plash

We saw our first Mayan ruins at just after 5 AM. We’d booked a “sunrise tour”, which required being outside our hotel and ready to go at 3:30 AM (in case it’s been a while since you’ve been up at 3:30 AM, here’s the skinny: it’s incredibly, mind-poundingly early) followed by an hour squeezed into a minibus with too many people of too many ethnicities. I’ve never been a very capable sleeper in the best of times, and even at 3:30 in the morning, sleeping during the ride proved impossible as the driver slalomed around the vast Guatemalan potholes.

The bus pulled into Tikal around 4:45 AM. Although the sun was on its way up, the jungle was still swathed in inky blackness, and as we hiked the trails I navigated by following the faint shadow of the person in front of me. There wasn’t much to see, but the sounds were incredible: birds, unnamed and unknown animals crashing through the trees nearby, and above all the howler monkeys in the canopy overhead. In the middle of the night, the roar of the howler monkey was almost spectral. It was a deeply creepy noise to have surrounding us. “Bloody things sound like the devil,” said an English guy on the trail ahead of me.

A little after 5 AM, we saw the temple:
 

It’s hard to describe how suddenly these things appear. The jungle is tall and thick, and it’s difficult to see even the tallest temples until you’re practically on top of them. Although we could see where we were going, it was still very dark, and the temples were mainly huge silhouettes against the slate sky.

After having walked for a half hour or so, we climbed Temple IV, the largest structure of Tikal, at over 230 feet tall. There’s plenty of seating at the top, and everyone on the tour (several dozen of us) got a chance to sit and see the stunning sunrise.

… or would have, had there been one. The sun, it seems, doesn’t often put on much of a show at Tikal. There’s usually too much mist in the jungle to see much of anything until the midmorning heat has burned it off. Instead, we got to see the mist gradually lighten over the jungle below us.
 

Eventually, we ended up ditching the tour (which was a terrible disappointment our guide guide, a friendly man named Luis) and wandering around Tikal on our own. It’s an amazing place, with six huge temple structures, dozens or hundreds of smaller buildings, and many more yet to be excavated, all meshed in by the jungle.

Our guidebook spoke of warriors and battles, kings and queens, victories and betrayals, and even human sacrifices – all had taken place on the ground on which we now casually walked. Hundreds of thousands of people had been born, lived, and had died here, centuries earlier. Their descendants are still very much part of Guatemala, but they themselves are long gone. Now, the only remnants of this once powerful culture are the remains of the massive structures they built to honor themselves and their gods.

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