tikal lived up to the hype, without a doubt.

it is the largest of the ancient ruined cities of the Maya civilization and resides in a lowland rainforest.

sharena, my former room-mate, her friend julie and i went twice. once in the afternoon and sunrise the next day. it’s really hot mid-day and they currently let you use your ticket over a 24 hour time-span.

the first day, we paid a guide to allow us to watch the sunset and listen to the birds and animals. sunrise and sunset are active times for the permanent residents (wildlife) of tikal.

on our way out, our guide spotted a tarantula on the trail we were walking. we watched it climb onto a tree and then noticed a scorpion on the same trunk. this was a bit creepy, especially considering we were wearing flip flops or sandals and a good friend, dj kokopelli of xela, got stung by a scorpion a few months ago. (he’s fine)

we also saw some raccoon/cat lookin’ animal that i forget the name of and some amazing fireflies. they were big, had two spots that glow for a good while and you can hear them when they fly past your head. the next day we saw spider monkies and toocans. some people go on walking night tours to see pumas.

during the sunrise tour the next day, we learned that some of the temples were constructed in part to track the time of the year. the mayans were/are incredibly advanced in many ways, including math, astrology and the passage of time. the path of sun shadows thru tikal can determine time of year and we were there right before the beginning of the rainy season. it started raining a couple days later.

unlike the copan ruins in honduras, tikal is still being excavated. it was really cool to see mounds of earth and trees covering some temples/buildings and imagine this is how it looked when tikal was discovered. one of the workers encountered a tarantula and invited us to hold it. sharena and i did, pretty exciting.

check out the wikipedia page on tikal if you’d like to read more.

view more of my photos.

here’s a picture julie took that shows a temple from a peep hole in what was probably living quarters.