14th August 2009, Flores, Guatemala

There is one place in Central America that I regret not visiting on my last trip. It is impossible to do everything and a mistake to try because you are always rushing to the next temple/volcano/beach. Tikal however is one of the highlights of the region and the most extensive and famous of the Mayan cities where, at one time, king Moon Double Comb, ruled the Mayan world and built the iconic temples that would be the Americas tallest structures for a thousand years.

Jana went to Tikal seven years ago, shortly after she had met me, but we did not go together as we were not a couple at that time. I passed up on the chance to see the site because I had to get back to Mexico city in time for a mugging. Well to be chronologically accurate I had to get back for a flight but the way events packed up, my passport and bank cards were liberated from me and ultimately I ended up staying in Mexico city a lot longer to get my affairs in order.

So, fast forward to 2009 and here we are again, Jana Planz and Luke Harris, still together and back in Central America. We had planned to do a little backpacking, maybe see Tikal, before we started work in Granada, Nicaragua but the constant momentum of backpacking, plus the near daily ritual of packing and repacking the same old chattels had driven directly to the stability and routine of a job. We did however, promise each other that we would “do” (as backpackers seem to say) Tikal before we left Central America. I am happy to write that Tikal has now been well and truly done.

We took an overnight bus from Guatemala City and arrived in Flores, the access town to Tikal, at around 7 am. Night buses are great as I have written previously because they save you a night on accommodation and also increase the chances of you getting a room as you tend to arrive just as others are checking out. One observation I will add, for any would be Guatemala-goers, is that the country has really geared up for tourism in the intervening years since our last visit. This has some good and some bad sides that I won’t go into here, bla bla bla economy, foreign business ownership, national identity etc etc. You know the story.

The impact of the tourist trade means that there are far more scalpers and chancers after your tourist plata. In Antigua (Guatemala’s colonial gem) all the agencies offer transport to Flores as this is arguably the most popular route and everyone wants to see Tikal, except me obviously. However, the tourist agencies in Guatemala, more so than any other country we have encountered, rob you blind.

We are accustomed to independent travel so we learned the names of the bus companies and booked direct over the telephone and saved ourselves over half the price as a result. No other agents that we saw slapped a 100+% fee for the service of making a phone call in Spanish to a bus company. I suppose if there are plenty of people willing to pay then why not? Its the typical spiel of imbalance of information that Steven Levitt writes about where people with expert knowledge, in this case a phone number and the ability to speak Spanish, make it seem as if they are the only ones who can do the job and whack on a whopping fee accordingly. It annoys me but then again, there are usually ways around it.

So Tikal. We had a brief catnap and shower to freshen up and we headed to Tikal only hours after stepping off our night bus. Jana was armed with her beloved camera and I had a packed lunch, which is the way we usually manage day trips, and in we went. I won’t go into the same level of rhapsodising prose as I indulged in when describing Machu Picchu but I will say that Tikal is a wonder and every but is beautiful as the aforementioned Inca Site.

Tikal is, of course, Mayan and has nothing to do with the Incas although the Mayans did trade with pre-Inca civilizations and it is plausible that some knowledge was passed on from the Mayans to what would become the Inca empire. The city is set in the vast expanse of jungle that extends from Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula through Northern Guatemala and Belize. A jungle that even today, after centuries of deforestation, is the size of Wales.

We hired a guide at my insistence, something that we do not usually bother to do, and split the cost of doing so with a couple from Washington DC who were nice but forgettable. The guide took us to the main temples and explained a little about the history of the Mayans and their rituals but nothing particularly insightful or outside the remit of your average travel book, but what really did it for me was to see these amazing structures, still standing majestically despite centuries of being lost in the jungle. The setting is pretty special, the jungle makes you feel at once enclosed and at the same time part of a vast expanse of green. That duality is never clearer than when climbing one of the temples.

We climbed number four temple first and got a sweeping view of the jungle, with green canopy undulating away as far as the eye could see, and just the upper parts of the towering pyramids peeping through the trees. The effect is breathtaking, quite literally as you have to ascend lots of steps in 80% humidity to reach that elevation, and made a big impression on me. There are some moments in life that you unlock in your memory remember via a photo, and there are others where we have a mental picture that is so strong that is so vivid there is no need for any other cues. Jana’s pictures of the day are great but I don’t need any of them to remind me of that first canopy view, taking in the pyramids of the Great Plaza in front of us, the acropolis and temple number five off to the side and the unending verdant sea of green.

We were lucky with the weather that day, so the sun smiled on us the whole time only to make room for a small shower just as we boarded the near-derelict mini van that we used to transport us back to Flores at the end of a glorious day. Tikal was our last full day in Guatemala for what is likely to be a long time and it will leave us with fond memories and a renewed interest in Mayan culture for evermore. I think that Jana enjoyed the day almost as much as I did even though she had visited the site once before.