Tikal, Guatemalan Disneyland

The problem with the resort we spent the night in was that it was one of those tropical resorts that could have been anywhere — Cancun, Jamaica. Prices were in American dollars, the fellow tourists were German and Israeli, the music in the bar was generic American boy band, the meals were served buffet style and you were stuck there because you were miles from the nearest town. The patio had a beautiful view of the sun rising over the lake, the fellow tourists all jostling each other to have their pictures taken.

The guide the previous day had impressed on us that we needed to be in the lobby of the hotel at 9am sharp for them to pick up us and there we sat, watching the other tourists come and go. A traffic jam of mini-van and micro-buses clogged the driveway as everyone headed for Tikal for the day. The driver arrived, barely late, certainly within parameters. Of course, he spoke no English, but he gave a shout for Lore-urr-rah and there I was. The only problem being that they were supposed to pick up another party as well, so we waited and waited, cooling our heels in the van. Eventually a Spanish speaking couple with 2 small girls in tow burst in us, throwing luggage. Which made perfect sense. Parents with small children are always 30 minutes late.

We were already late getting there, so the van hadn't even stopped before the door was open, the guide sticking his head in to look us over. He turned to Dean and I and said, you must be the English speakers, where're ya from? We told him California. So, he responded the same way the guide the day before and the man who'd picked us up at the airport in Guatemala City had said, California, eh? That means you speak Spanish, right? Every Guatemalan we talked to had family in California. And, yes, we should speak Spanish. We have no excuse.

Unlike the day before at Ceibal, we did not have the guide to ourselves. It was a group of about 10. And we did not have the ruins to ourselves. It was as crowded as Disneyland. But Tikal is an enormous site, big enough to handle a crowd. The only places you really noticed it were the ladders you took up and down the higher temples, so the stairs didn't get completely eroded away by the crowds. Many people are not in shape to climb a 4 or 5 story ladder and, even though the sign said, no small children, everyone ignored it, so you had people climbing up and down carrying babies or hovering over them so that they didn't fall.

That said. It was a gorgeous sunny day and the ruins were magnificent.

This is the east pyramid of Complex Q. This is one of two sets of east-west pyramids facing each other across a courtyard that would have originally been white limestone, the structures painted red. Only this 1 pyramid out of the group of 4 has been uncovered and restored because just the act of digging them out and leaving them exposed damages them.

In front of many of the temples is a row of stelae and small round altars. According to Mayan historians, the Maya never used the wheel. They had no large domesticated animals, no horses or cows, no oxen. So, the Maya had no carts. The guide at Tikal, Luis, claimed that, well, look at these altars, that obviously the Maya knew about the wheel, but didn't use it out of respect. That the Maya used sets of logs as rollers to move heavy objects. But the shape of the wheel was the shape of the sun, which was an important part of their religion, so they didn't use the wheel because that shape was too sacred. I'm a little skeptical about this because the wheel is a very important labor saving device. But on the other hand I've now seen Guatemalans carry an enormous amount of weight on their backs and balanced on their heads and a wheel is not as useful without the additional effort and labor of building a road.

Some of the altars at Tikal are replacements, so that Mayan shaman can come and do ceremonies with fire and incense and not damage the original stones.

This is the view from the top of temple IV, looking east towards the Acropolis (Temples I and II) on the left and the backside of Temple III on the right.

View looking up at the comb roof from the platform on Temple IV, the Temple of the Double-Headed Serpent. There were a crew of park rangers working on the sides of the pyramids with chainsaws cutting back the foliage growing up through the cracks in the stones.

View of the top of Temple I from the lawn of the Acropolis.

View of Temples I and II from the outside the main Acropolis courtyard.

Looking up at Temple III, the Temple of the Jaguar Priest.

The west face of the Lost World Pyramid.

Palace 5D-44.

They fed us a hot lunch at the end of the tour, there in the jungle in an open air restaurant, listening to the howler monkeys and the native turkeys running around in the undergrowth. Somehow we made it back to the van with our luggage at exactly the same moment as the Spanish couple and their 2 children. A hour and half drive back to the airport and, you know, I've forgotten to mention Guatemalan speed bumps. The highways seem wide with large shoulders, more or less paved or at least well-graded, but they go right though the middle of little villages where the dogs and the livestock and the children run loose and the laundry is hung out to dry. Every 100 yards there's a crosswalk because there's another little store selling soda pop and potato chips and candy. (Trust me, American companies are fully exploiting the snacking opportunities in Latin America.) And at each crosswalk is the mother of all speed bumps. Imagine a row of random metal bumps, each one about the size of a human head. Even the big buses had to slow to almost a crawl to ease themselves up and over these barriers.

We ended up at the airport at 4pm when our flight wasn't until 6:30pm, so we had a vague plan to check in our luggage and take a cab into town to find an early dinner. Because we were headed for Antigua and after an hour flight and the time to get the bags and the hour drive from Guatemala City to Antigua, it would be pretty late for dinner at the far end. But we were met at the airport by one of the guys from the guide agency who spoke minimal English, you know, Tarzan tourist English (one noun, one verb) which was a good match for my Tarzan tourist Spanish. And he said that the airline wanted to put us on an earlier flight, on a different airline, which would get into Guatemala City an hour earlier. Which is fine, but now I need to make a phone call to the guy picking us up on the other end because we're going to be an hour early and on a different airline. And we have no phone card. There is a spot there in the airport where there is a bank of computers and a sign that says Teléfono Internacional, except the young lady manning the booth speaks no English and repeating Teléfono Guatemala City to her gets us nowhere. I show her the piece of paper with the phone number and the words Guatemala City, thinking that she will recognize at as a phone number and figure out that we want to make a phone call, but that didn't work. We wander this tiny airport a little longer and find a place that says they send faxes. Good, we have a fax number for the company, we'll just send a fax. Unfortunately, that booth had just opened for business and they didn't have the equipment yet to send faxes. They hoped to have a fax machine in a couple months. We go back to the original booth (after all, we've still got plenty of time before the flight). We try more sign language and more Tarzan Spanish and the light finally goes off the young lady's head. She dials the phone, I go through two or three people before I finally get someone who speaks English and he's not quite sure what to do with me because this is the main travel agent in Guatemala, but we have been subcontracted to somebody else for the transportation to Antigua bit. And didn't I understand that it was Christmas holiday, really, it wouldn't kill me to wait an hour in the Guatemala City airport. Which is true. But if I hadn't tried to get through, I would be guaranteed to spend an hour waiting in the Guatemala City airport and I was trying to reduce the odds of that happening.

Our new airline, Tikal Jets, has a single daily flight back and forth between Flores and Guatemala City. The plane is a DC 9, older than either Dean or I, and obviously has a long history. There was at least one logo painted over on the side. (Dean joked that it said PSA or maybe Air Cal.) The signs in the cabin were all originally English only, someone had come through and pasted on Spanish as an after-thought. And landing in a Latin American country in a plane older than you are with lightening flashing over the volcano is, well, memorable. We got off the plane in a light rain, crossed the tarmac, and climbed a flight of stairs to a terminal waiting lounge where the woman said, if you have baggage, you need to wait here. We then watched the baggage handlers carry each bag up the stairs and leave it outside the glass doors in the rain and when all the bags had been carried up the stairs, they opened the door to the stairs back up and it was Christmas, everyone diving and shoving for their bags through a narrow set of doors.

We wandered out into the airport where there were a few guys with signs with names on them, but not ours. But my expectations had been sufficiently lowered that I wasn't really expecting to see anyone for us. Then I heard my name and turned around and there was our guy, Edgar, with another woman. It turned out that the travel agency had been so worried about us that they had sent a secretary (who didn't speak any English, but had a sign with our name on it) to catch us and wait with us if the sub-contractor Edgar didn't show up until the appointed time. But he had gotten the message and there he was. This was all better service than I had any reason to expect. So, we dropped her off and headed for Antigua.

Now to get to Antigua, you apparently have to go up and over the volcano on a rather steep highway which is part of the Pan-American highway that goes from Alaska down to South America (with a break in Panama where people usually ship their cars around Columbia). We'd seen a Land Rover that morning in Tikal with California license plates that said 4BRAZIL, so this must have been someone driving the Pan-American highway. And it was a confusing stretch of road, gas stations, a Casa de Waffle, a giant nativity scene where the figures had Nightmare Before Christmas Jack Skellington round white faces with empty eye sockets. The road was so steep there were 4 dead, broken down buses clogging the road. The grade of the road therefore rated as a 4 dead bus slope. One of the buses being welded on, sparks flying in the dark, there by the side of the road. And you just have to get used to the idea that alto (stop) signs are more of a suggestion of right-of-way for the timid, rather than actual traffic instructions.

Hotel Casa Santo Domingo is a converted monastery with the ruins of a church out behind the swimming pool. The hallways filled with soft piped-in sacred music and amazing 19th century carvings of saints. There was some problem at the desk, but Edgar took care of it in rapid Spanish I couldn't follow. And I thought, ah, this is what it's like to be a rich ass, white tourist, hand carried from location to location. We figured out what the problem was later when out of exhaustion and laziness we had dinner in the hotel restaurant and signed the bill to the room — the guest name on the room was "Andru", no last name. This apparently was Dean's new Guatemala Witness Protection Plan name.

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