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Published: July 17th 2009
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Getting up at the ungodly hour of 4am was actually OK. Reason being we had though that the minibus taking us to Tikal was going to get us there in time to climb a temple to watch teh sun rise. Of course no such thing happened - or could have happened - as we found out while watching the sun rise from the minibus seats that the gate of the site didn´t even open till 6am, well after sun rise. So feeling a little disappointed at this, we arrived at the site. Tikal was the thing I was looking forward to the most on this trip so I was very excited about arriving there. It´s one of the largest Mayan sites and it was dominate from about 600 BC to about 1200 AD, no one´s really sure why the Mayan´s left the site but it´s thought that they probably ran out of natural resources as there were over 10,000 inhabitants there in it´s height. The site is just massive. It´s in the middle of the rainforest and was only rediscovered in the last 60-70 years. It´s very different to the other sites that we have seen by this very fact. You
Weird Raccoon type animal
can´t remember it´s really name, but really cute have to walk through long stretches of Jungle/rainforest to get to the different parts of the sites and as we were walking across, our guide would point out different animals and tress and plants to us. We saw howler monkeys, spider monkeys, wild turkeys, millions of multi coloured butterflies and some weird raccoon like animals indegenious to this area. The plant life was amazing as well as all the sounds and smells. Tikal is interesting in that it displays so many different architectural styles of the Mayans and we saw temples and pyramids which were reminesent in style of Teotiochoun and Palenque amongst others. The archeologiests are still working on many of the sites, but they are only clearing the tress from some parts of the buildings as this is helping to perserve them. As you´re unable to see the site as a whole and have to climb up one temple to see the tops of the others, it really sets Tikal apart from anywhere else we´ve seen. It was just beautiful.
There are just 2 of the main temples that your not allowed climb so we climbed the rest. I started getting bad vertigo on top of one
of the biggest, so I had to slide on my arse back to the safety of the wall. This temple was higher than the Sun temple in Teotiochaun, but I´d had no problem climbing it. I think the temples in Tikal are just so much steeper and because of the tree coverage, it feels like your just standing on a platform on top of the canopy of the tress. I only got half way up the steps of the next one before the vertigo came back again. The guide had told us that this one was particularily narrow at the top, so I wasn´t keen on the idea anyway, but the wooden steps they had errected to get you up were so sheer they were like a ladder, so about halfway up I foolishly looked down and then was it for me. The saftey of the ground beckoned! Dara and Aoife said they were great views from up there, so I was a bit disappointed, but at least I´d climbed the other ones. My camera batteries died on me, so I was using the camera on my new phone to take most of the pics, but I´ve discovered that I
can´t upload them on to the net with out he CD-Rom that came with the phone. I think most of the best ones are on the phone so I´ll have to wait till I get home to up load them. Hopefully some of the ones on the camera are ok. Camera´s on it´s last legs though, really need to buy a new one, it´s taking lots of blurry pics for no reason.
We ended up in the great plaza where there are lots of buildings including a temple, observatory , palaces etc, so we explored round there. By now, the heat was getting too much so we were really glad we´d gone early in the morning. We headed back to Flores with Jelly legs after all the climbing (I´m so un fit!!) for a lazy day (for a change.....) . I meant to go swimming in the afternoon, but didn´t get round to it, so this morning, when I couldn´t sleep with the heat, I went for an early morning swim in the lake, just gorgeous! wish I had a lake like that outside my bedroom at home!
Tonight we´re back on the bus for our last long
bus journey, overnight to Lake Atitlan. Not looking forward to it..........
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