Tikal and Yaxhá - see both if you can!

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My younger brother Eric came to visit us in early February, and had been reading his Lonely Planet guidebook for suggestions of places to visit (as well as, I should certainly hope, my List of Top Places to Visit )

He was pretty interested in making a visit to Tikal, and as we chatted about arranging the details, I decided that I would like to tag along to provide some company. I wanted the chance to visit the area again, this time (based on Steve and his mom's trip) adding in a trip to Yaxhá, which Eric was also game for.

Eric arrived from the US on Friday night and, after spending the next day in Antigua, together we set off for Tikal and Yaxhá. As you may already know from Steve's experience (in his blog entry), Yaxhá is an excellent place to make the effort to visit. Steve had the name and contact info for an excellent guide he met at Tikal (see contact info at bottom), so Eric and I had the benefit of having a fully guided tour already arranged when we arrived at our hotel.

There we met Pablo, a young guide who, years ago at the age of 8, was sent up to New Jersey to live with an elderly gentleman in an old-folks home for three years. Three years without his own family! It had to be quite a hardship for his family, but so it is, and he returned to Guatemala fluent in English. He proceded to go to University, getting a master's in Political History. (When I asked him if he ever wanted to enter politics, he laughed and said that by studying history he learned that he NEVER wanted to enter politics!)

Pablo then took us (via a driver friend of his) to Yaxhá for our own private tour. It turns out that Yaxhá is still delightfully uncrowded and in fact we were 2 of only 4 guests there the whole afternoon. Compare that to Tikal, where hundreds might visit in a day. That said, you're still pretty lucky to be able to visit Tikal with such relatively low numbers. I believe other major Mayan ruins of Mexico, for example, Chichen Itza, are far more crowded. (Interesting tidbit, Yaxhá was the setting for the Survivor: Guatemala show and the producers of the show had to agree to both fund some park improvements as well as agree to creating a very small footprint of their stay there, in order for the show to get permission to film.)

Our tour was timed to be a sunset tour, with the highlight moment seeing the sun set from the top of the great temple overlooking the Yaxhá lagoon. Pablo took us from one temple to the next, going into great detail the political and cultural aspects of what we were looking at. For example, he pointed out the North-South-East-West orientation of the buildings, which have a major impact on Mayan life. According to the Mayas, South is yellow, the color of corn. East is red, the color of blood, which, when mixed with corn, gave original life to man. North is white, which represents the ancestral dead, and West is black, which represents the underworld. You'll see these colors a lot in Mayan religious artifacts.

With their understanding of the orientation of the compass, the Mayan rulers also became talented astronomers. The rulers, whose job it was to be a human diety, needed to keep the people in awe of their god-like powers. So they dressed in fantastic masks and built impressive temples and courts which were designed to amplfy their voices.

They also appeared all-powerful because they could reliably predict the changing of the seasons. This is super important to an agrarian society, whose lives revolve around the when the rains would begin or end. How did they do this? By observing the stars and the equinox! It turns out that the beginning of the rainy season coincides with the spring equinox, and the ending of the rainy season coincides with the autumnal one. The ignorant masses didn't know this, or keep calendars, but the leaders did. By making good astral observations, they were not only giving their people important information to keep the crops productive, they were keeping their people in awe by "bringing" the rains according to their predictions.

I have a picture of Pablo explaining this phenomenon in Tikal, where there were structures built in front of a temple which lined up exactly with the shadows created by the sun during the spring and fall equinoxes.

After this fascinating lecture of the compass points, we headed on to one of the great temple courts in Yaxhá. Unlike Tikal, Yaxhá doesn't have a lot of guests who have killed themselves falling off the temples, so they still let you climb them. (Last year, Tikal had 5 people who fell to their deaths, which is apparently the number which triggers their "no climb" policy) So up go Eric and I, seriously hoping we wouldn't be the idiot tourists who would fall and trigger a no climb policy in Yaxhá.)

Up at the top of a temple, I became fascinated with a colony of leaf cutter ants who were busy at work at the top. The early evening light was just perfect, and I took a little video of these fabulous creatures leading their busy lives at the top of this fantastic ancient temple. Consider the juxtaposition of the ancient civilization with that of these little ants (see video).

Eric (who earlier had returned safely to earth) and Pablo waited patiently for me to slowly climb down the steps. I didn't want to appear like a careful old lady, but I did have to resisit the strong urge to sit on my butt and plop down the stairs one by one to avoid killing myself. Instead, I tried to act casual as I descended the steep, shallow stairs (with my giant size 11 feet, which where twice as long as the steps were deep) and so basically traversed the stairs in a Z-pattern in order to get a decent foot-hold. Eric shot a few photos of this, possibly to record the event for the medical examiner who would sign my death certifcate. ("Cause of Death: big feet/shallow steps")

By the time I got safely on terra firma (resisting the urge this time to kiss the ground), Pablo was busy checking his watch and hurrying us on to our crowning event: watching the sun set over the Yaxhá lagoon from the top of the highest temple. As we hurried over (Eric silently cursing my obsession with those ants), we could listen to the great roars of the howler monkeys. I'm telling you, if I were left alone in this jungle with the light fading and could see nothing but only hear the sound of those monkeys, I would just curl up in the fetal position and give up. They sound positively menacing, and as Steve noted in his earlier blog entry), exactly what you'd expect those beasts to sound like in Jurassic Park.)

At last, with Pablo sweating profusely and shooshing us up the stairs to the top (real stairs! with rails! how safe!), we reached the top of the temple juuuuuust as the sun had gone beyond the horizon. Aw shucks, but I must say that the view from up top, above the jungle canopy and out to the lagoon, was fantastic. We rested a moment to catch our breath, enjoyed the moment, and then swiftly headed on down, because when it gets dark in the jungle, it gets DARK.

The next day we joined the regularly scheduled Tikal tour with the ever excellent Pablo again as our guide. By now you've probably read enough about Tikal, between our first family visit , and that of Steve, so I'll just insert one little story:

As we were walking through the jungle from one temple to the next, we went down this path to a point where Pablo suddenly stopped, looked back at us, put out his arm to stop us in our tracks, and calmly but with big eyes said, "Stop." He turned back around to point out a 5-foot long Fer De Lance snake, which is one of the most poisonous snakes IN THE WORLD. (I looked this up.) I happened to have my camera on, so was able to take a pretty good shot of this baaaad boy.

Our little group of 7 people very obediently stopped and watched the snake slowly, creepily slither by (you could have heard a pin drop, but no one would have dared drop the pin). After it disappeared off the path ("to where!?" you could legitimately be screaming - the thought certainly obsessed me for the next 3 hours), Pablo spent the next 10 minutes wiping off his flop sweat and muttering "anything but snakes, I can handle anything but snakes."

I spent the next few minutes nervously chatting with Pablo, wondering if the snake might be a poisonous but passive snake, the kind where you can say to yourself "they're more afraid of you than you are of them" which is a great thing to be repeating to yourself at this moment. But no, Pablo assured me that these are really mean, aggresive snakes, and they can strike you from any position: front, back, hanging, slithering, etc. I've looked up this part too, and it's true. Heh! Heh! Pablo said that if you get bit, you have about 20 minutes before you will lose your limb, and if it goes beyond that you're dead. Thus, the course of action to take with a bite from the Fer De Lance snake is: cut off the limb.

Now of course imagine you're in a developing world where not only is it a rough 1-hour drive to get out of the park, what you're driving to is going to be a developing world hospital where they're likely to say "oh, I'm so sorry. Where shall we send your body?" So you're really down to asking one of the Tikal grounds staff to pull out his machete and just whack off your limb. And then you can revisit the whole hospital scenario with just lots of blood and gangrene in the picture...

What's really important is just to stay clear of the snake. Pablo's been doing this for years and he said he's seen very few of these guys. I guess we were just lucky!

I would HIGHLY recommend Pablo to anyone considering a trip to Tikal and Yaxhá (how's THAT for a segue?) You'll have to call or email him to arrange the details; he speaks excellent English and was pretty supportive of me putting his contact information on my blog.

Pablo's email is: [e-mail]
His cell phone number is (Guatemala country code: 502) 5527 0859

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Photos

Near the entrance of Yaxhá
These stelae pieces and glyphs were completely in their original form and place

Close up of glyph
(click to enlarge and see detail)

Pablo showing the equinox temple design (Tikal)
The temple behind him was the observation temple. There were two smaller structures on either side of us that were perfectly positioned such that the shadows of the equinox would line up PERFECTLY with the structures, thus telling the leaders when the rains would come or leave.

Eric at top of temple
with another temple in the background

That little spec up there?
That's me, hoping not to fall to my death

Sunset at Yaxhá
Note the temple in the foreground, right

The deadly Fer De Lance
NOT friendly, NOT cuddly

A Ceiba tree: a symbol of Guatemala
To the Mayans, the tree represents the axis of the world, connecting from the underworld (the roots) to the heavens (the branches above)

Comments

[Eric]

I was there!