I took breakfast in the same place, and then I went to a building with a red cross painted on it, next to the entrance gate. I had been bothered by some form of biting insect all during the night. Not mosquitos, at least not the typical species, but small enough to pass through the fine net I had slept in. There were small red whelps polka-dotting my wrists and ankles, the places where my cloths hadn’t covered. It is too hot in Tikal, even in the night, to use a sleeping bag. The staff in the medical building told me that there are a myriad of tiny biting insects in the area, that the marks were nothing to worry about, that I wasn’t going to collapse and die of Dinghy Fever, and that they would fade in two or three days. Well, thanks! It’s always good to know imminent death isn’t on the day’s schedule.
During the second day in Tikal I had several mammal encounters. While entering the park I saw a large rodent, about the size of a cocker spaniel, cross the path. It looked kind of like a giant guinea pig, with a rounded back and bottom, and no visible tail. Later, I was waiting silently in the middle of a long, empty path in the thick sweltering jungle, and a social group of pizotes scurried out of the forest and began to forage and sniff within ten feet of me. Pizotes are relatives of raccoons, but are longer, lighter, and more catlike. They are reddish brown in color, have pointed snouts, and long, ringed tails. They were amazingly fearless, and I was able to take video and a handful of pictures before they continued on their foray into the jungle on the other side of the path.
Some hours later, I was stalking a brilliant tropical bird called a Blue Crowned Motmot (look up a picture, they are incredible) when a couple of guys came walking down the path. I greeted them with the awkward nod that I’ve developed to try to explain, “yes, I’m absolutely grinning with excitement over a bird, alone in the woods,” when one of them did a double take and told me he thought he had seen me reading in Antigua’s central plaza. I introduced myself to him, (he was a middle-aged thick and bald Australian named Alex), and to his companion (a Guatemalan guy named Santiago closer to my age, and with hair). I told Alex that yes, it probably was me, and we started a conversation. They were looking for monkeys, and asked me if I had seen any around. The day before, at sunset, I had watched several pockets of spider monkeys swinging around and foraging in the treetops around Temple V, and that morning I had passed under some that were traveling parallel to and immediately over the path. I told them about this second group, but before they could even begin moving in that direction there was a loud crash up on a nearby ridge, and a family of spider monkeys began heading our way.
We took turns sharing my binoculars, but eventually this became unnecessary: the group of ten or twelve monkeys came right for us, seeming very curious in their inspection of the humans. They undoubtedly knew we were there, and would throw pointed and lengthy stares in our direction when they got close. One even climbed down a vine into a palm tree on the edge of the path, and began skinning and eating palm nuts about ten feet above our upturned faces. It was awesome.
Later, I wandered back to the Central Acropolis and ran into Hagai resting in the shade cast by a tall palm. We started talking and he told me that he had decided to go on that excursion to El Mirador, which is a complex of ruins near the Mexican border that houses two of the tallest and oldest temples in the Mayan world. He told me that so far only he and his friend were going, and that they were looking for other people to come along, because the guide would drop the price for a bigger group. I decided on the spot I wanted to go, and asked him about logistics. Hagai told me that they had until four p.m. that afternoon to tell the guide about additional people for the trip, and that the plan was to leave at five a.m. the next morning. He told me he was staying in a hostel in Flores called Los Amigos, which I had heard about and had been recommended to stay at by several people in Antigua. I was pumped!; I couldn’t imagine a better way to make the most of my one week’s time in Peten, and so I told Hagai that I would try to make it happen. He gave me a smile and a handshake, and told me that he would be in Los Amigos if I decided I wanted to go. I wandered around the ruins for a little while longer, but quickly realized that this new potential adventure had taken over my attention and imagination. With a last awe-filled glance back at the crest of an ancient temple through a window in the canopy, I walked out, got my bag from Enrique, and haggled out a seat in a Flores-bound shuttle.
