Tikal

Tikal was sooo amazing. I had never realized how monumental it is. You really have to be there to understand the scale. So cool.

Temple 1

After leaving at 4 am, a shuttle, a plane, and a bus, we arrived in the Tikal national park. Our tour guide was studying archaeology but he wants tone an ethnobotanist, so he pointed out different medicinal plants in the jungle. He grew up in Guatemala but his family is from Honduras so he was going to go back and learn the indigenous language of his ancestors. That was really cool because, since he's Mayan he was really invested in the history of Tikal. (the real pronunciation is Tik'al, with a click in the middle).

Allspice tree

One of the plants he showed us was the allspice tree. The leaves totally smell like the spice, usually they get it from the dried berries but sometimes the leaves too. What's crazy is that when you chew the leaves it produces an anesthetic, my tongue went numb!

The other one was the ficus ficus parasite vine. I remembered it from Costa Rica, it takes over other trees until it looks like a tree itself. But I didn't know that the sap is an antiseptic, they put it on wounds and it stops the bleeding. It's amazing how much knowledge ancient people had, and so sad that so much is being lost.

Anyways, that all happened in between the amazing ruins. And I thought the first one we saw was big! They left half of it covered to preserve it but also to show how quickly the jungle can take over. We passed a bunch of them that have some pretty good sized trees on them already, and that was after being excavated partway.

Climbing Temple 2 was super scary, the "stairs" were more like a ladder with huge gaps in it. But the view of Temple 1 was amazing.

The grand plaza also had dormitories for the out-of-town people to stay in, we got to walk through those, and the original wood in the ceiling is still there. So cool.

Ladder up Temple 2

The "hotel"

The collapsed burial temple in the grand plaza had some incredibly preserved masks, also huge.

wooden beams

One of the masks

The astronomical building is part of the Lost World complex, and they have found previous structures dating to 800 BC underneath it! I was trying to wrap my brain around it, and I couldn't. That is so old.

Temple 4 is the largest and from it you can see all of the other temples poking through the treetops. (if you've seen Star Wars IV, they filmed from above when they show Alderan).

Top of Temple 4

View from Temple 4

Another one of my favorite things was the acoustics. The way the plazas are designed, at a certain spot in the middle you can hear them amplified, as the sound bounces off the temples.I don't know that much about engineering, but I know that is pretty remarkable, especially for their time period.

Oh and this tree is really cool, it's called a Ceiba tree, they are really tall, but Temple 4 is even bigger.

Aah basically the whole day was awesome, and so worth the hours of traveling. I love ancient things and always have. I have a distinct memory of checking out books on the Aztecs and the Maya at the Chapel Hill library, so I must have been 7 or 8. Different cultures have aways fascinated me. Good thing I'm an anthropologist!