Last Stop Guatemala

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After my Semuc Champey and Las Marias adventures i headed to Peten. Peten is the northern department or state of Guatemala and my last stop before Belize. Peten is mostly flat lowlands full of forests and much less indigenous than the rest of guatemala. I stayed in Flores, which is a tiny island on the Lago Peten Itza. Really there is not much to this town (you can walk around the whole city along the picturesque lakeshore in less than an hour), but it gave me a homebase for exploring and chance to get to know some new Guatemaltecos.

The ruins of the ancient city of Tikal are the main attraction here. It was the site of an ancient Mayan empire going back 2500 years or more and just petered out around the year 900. There are various explanations of why it died out. I could tell all about the history and culture but i don't really feel like it.

Against my better judgment i signed up for an early morning tour to Tikal. I usually like to just get there myself because it is cheaper that way and you don't have to put up with obnoxious 2-leggeds, but i was feeling lazy and you can't get in without a guide so early in the morning anyway. So we left at 3 am so we could catch the sunrise over the jungle.

We got there by about 4:30 and had to walk a ways into the jungle to reach the temples. I was surprised how chilly it was here. I thought it would be like Palenque across the border in Chiapas, Mexico where it was so hot and sticky a couple months ago.

Then the sounds of the jungle dawn began. I had never heard anything like this in my life! It was a prehistoric dinosaur-demon-jaguar if i ever heard one, or if you prefer, like one of those ghost-monsters on Scoobie-Doo that turns out to be just a wacky guy with a microphone. They were black howler monkeys. It was quite fascinating and eerie, and definitely put you on edge. I didn't get any pics of the howlers but got a few of the spider monkeys.

There are also 100's of bird species here and I saw and heard dozens that I had never seen or heard before, including one that would tip its head back and ruffle its chest feathers and let out this wild loon call. I also saw a small harpie eagle burrowed in the side of one of the temples, keel-billed toucans, a small bird called the Montezuma Oropendula, oscillated turkeys, vultures, and various woodpecker species, one of which looked like a type of giant pileated woodpecker, but I'm not sure.

After seeing an amazing sunrise atop of the the taller pyramid temples and hearing the birds and monkeys, i ditched the tour and spent the rest of the morning wandering by myself around the ruins and forest. Like Palenque, I tried to imagine what this place looked like over 1500 years ago as a flourishing metropolis of over 100,000 people without the jungle that it is buried in now. What happened you guys?

My last night in Guatemala was perfect. I went out with Greysi to a place called Cafe Cool Beans. Greysi is the girl who gave me a coconut at las marias. She works for a conservation organization that catalogues flora and fauna in Guatemala's national parks and is going to school at the local university for business administration.

A local guy was playing guitar and singing and then I started playing Djembe as accompaniment. When he took a break he asked if anybody else played, so i went up there and ended up performing for a whole group of people. The guy joined with drums and then guitar and we ended up jamming for a couple hours and everybody had some good 'ol fun!

Splendid Nature, ancient culture, good music, fabulous food, stimulating conversation, vino tinto, beautiful girl....What could make for a better week?

Up next: Goodbye Guatemala and Culture Shock Belize

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Photos

Greysi and Her Friends
She's the one on the right.

"Howl You Funky Monkey!"
Got this off of: http://www.wildernessclassroom.com/www/schoolhouse/rainforest_library/animal_library/howler_monkey.htm

Pensive Vultures
Don't know why, but I loved these vultures. I call them Onan and Mamadouba.

Comments

[Derek]

Where did everybody go?
Jared Diamond's book _Collapse_ is a beautifully written attempt to understand what happened to the Maya Civilization. The simple answer is, though, that they didn't go anywhere. They simply lost their civilization. The people remained, and lived, and died, and the other things were forgotten. They got tired of civil war and conquest and just decided that it wasn't worth it anymore. It's not like tens of thousands of Europeans came to the "New World" and didn't decide the same thing. So many English settlers fled the repressive societies of the Colonial period for the more tolerant and balanced indigenous way of life that laws were introduced to encourage racial division. Howard Zinn's _A History of the American People_ describes this in great detail.