Jungle Things

I'm running a little behind on blogging, so here's a quickie from the town of Lanquin.  

Tikal

A while ago (a week?  more?  where are we? what month is it?), we went to Tikal, and it was amazing.  A fun wait for the bus, discussing narcotraficantes and the failure of Guatemala's tourism organization with the guy in the bus ticket office, and then a quick ride from Flores to Tikal.  

The national park of Tikal itself is huge -- something like 25 miles by 25 miles -- and even the archaeological portion is big.  Some temples and ruins are kilometers from one another.

The scenary is almost as spectacular as the ruins, with dense jungle completely surrounding the more remote trails.  We saw monkeys and got chased hard by mosquitoes at a near-run for perhaps a mile on a deserted foothpath.

The thing about Tikal is that it's impossible to photograph.  It's so big.  The best I can do is this, a photo taken from one of the temples (more than 200 feet high), looking at several of the other temples.

In between are other ruins and raised footpaths, and even the distance you can see is but a fraction of the entire city.

Some of the ruins are better excavated than others.  

In my mind, it's a tough call whether Palenque or Tikal is the best set of Mayan ruins we've seen, but they'd both be tough to beat.

Jungle

Chuck wrote about our arrival at the closed lodge way out in the middle of nowhere down a dirt road to an even further type of nowhere.  So that scene has been set. We were camping in the van in the parking lot of an otherwise empty lodge.  And the next morning, we decided to take a hike.  The lodge caretaker warned us we would need a guide, though it really wasn't that far.  Once again, something about snakes, etc. etc.  But the trail looked fine, so we set out on our own.

Francisco, Savior of Gringos

Five minutes later, a dude named Francisco showed up and refused to take no for an answer.  Either these guys really thought we were dumb gringos, or we really were, for refusing a guide.  Anyway, we couldn't really keep fighting it, so Francisco led the way.  We felt incredibly stupid being guided on a hike.  I mean, Chuck had his machete!  Come on.

My outdoorswoman ego died a painful death.


The hike, though, was good.  A number of times, we crossed the wild, rushing river on log-bridges. (Lena thought it was the worst thing she'd ever had to do.)

 

And then we arrived, after a little climbing, at the point at which the river exits its cave pathways.  A calm, deep pool used by Mayans for centuries as a sacred site.

Normally, we could have dipped in, but the heavy rains might have made that a bit dramatic on this particular day, since the pool flowed immediately into a charging, frothing beast of a river.

Bath time?

Lena's favorite bridge

But all in all, it was a fun time for the foolish gringos after all.