Sleeping in Hammocks

That's too much hair now
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From San Ignacio in Belize we popped back over the border into Guatemala to see the Mayan ruins of Tikal.

The trip involved some haggled transportation to get to the border and on to Tikal and an exciting night sleeping in hammocks at the Jaguar Inn, just outside the park boundary.  Neither of us had slept the night in a hammock before (although I had slept quite nicely in a hammock full of monkeys in Bolivia).  There were mosquito nets for each of the hammocks to keep the bugs away, although unfortunately all of Tikal's bugs seemed to be in Alex's net already.  And the nets were a bit steep, so sleeping wasn't all that easy.  Luckily we had a 4:30 wake up call to join a sunrise trip to the top of the highest temple.

hammock full of monkeys

Temples and unsrestored hills
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We had given ourselves two days in Tikal to see all the sights, and to have a proper look round that was probably about right.  There are quite a few walking trails to outlying temples and things, but most of all we just enjoyed sitting on temples in the jungle admiring the views, and best of all looking at and listening to the howler and spider monkeys.  Those of you who have been paying attention to the blog will note that Alex had a nice time playing with spider monkeys in July.  Well the Central American monkeys are a slightly different breed,slightly brownie in colour.  But they get up to the same swinging and squeaking antics, so the monkeys were probably the highlight of our Tikal trip.

Temple in the sky
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The temples themselves were pretty amazing too.  Most of the ones in the photos have been restored in recent times, but the restoration pretty much involved cutting down all of the vegetation and cleaning away all the mud that had formed.  Many of the temples have not yet been uncovered, and from the top of some of the higher pyramids you can see several small hills spread out amongst the temples.  In fact these hills are just the unrestored temples.  Tikal will look even more amazing when the archaeologists have finished their work.

The trip back to Belize represented our last trip in the Spanish speaking world for the time being.  Although amusingly our taxi driver from the border in English speaking Belize didn't really understand us until we started on the Spanish again, ho hum.