Tikal

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="431" caption="Tikal at sunrise"][/caption]

It wasn't until we went to set our alarm the night before that I learned we had arranged to leave for the ruins at 3:15 in the morning the next day. We set out amidst barking howler monkeys and chirping cicadas down the four-kilometer trail to Tikal's tallest structure, Temple Four, to catch the sunrise from its top. It turns out they were only allowing tour groups to do this for another ten days. After that they were to adopt UNESCO hours of opening and closing.

Something you have to realize about a place like Tikal is that it really is an ancient city. Many archeological sites, it seems, are more on the scale of a town. We were hiking at a good clip for about an hour and a half just to get to the middle of it. Because Guatemala's rain forest is protected, they've really just cleared off the structures and left trees and brush to grow around which gives the park a unique feel. The only place you really gain a sense for what it might have looked like in its day is in the central plaza where you kind of step out of the pyramid-strewn jungle at the end of the tour, into a grass-covered open field completely surrounded by structures and two stories off the ground. Incredible.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="431" caption="Lori checks out the view at the end of the tour. The tower in the upper left is where the picture at the beginning of this post was taken from."][/caption]

Lori and Beth and I held up pretty well throughout the five-hour tour, and even did better than most with our backpack full of goodies we had procured the evening before in a fit of wisdom. But by the time eleven o'clock rolled around under the glaring sun, I could tell that morale had begun to dwindle and we were all quite ready to go. Too bad for us, we had to sit in the bus aisle. Poor Beth kept nodding off with no place to lay her head. If I had known it would come to this I would have insisted we book with a different agency.

By the time we got back to our hotel I was so spent and sleep-deprived that I went right to sleep.