Calamity Jen and Mundo Perdido

So, this past Thursday and Friday, I went to Tikal with Oriana and her mom.

The way the trip was organized differed greatly from how we’ve previously been traveling—it was planned. We left very early on Thursday morning, 4 AM, on a shuttle to the airport in Guatemala City. We flew in a very small plane to Tikal-Flores. Once we arrived at the airport we were met by our hotel shuttle driver and tour guide. We hopped in the transport bus with the shuttle driver and he dropped us off to get some breakfast at a local stop while he collected people from the bus station. The local breakfast place was good. Most of the locals in this place were large men, armed with flashy and very unnecessary handguns, much like what we saw in Zacapa and Izabal. We finished and then boarded the shuttle bus again for the 45 minute ride to our hotel and the Tikal National Park.

Tikal’s National Park is 15 square kilometers of protected lands. It’s a real sight to see.

A note, Tikal is in Peten, the district in the panhandle of Guatemala that borders the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. Peten is mostly made up of jungle and rainforest, very few people actually live there.

You’ve seen my pictures of Quirigua. There are about 5 stelae and 3 larger boulders with one building/large plaza area. We covered that area in a little more than an hour. This was nothing compared to Tikal’s structures. The websites and guidebooks for Tikal show the same two pictures—I didn’t have a very good grasp on the scale of what we would see.

It was very hot, very humid, and I was just getting over a pretty bad sinus infection. So, I was a mess. It just got better when you add the sweat, many many mosquitoes, and heat rash. Yes, it was so hot, I got heat rash on my arms. I think the best explanation is that I experienced nature-overload. My superhero name is going to be Calamity Jen.

So, we get started on the tour, not a whole lot of an incline (thank goodness) because just walking in that heat was enough. We finally come up to the map of the grounds of the park. And it hits us. There are 5 large temples, a plaza with multiple royal buildings, and other smaller buildings. This was a lot more ruins than we thought. The tour guide mentions that it’s estimated that only 20 have to wait until other countries help them finance the archeological expeditions to uncover more. Given the tourist attraction that Tikal already is, it seems silly percent of what is at Tikal has been uncovered—leaving 80 percent still to be uncovered. She also mentioned that for lack of funds, Guatemala will that there aren’t plans to for further archeological projects to move forward there.

The buildings are thought to have been built between 600-800 CE. Although for a few structures, archeologists disagree on the dates. The structures at Tikal are just amazing both in size and architecture. For me, the most interesting part was how they even found these ruins because they were all covered by jungle vegetation. They call part of the site Mundo Perdido—Lost World. I think that’s a pretty apt name for the entire Tikal area. It felt very much like a lost world to me—especially because so much of Mayan history still remains a bit mysterious.

While the structures at Tikal were much more interesting, the stelae with Mayan glyphs were much more visible and better preserved at Quirigua. It seems that the stelae at Tikal were excavated and then left to erode in the rain over time. Had they been left until later, they might have been better preserved under all the vegetation. Limestone doesn’t hold up very well in rainy weather.

Since I didn’t have a guide book—and wasn’t going to buy one at the various tourist traps there—it was difficult to glean from our tour guide’s broken English the significances of each building. So, I won’t even attempt to explain stuff—I just don’t know enough to do it. But here are some pictures…