Author: Jared

It was pitch black when we got off the bus at Tikal and were shepherded into the park. The forty-five minute hike in darkness to Temple 4 was uphill and aggressively fast, with us 40-somethings lagging behind the gaggle of 20-ish hikers up ahead. When we were about halfway to the temple, the noises started. They followed us all the way to the summit. Have a listen to this, particularly starting at the five second mark. You may want to turn up your volume for the full effect.

That, my friends, is the call of the Black Howler Monkey, the second loudest land animal in the world and the most terrifying thing you will ever hear while walking through the jungle in the dark. Our guide let us know that Steven Spielberg used that sound for the voice of the T-Rex in Jurassic Park. After a few minutes, I stopped believing his howler monkey story and kept waiting for a tyrannosaurus to come charging through the trees.

The view from the top of Temple 4, the highest structure in the park, was breathtaking (see Lea’s video above). The sounds of the jungle coming to life were even more so. The climb up the hills and the final staircase to reach the top was breath-destroying. Be prepared when visiting ancient structures in Central America. The Mayans and other cultures in the area seemed to love hauling rocks up to the highest mountains they could find and building pyramids even higher. I think they did it just to make the future tourists tramping over their sacred sites suffer.

The tour followed through the rest of the complex, which is enormous. Tikal at its peak had a population of 250,000, so what you see is just a fraction of what’s really out there in the wilderness. An interesting factoid that our guide dropped on us was that Tikal is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in both the Cultural and Natural categories. This means that they aren’t allowed to completely excavate any of the ruins. They can clean up and restore half of a pyramid or temple, as long as they leave the other side in its “taken over by the jungle” condition.

And we were definitely in the jungle. Wildlife was everywhere. The big animals are rare, of course – our guide said it had been over two years since he’d last seen a jaguar on one of the trails. There were all kinds of birds, including a hawk, toucans, and parrots (which are devilishly hard to stalk with a telephoto lens). We also caught a glimpse of a coati, a Central American member of the raccoon family, rooting around for lunch on the slopes of the astronomical pyramid in the center of town.

The tour wrapped up in the Plaza Central, flanked by two temples and several other structures – the basic town square of any great Mayan city. Even though our legs were burning, we climbed to the top of one of the temples for a few more photographs. We did this just for you. You’re welcome.

Nuts & Bolts

What to Bring to Tikal

• Headlamps. (Or flashlights, but headlamps will leave you hands-free.) There is no illumination but what you bring with you, so if you go on the sunrise tour you will definitely want to be able to see where you can run when the tyrannosaurus chases you. Also, when I say there’s no illumination in the park, that also includes the toilets.
• Toilet paper. Guess what else they don’t have much of? Years of experience have taught us to always bring our own. I’m not talking about a full roll of triple-ply Charmin, but the camping paper you can pick up at any Dick’s or Academy will make your world a happier place.
• Water. Lea and I went through 5 liters before 11:00 a.m. That’s a lot of weight in a backpack, but you won’t regret it.
• Snacks. You won’t get a chance to eat until after you leave the park, and at some point inside you are going to need a granola bar. Or cookies. Or Doritos. Just sayin’.

Lea made the observation that on this trip we’re going to set our record for the most consecutive days of getting up earlier and earlier to do stuff. Yesterday we got up at 4:00 to make our flight. Today we got up at 3:00 to do the same. Tomorrow we’re getting up at 2:00 to catch the sunrise tour to Tikal and enjoy as much of it as we can before the rain sets in.

But today we’re in Flores. Yay!

Flores is a city in the northern part of Guatemala on the southern shore of Lago Petén Itzá. The tourist quarter is on the Isla de Flores, which is connected to the mainland by an easily walkable causeway. Yes, we’re staying in the tourist quarter. On the plus side, there are tuk tuks everywhere.

First order of business was checking into the Hotel Villa del Lago, breakfast at Restaurante San Telmo, followed by getting tickets for Tikal. (See Nuts & Bolts below.) Then, since we’re on a small island in a big lake, the obvious and affordable thing to do was take a lake tour. There are several potential stops you can hire a boatsman to take you to; we ended up going to the ARCAS Wildlife Rescue Center (Q25 pp) and the Museo Santa Barbara (Q20 pp).

ARCAS was founded to rehabilitate wild animals that were being trafficked and mistreated on the Guatemalan black market. There were monkeys, many birds, a couple of crocodiles, and some big cats, including a puma and a jaguar. The jaguar was pretending to be bored, but I know for a fact he started stalking me. The puma didn’t look too happy with me either.

Flores is very quiet. We can tell it’s the off season, and that’s a good thing. The restaurants aren’t crowded, you can walk around without being hassled by vendors, and the people are overall welcoming. It’s restful without legions of partying gringos shrieking through the streets.

It is, however, very hot. Today was relatively cool 90⁰F compared to recent weather reports which had the highs over 100. When we get up to the highlands it’s going to be much cooler, with a lot more rain. It’s that rain that worries me. It’s raining now, but it’s supposed to clear up tomorrow morning when we take our trip to Tikal. After that, this might shape up to be one of our soggiest vacations ever.

Nuts & Bolts

Buying Tickets to Tikal

So here’s the deal. You can arrange transportation and a guide to Tikal, but that doesn’t include the ticket to get into the park. For non-Guatemalans, the cost is Q150 for park admission and an extra Q100 if you want to get in early for the sunrise before the park officially opens. These are two separate tickets you have to buy, and the teller selling them seemed confused that we needed both.

The only place to buy these tickets is at Banco Banrural. You can buy them anywhere in the country, and doing so elsewhere than Flores might be ideal. The bank in Flores is open on Sunday from 10:00-1:00, and is conveniently located in the mall just to the south of the causeway from Flores Island, but we spent about an hour in line to get inside and get our tickets. Not sure if this is just how it is on Sunday, or if that’s how it is every day. Given that this is the slow season, I can imagine that during high season the line would be extra long with tourists and not just local residents trying to get their banking done in peace.

Pro-tip: Get there early and be ready to queue up.

Today was a transit day. Transit days can be brutal, especially when you only get three hours of sleep due to late night packing and early morning flights. This happens to us a lot. Sometimes it’s our own fault for going with the cheapest fare; sometimes we’re limited by the flights available.

Anyway, we’re in Guatemala City. Yay! We’re supposed to be on our way to Flores, where we had a reservation tonight at the Hotel Villa del Lago. Yeah, that’s not happening at the moment. It turns out that once we got off the plane in GC, there was an email that our evening flight to Flores had been canceled and we’d been re-booked for a flight the following evening. That wasn’t quite going to work for us, but the kind folks at Avianca were able to book us on the first flight out tomorrow morning.

But, that means we get to spend some time in Guatemala City, which we didn’t think we’d do. We found a room at the Hostal Guatefriends and had some great sandwiches at Comedor Antojitos (which wasn’t actually open when we showed up hungry on their doorstep, but they let us in and fed us anyway.) We went to the National Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, which has absolutely fantastic Mayan artifacts, and went window-shopping at the Mercado de Artesanias. We’re going to crash early tonight so we can get that early, early flight in the morning to Flores and book our trip to Tikal. No way are we missing Tikal.

Nuts & Bolts

Tips for the Guatemala City Airport

1. Hang on to your baggage claim ticket. They won’t let you take your baggage unless you can show the claim ticket on your way out. I’ve honestly never seen this before, and we held up the line for a moment while we dug ours out of our carry-ons.
2. The ATM in the arrivals corridor is the most visible, which is probably why it was out of money today. There is another one on the Departures level, hidden behind the money changing kiosk.

Getting Around

Not that we’re experts or anything based on half a day of being here, but I’d say that even though Uber is available in Guatemala City, you’re just as well off flagging down a cab. Unlike in the States, where Uber sets your trip price before you agree to it, Uber in Guatemala is metered by distance and time – which means our driver took the longest route possible to get us back to our hotel and drove the price up higher than it would have been if he’d gone the straight way, or if we’d just negotiated a fare with a cabbie.

Update: Apparently we just had a bad experience with one Uber driver. We used two more and everything was fine. We reported the first on Uber’s site and got refunded most of the cost of the trip, so all is well.

Lesson learned.