Flores and Mayan Tikal in the jungle

Flores 15 February

Breakfast is taken on the island which looks at first to be disappointing but away from the edge it’s lively and colourful with a huge selection of restaurants, a small selection of different menus and a medium selection of people we’ve seen before.   This is a rest day before we visit Tikal, the Mayan temple complex and city in the jungle.  H has a swim while I fall into that deep form of contemplation that the uninitiated believe is merely a nap.

I mentioned the armed guards in a previous posting and there are also lots of police and army around.  They all respond with a smile and a buenas  dias  and  I even get a smart salute from one soldier.   The whole country seems very amenable to travellers from our experience but I always wonder how many years’ worth of average income we’re carrying about in the form of cameras, lens, binoculars, e-books etc., let alone the cash.

Up at 4.30 again for a 5.00 bus, breakfast a mouthful of water followed by an hour and a half ride.  Roseate fingers of dawn clawing at the fleeing  night sky.  For goodness sake, where does this tosh come from.   Weakness through hunger, probably.

The whole Tikal area is big and there’s nothing to see except trees when we arrive, no looming temples glimpsed from the bus.  We only booked the transport, not the guided tour but we drift along at the beginning because the guide says we have to be shown where to go.  He explains the arrangement from a model and I ask him quietly how much it would be to join the group.  A figure is mentioned, a note changes hands.   He’s good but very fact rich and it’s impossible to take it all in.  He points out a crocodile but doesn’t do as one of the other guides did who told his group that the crocs are vegetarian.

This temple complex has 5 main steep sided, stepped pyramids with many other structures dotted around and the visitable site is about a kilometre by a kilometre.  The number of structures still hidden under  over a thousand years of jungle growth is unknown but probably a lot more than one.  Even what we see now  only began to be excavated in 1956 following the first photographs taken of it in the 1880’s.  The lot were  abandoned long before the Spaniards arrived and the scale of the buildings is awesome.  All constructed by hand, they didn’t even use the wheel.  Apparently they knew about it because wheeled toys have been discovered but the wheel  was a sacred shape and could not be used.  That’s religion for you.   This is a wonderfully atmospheric place with man-made mounds covered in undergrowth and towering limestone temples pushing through the treetops.  We finish by climbing Temple IV, built around 750 and 230 feet high.  I don’t know if there were any man-made structures anywhere in the world higher apart from the Egyptian pyramids at the time.    By around 900 it had been abandoned.  From the top of Temple IV we look across the forest canopy and see the tops of other temples breaking the treeline.  It is very impressive.   This was a culture of human sacrifice, usually defeated enemies but they also had something called the ball game which seemed to be about keeping a ball in the air using hips and feet.  The winners got to decapitate the losers so I guess arguments about ‘offside’ tended to be fairly vigorous affairs.

If we had to choose between them we think Tikal has the edge over Cambodia’s Ankhor Wat.  It’s more mysterious because it is in the jungle whereas  Ankhor Wat is essentially in the middle of cultivated farmland, huge though that complex is too at about 40 square miles.  There were fewer visitors at Tikal and there’s always the knowledge that there is lots more ‘out there’ somewhere.   

On our return we go in the Maya Mall shopping centre to get supplies for tomorrow’s bus ride, 5 hours (allegedly) to Belize City.   The supermarket is like supermarkets worldwide in their dedication to stocking local produce;  the oranges are from the USA despite the fact that they grow locally.  Looking at any of these towns I’m reminded yet again that corrugated iron shares would be a great investment.   On the other hand, paving slabs for pavements not so good.  Like all third world, although we’re supposed to say ‘developing’ countries these days, the pavements are unbelievably bad, broken cement, holes, missing grilles, narrow, cables cemented into them, posts blocking them, uneven and never an unbroken run.  Back home people couldn’t even cycle along them.   There’s a relatively new causeway to the island and the pavements are too narrow for a pushchair.   However, we like Flores, it’s fairly quiet and restaurants look across the lagoon for the setting sun so we have a sundowner in a first floor restaurant where a cat sits on a stool  at the bar and drinks from a glass.