Tikal Me Pink

Okay, so on three hours of sleep and a cold shower, I got up at 5am and took a microbus with a bunch of tourists to Tikal. I met this cool American dude named Mark while we were waiting for the gates to open at 7am, and since we were both solo we decided to tour the park together. I had decided to spend the night in the park so I could catch a sunrise (otherwise the park gates don´t open til 7am and you have to wait outside) and so I dropped my bags at the Jaguar Inn and tried to arrange a room. I had decided that two weeks of traveling around and taking cold showers, sleeping on cots and hammocks had taken it´s toll, and I was willing to shell out the mammoth $33 bucks to get a real room with hot shower and private bath for the night. There are just WAY too many creatures living in Tikal National Park to sleep on a hammock, even under a mosquito net, outside. At the moment they could only reserve me a hammock, but I did later get a room.

Onto the park. Good thing I brought my bugspray. Tikal is literally in the middle of the jungle in northern Guatemala and I´ve never seen so many bugs, ,espeically Mosquitos, in my entire life! Matt and I would walk and when we looked behind us there would be a CLOUD of mosquitos, like a swarm, following us and waiting for us to stop. I think I used 3/4ths of a can of Deep Woods 25% DEET Off in the two days I was there.... literally, no joke. You know in Charlie Brown how Linus always has that stink cloud following him around? Well we must have very well looked like that but with a mosquito cloud following us around.

Mark and I weren´t in the park for 5 minutes when we saw troupes of monkeys swinging around the trees. They have two types of monkeys in Tikal- spider monkeys and howler monkeys. Spider monkeys are cool and very playful and fun to watch. Howler monkeys get their name because they are loud as hell and you can hear their frightful shreiking for miles off in the jungle. They sound like they are having some crazy orgy 50 feet away, when they may actually be a mile off.

So the two of us toured around and walked the whole park. We decided not to pay the 10 bucks to hire a guide and just check everything out. We started at 7am and by 2 we had done the entire park. There are 5 major temples in the park, called Temple 1-Temple 5. Temple 1 can no longer be climbed because too many people have fallen off and died recently. Temple 3 can´t be climbed because it is covered in jungle and trees except for the top. The Guatemalan government doesn´t have any money to excavate it right now. So we climbed 2, 4, and 5. For those of you who have seen the movie Star Wars, you might recall that there is a scene of spaceships descending into the jungle near the end of the movie, just before Princess Leah awards heros medals to Luke and Chewy and Hans Solo. This jungle scene was shot from the top of Temple 4, and the view there is incredible. You see the other temples, with their peaks ascending through the jungle, and you can see for miles and miles and miles, nothing but jungle and ruins from the ancient Mayan empire. Temple 4 is 68 meters tall (about 220 feet), and the ascents of all of the temples are quite steep. Temple 5 is really cool because it was only recently excavated. Like 3, it had been covered in Jungle until the government of Spain agreed to donate the money to have it excavated.

After a long day and early awakening, I retired to the Jungle Inn, ,where my room with fan and hot shower awaited me. I was soooooo sticky that even though it was my first hot shower in 2 weeks, I wasn´t really all that stoked about the warmth.

When I woke up it was around 8 and I went to the cafe where I met 3 canadians and an american traveleing together. We hit it off immediately, so I broke out my liter of rum and we invited 3 more girls over and we threw a little jungle party. The girls, 2 americans and a canadian, turned out to be spanish students in Xela, where I will be studying, and they also turned out to be quite cute, so now I will have some nice guides to show me around the city, and introduce me to the nightlife when I´m in Xela. We drank and partied until 2am, jungle style, until literally the entire hotel and security was really pissed at us... because as I had done the night before, they were all planning on waking up at 5am. Apparently sound carries a lot in the jungle, and plus anyone who knows me knows that I have a pretty big mouth anyway.

While we were sitting at our table in the cafe, a tarantula decided to grace us with his presence at sunset. I flipped out because it was the biggest spider I had ever seen, but it was only the size of a half dollar, and I learned just a few hours later that a half dollar size is NOT a big tarantula. Eventually security asked us to move because we were by all the hammocks and tents so we parked the party on my porch, sitting in chairs and hammocks and still drinking and getting even more wild. At this point I saw a shadow creep across the periphery of my vision and I shined my flashlight in it´s direction to learn what a REAL tarantula looks like. No kidding, ,it was the size of my fist, all fat and hairy and gross. Luckily it was more scared of us than we were of it, and it ran away quickly once discovered.

We called it a night at 3am and I awoke in the morning to find that my Canadian friends had arrived in the park. Two girls I had met in Utila on the ferry had been in touch and we arranged to meet and tour the park together. They had a package tour with a guide so I did the park again with a guide and left at 1pm to catch the bus as far as I could southward bound. Next stop on my tour, the caves of Lanquin and the limestone pools and waterfalls of Semuc Champey. The name is not Spanish, but Qui´che, the language of the Mayans. I´m still not sure what Semuc Champey means, but I´m pretty sure it means ´´kick ass place´´ or ´´awesomest place ever´´ in the Mayan tongue.

I´ll post pics of Tikal and more about Semuc later. Right now people are waiting to use this computer!!!!