Tikal

13/05/2014 

Tikal... One of the most important Maya's ruins and one of the most beautiful places I visited during this trip. As beauty, I would compare it to the Inca's Machu Picchu. To visit all the park is necessary one whole day and to walk for about 10 km between all the temples. The path is completely immersed into the forest and during all day you can hear birds and monkeys. The howler monkey (scimmia urlatrice) is the one that can be heard from almost every place. Their guttural sound  can be scaring when heard for the first time, most of the times you can only hear but not see them, because they hide on top of the trees. 

One of the possibility is to spend the night at the Tikal campground , seeing the sunset or the sunrise from the top of one of the temples and sleeping in a hammock or a tent. Unfortunately this was crazy expensive and I had to renounce. Despite this, the visit was great. There are 38 temples, some are really well preserved, others are still underground and you can see only the hill hiding the temple, some were under restoration. Tikal is still a quite new archaeological park. The ruins are dated 500BC - 900AD. They were described for the first time in 1695 by a Spanish priest travelling in this area, but then they were forgotten again and rediscovered in 1848... But the first excavations started only in 1956 and they are continuing till nowadays. Sometimes it's difficult for us to understand how some big cities like Tikal or Machu Picchu were forgotten, but we need to consider their locations. Antique civilization were used to build their cities on top of the mountains or in the jungle, places of difficult access. I myself renounced to visit some of the ruins in Guatemala because getting there required too much travelling or walking. Saying that the ruins fell forgotten for hundreds of years is not even correct. For sure some locals knew about this places, but didn't know the importance. 

In Tikal there are many carved stelae, but not beautiful as the ones in Copan . What's more impressive here is the grandiosity of this temples, some are very high and the stairs that head to the top are almost vertical. If you don't have vertigo you can climb to many of this temples and enjoy the view. Temple IV is the tallest one and from the top you can see other temples finding their way up through the vegetation. 

Cleaning temple V from vegetation 

This is how the temple looked like before restoration 

Under this hill is hidden a temple 

 

Howler monkey 

When I was looking at the temple V, I looked up in the sky and I was lucky enough to observe a very rare natural phenomenon : a circular rainbow. Absolutely fantastic!!! I'll post some pictures, what you will see is not a camera effect and the pictures are not photoshopped.