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Published: July 25th 2011
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Visiting the ruins of Tikal has always been very high on my agenda since I first visited Chichen Itza nearly 10 years ago. Chichen Itza receive millions of tourists every year, Tikal, a maximum of 600 a day. Why are you going to ask me? Accessibility seems to be the answer.
To explain why so few tourists are making it to Tikal you first have to consider that Guatemala has only been out of civil war for few years. Second, Guatemala City, the capital is very wellknown for a huge crime rate and unsecurity. This doesn't make the best marketing campaing up to these days for Guatemala.
Next problem, access. You can fly in from Guatemal City, but we didn't want to go there. You can also fly in from Belize, but this is far away from being cheap. Next option, you can ride a bus to Flores. We took the bus from Chetumal in Mexico. It's a 20 seaters tourist bus, leaving Chetumal at 7am and making it to Flores just before 4 pm, a long day!
This is a long day, we first crossed the border into Belize, and drive 5 hours through Belize, before reaching
the border of Guatemala. The bus was ok, the road too, it's just a long day (I know, I' repeating myself!). PS, if you do chose the same option as us, the money changers at the Belize/Guatemala border will try to cheat you solid. I was lucky for once! Faster, equiped with my own little calculator, and "seeming" to be pretty convicing, it's the first time I ended up on the good side of the deal, so much that the money changer wanted his money back 10 minutes later, but hey, a deal is a deal!
Tikal is a beautiful natural reserve. You could stay there in small bungalows, even tents, but we chose to stay on the small inlet city of Flores.
If time is the essence, money is scared, and beautiful is the place, you have all the ingredients for the making of a backpacker mecca...and Tikal/Flores is exactly that.
Flores doesn't seemed to have a single pretty top-end hotel, instead it is teaming with huge amount of very cheap backpackers places. We settled for a nice room, with all amenties, and more important, a nice balcony facing the lake, for a 50usd a night
including breakfast at hotel Santana.
Be warned, it is not because a place is targeting backpackers on a tight budget, that scammers don't roam the place. And the saddest thing, it seems to be those on the tighter budget who got ripped-off first. We paid 14usd for the transfer to Tikkal plus a nice guide for the day....but were offered the same thing few times for more than double. Same issue for the bus from Flores to Belize, paid 14usd, were offered by the company operating the same bus a ticket for 25usd...go figure out!
Tikal is an hour drive from Flores. Our departure was at 4.30am from our hotel, trust me, it was a good choice. Our guide for the day, Boris was a great energetic guy. We tour few of the temples with him during the 4 hours of our visit. We were back in flores at around 2pm, and it was pretty hot, and time for a small nap.
As youy may guess, we haven't checked much of the nightlife lately, waking up every morning before 6am make us going to bed pretty ealry at night!
Tikal is magic. Most of it is
still deep in the jungle. So we not only saw the temples, but we also had a little safari. I didn't take the right lens for this with me, so not much wildlife on the pictures. But we say monkeys, foxes, coral snakes, and other bugs and rodents on our little tour.
We did climb temple 4, but we gave a pass on the climb of temple 5...these steps are really to scary for me! The pictures do speak for themselves. For info, temple 4 is the place where they filmed the first Star Wars...not really an historical fact I admit!
We try to find some good food in Flores, but only found some ok food, not much to write on our food adventure here. Maybe just that when cocktails are dirt cheap, they may simply be not that great too, a simple fact in Flores.
Our next stop is back to Belize, you can already guess we are going back underwater. Few days before our next entry with a lot of underwater pictures...for those who are already fed up with my writing!
With Love...the little guys are joining us soon...
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