maya, maya and more maya

So, here we are in San Pedro Sula in Honduras, a pretty nondescript, ugly, rather violent town in northern honduras. Apart from that it´s really nice.

Our last entry was from Antigua where, before our departure we studied more spanish and climbed another volcano. This one had lava that you could fall into. We toasted marshmallows. Well, I say toast, we made marshmallows combust into a ball of flames as soon as they got within 3 feet of the lava. It was quite hot and toasting marshmallows on it isn´t as easy as it sounds.

Then it was off to Semuk champey, Guatemala for some caving, climbing, jumping off stuff and getting stiff necks and bad backs for hitting the water too hard. I´m writing this with my head at a funny angle (well, funnier than normal).

After that we hobbled up to Tikal in the Peten Jungle in Northern Guatemala. Tikal is an ancient mayan city with some huge, rather impressive, 1800 year old mayan pyramids that you can climb up and fall from (which a few people have done recently and killed themselves). It really is an incredible place, with toucans and eagles flying around the sky and monkeys fighting in the trees. We watched the sunrise but didn´t see the sun - it was too misty. Apparently it happens every morning. I think they just get a sadistic pleasure in waking up the tourists and dragging them up temples at 4 in the morning.

But tikal was just our warm-up because when we left we embarked on our 6 day mission to El Mirador, a virtually unexcavated, massive lost mayan city deep in the Peten jungle near the mexican border. It really was an incredible experience, if very hard work. On the trail, we found many mayan artefacts including cutting toold, large pieces of pottery and spearheads, lots of which was left by the tomb raiders that have beat the archaeologists to the tombs.

We watched the sunset from a different mayan pyramid for every night of the trek.

---

---