Apologies and Ruins

Note: photos lost in terrible incident – the pain!

I must start this short entry with an apology. The night before visiting Tikal I did not sleep very well, if at all. This was to affect my appreciation of the place quite significantly so I am unfortunately not in a position to go into great depth on the matter. For the time that I managed to remain relatively conscious, however, the experience had the following highlights:

A few Howler Monkey diatribes

-The view of the ruined temples IV and V sticking up out of the jungle canopy as viewed from the top of temple I (and seen in Star Wars, episode IV ‘Dantoine’) was majestic.

- At the ruins of a ritual site, after a description of the ritual beheading of certain individuals for the benefit of the gods, society and the structural integrity of certain temples our guide (an English speaker who was paid $10 by each of the ten people in our group to recreate the missing details of ancient Mayan life) disturbed the subterranean dwelling place of the biggest, hairiest, scariest and he assured us, most timid spider I have ever seen. After having poked enough with his stick to force the spider to evacuate its home, he covered its hole with a stone, thus preventing its escape. It was thus there, scurrying about on the grass for our viewing pleasure for a considerable amount of time. It was a tarantula and it freaked me out.

-Despite being tired and not particularly inclined to long walks, the temples were separated by large sections of lush jungle, which were very beautiful

-Happening upon some Howler Monkeys our guide took it upon himself to demonstrate his facility with a few Howler Monkey diatribes that he projected in to the forest canopy. While the Howler Monkeys were quick to retort, thereby revealing more clearly their whereabouts, they are want to produce rather obnoxious sounds which combined with the jolly imitations of our guide, got a little tiresome.

-Upon asking who had built the temples and in what way the upper classes participated our guide assured us that the Mayans lived in a veritable utopia (my words), where everybody was equal and worked together – a view that has been contradicted by everything I had read previously and since (it is probably becoming apparent that I found our guide a touch annoying)

I was told that I should have appreciated the unadulterated authenticity of the ruins of Tikal more than the far more renovated and excavated ruins of Palenque.

I did not.

Other than being tired this is probably also due to the fact that I came to Tikal directly from Palenque and had thus possibly had my full of crumbling rock temples which, bar a good guide to engage the imagination with stories and big picture perspectives, can just start to look like a mound of rocks after a while.

I spent most of the time being tired and grumpy.

Forgive me.