Advertisement
Published: April 26th 2010
Edit Blog Post
So a couple weeks ago, or days ago, or whatever.... mmm.... I was up in the Peten region of Guatemala. mostly flat, totally hot and humid and jungly marshy lowland. This is where the famed mayan ruins at Tikal are.
I arrived to Flores, a little island city in el Lago de Peten Itza. I hated flores. it is 100% built for tourists, too sterile, covered in concrete. but I got there late in the evening, so had to stay. Stayed at a hostel that made me feel like i was in a dorm at an american university. felt sick to my stomach. and also really hungry, so i went walking and found a place to eat some fried rice and seredipitously sat next to Bris, a french anarchist who has been living in Mexico for the past few years and was on a trip out of mexico and into guatemala for visa purposes. He hated flores too.... with a hilarious French vehemence. ha ha. We got to talkin over our fried rice, and he told me he had just come back from a bike trip into the Biosphera Maya. he gave me the name of the guy in Remate
who took him on the trip.
so the next day i went to Remate, which is also on el Lago de Peten Itza, but which has a natural shoreline and only a few guesthouses and restaurants and is very quiet and beautiful. Salvador is the guy who works at one of the guesthouses and lives there with his wife and beautiful little kids. And he takes people on these bike trips into the biosphera maya to see some remote ruins which, unlike Tikal, are rarely frequented by tourists.
So, we went to his friend´s house to aquire the 2 rusty bikes and to the tienda to get some pasta and cookies, and headed out the next day, sqeaking down the street with our stuff strapped to the backs of the bikes. and i always thought that in order to do a multi'day bike trip, you have to have a really nice bike with nice saddle bags and a camel pack and all that shit... not so. not at all.
on day one we rode on dirt roads through the jungle and little hamlets up to the ruins at Yaxha. Amazing. look at the pictures. we only saw
2 other tourists there, but there was a whole encampment of guys who live there for 42 days at a time, working on restoring the ruins. The platform that we camped on was right next to thier encampment, and it kinda felt like what i imagine a gold'mining camp might have been like... a bunch of guys, out in the middle of no where, working really hard all day, and killilng time all evening. we were camped close enough to them to hear all the dirty jokes and farts and burps and ranchera music on staticy radios and laughter... already feeling like men stare at me a lot down here because i am a gringa, it was something else to be in a place where these guys probably only see 5 women in their 42 day stint. por favor.
watched the sunset from the highest pyramid at yaxha. that´s why that pyramid was built... so the mayan kings and queens and ceremonial leaders could sit up there and have sunset ceremonies. and there i was, watchin the sunset, looking out at the mayan biosphere, jungle as far as the eye can see... incredible.
on day two we rode
on even smaller, ruttier dirt roads up to the more remote ruins at Nakum. These ruins are smaller but i found them even more magical because of thier remoteness and the fact that they have not been restored to a very great extent, so much of the ruins are still half overtaken by tree roots and vegetation... a really beautiful mix of ruins and hungry nature.
we had a few hours before sunset to walk around the ruins and through the jungle.. there was a little lagunita populated by crocodiles.. also saw tucans and an anteater bear (i dont remember the name) and gangs of pozotes, these kinda racoon'bear like creatures with long tails and monkeys everywhere in the trees.... and snakes and lizards and lots of bugs.... SO ALIVE. amazing.
there was also a worker encampment at Nakum, but this one way smaller and quieter.
that nite i layed in a field and watched the many.bright.star.sky twinkle. until the clouds rolled in and it started raining...
it rained much of the night that night, which was strange because the rains usually dont start here till mid may.
this made the ride out on the
next day VERY difficult. the low parts of the road were just thick, clayey mud, that stuck to our tires and wouldn´t come off and made it so the wheels wouldn´t turn. he he. so, the ¨ride¨out of the biosphera was a hot, humid, insanely hard trudge. but also really fun because we discovered that if you rode as fast as you could, you could kinda get through some of the mud. charging as fast as we could, on shitty bikes thru the mud through the middle of the jungle.
Salvador´s bike broke when we had 11 km left to ride, so he had to walk. damn. but we got out in one peice, very sweaty and exhausted. perfect.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.082s; Tpl: 0.015s; cc: 8; qc: 46; dbt: 0.0473s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb