Stage 3: Tikal
Crossing the Border
I rode out of San Ignacio and into a very hilly region. Although there were some more intense hills, the landscape was just hilly in general.
I rolled up to the border and exited Belize with no issues, showed my covid test and paid the $40 exit fee. Over on the Guatemalan side, it was a bit confusing. There were no signs and a lot of large trucks being processed. Some militia men and women were milling about at a station at what seemed like the exit to the town. I walked past them and they did not check my passport. All of a sudden, I was in Guatemala. A taxi driver called out to me,
“Hey! Did you get a passport stamp?”
“No, where do I get it?”
“Go back through the border and around the side and along the administrative building to the corner”
Well, thanks to the cabbie, I won’t have any problems when I leave the country.
This was a pretty long ride. The Tikal entrance will fake you out, because you have to buy your ticket for the park at a gate located 10 miles from the park itself - and the ride in has even more hills. As I rode in, some of the bird chatter had ceased, and I saw some monkeys crashing through the trees occasionally as I rode by. My legs were pretty tired at the end of the ride, I had climbed 4440ft on an 80 mile ride on the third day of this trip. This is what I trained for!
I was planning on camping, but I had neglected to do any research beforehand about the park itself. It turns out, you can pay for a night entrance and night hike and go into the park to observe birds and watch the sun rise over the temples. That sounded too cool to pass up, so I signed up for a tour at one of the hotels on the grounds for $20. There were several other people at the campgrounds, an Italian woman in a tent, a Swiss couple in a Mercedes sprinter that they had shipped over from Hamburg prior to coming, and a Guatemalan family who had driven their car but were sleeping in a tent. The groundskeeper, Manuel, was also very friendly and offered plenty of assurances about my belongings while I went and explored the park.
My camping setup
I had to be at the hotel by 4am in order to go on the tour. I set an alarm, but it turns out I wouldn’t need it. One of the best things about actually sleeping at Tikal is the howler monkeys, which started “howling” at around 3:30am. It sounded like they were directly above my tent (there were just trees there, so they probably were). Here is a video of what it sounded like. I haven’t verified a rumor I heard that Jurassic Park, the movie, used the howler monkey call for the T-Rex roar.
This video is what I woke up to at 3:30am.
We walked from the hotel to Temple 4, the two-headed serpent temple, stopping only a couple times on the way to observe various features of the park. We climbed up the temple and arrived around 5:30, while it was still dark. The howler monkeys were making a complete racket. The birds started to awaken as well and make a lot of noise. One of the guides spotted a toucan in a tree not too far from us and gave me some binoculars. As I was looking through them, a second toucan lighted on another branch below the first one and I started at their bright yellow chests and huge rainbow-colored beaks as they chittered to one another.
The sunrise was amazing, the temples rise out of the forest, with only the tops visible above the canopy. The tallest temple is about 230ft high, it truly gives the place a mythical feel, that thousands of years ago (Tikal started being built as early as 600BC) it was a bustling metropolis, with the forest area cleared and sacrificial alters were something that one would simply come across in a walk across the temples. With new LIDAR technology, they have discovered around 70,000 structures in the area, far more than previously thought. Tikal is also being actively excavated, with only an estimated 20% of the pyramids unearthed.
Unfortunately, the guide was a little sparse on information, the main reason for booking the tour was to enter the park in the dark.
I ditched the tour after that and walked around on my own. I only saw a fraction of the park. It is enormous, to send your way through all of the grounds and visible structures is over 10 miles, and then you would want to observe them, of course. Thinking of my impending 40-mile ride with the brutal hills, i limited myself to just a few miles, and climbed two pyramids. I went up one pyramid that is a bit lower than the rest, “El Mundo Perdido”, a Royal necropolis. This was the best site for spotting birds because the top of the pyramid is just below the canopy. I can’t name most of the birds that I saw, except for the myriad of green parrots that were squawking and flying around in pairs.
View from Temple 4
Mundo perdido
There were also a couple areas where people would play a ball “game”, which was not so much a game as a reenactment. Our guide at the ATM cave in Belize told us that the ball signifies the sun and the moon, and the hoop is the passage and transformation of the sun in the sky and it’s passage to the underworld on the other side of the horizon. They revered jaguars, in part, because of the yellow and black spots, representing the sun and its occasional darkness.
Spotted a group of anteaters
I headed back to grab my bags from where I dropped them off at the hotel, I hadn’t really trusted leaving them in the open under Manuel’s care at the camp site. I was pretty exhausted from the early morning and crashed for about 20 minutes while sitting in a comfy chair in the lobby. Then made my way back to the campsite, packed my stuff away and headed out. I had a great time experiencing some ancient culture, now I’m headed to Flores to meet my host and get a more modern experience.
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