Friday, January 19, 2007: El mundo perdido

Tikal, the lost city. Centre of the ancient Mayan world. The thing not to miss in Central America. But, like the pyramids in Egypt, Tikal is big and impressive and mysterious and strangely… underwhelming. Maybe I’m the unenlightened one for not being able to feel the cosmic rays converging, man. Or maybe I’ve just visited too many ruins to feel appropriately awed anymore (I hope it’s not that; I’d rather be unenlightened than blasé). But these places always leave me feeling emptier than I think they should. I just find that without the people who built these great structures and magical cities, who lived in them and brought life and energy and significance to them, without these people, everything seems so… dissipated. Lifeless, with the possible exception of the hollow buzz of modern-day commerce and rampant scamming of tourists, if you call that life (give me Asia’s Buddhist and Hindu temples anyday—they may not have had as many centuries to absorb energy and significance, but they still mean something to the people who live next to them, they still live) . We try to appreciate these places that we’re told are meaningful, but without the culture that went along with it, how can we really? We expect them to make us feel so much. When they don’t, we can’t help be disappointed, as much with ourselves as with the site we’ve visited.



However, I did enjoy the day I spent at Tikal, even if I didn’t feel the universal hum or experience some sudden perfect alignment of my shakras or whatever. We ended up with a four-hour tour of the area, in Spanish, and though I only managed to catch probably two-thirds of what our guide told us, I was pretty happy to have gotten that much out of it. It feels good to not have to be constantly catered to in a language other than the one that is actually spoken in the country I’m in.

We climbed up a couple of the temples to get a better view of the area. The view from the top of Temple IV is magnificent:

The climbs back down were gruelling.

We saw a bit of wildlife, too. The jungle around Tikal is second-growth forest—the area was completely deforested to make way for the ancient city and the farmland needed to sustain it all those years ago—but it's an old-ish second growth forest with well established flora and fauna, and the ruins themselves are separated by thick canopies of forest. (This is a ceiba tree, the national tree of Guatemala. Also known as the silk cotton tree, it's soft fibers are used to stuff pillows and mattresses.)


Minutes into our walk we saw a couple of toucans. Toucans! Later, after the tour, Airek and Alice continued to walk around a bit and saw a monkey up in a tree, while I chilled out under a tree and had a coati walk over and sniff at my feet for a couple of minutes before walking off (allowing me to get what I hope are some good shots with my high-tech point-and-shoot film camera; it will be months, I’m sure, before I find out). When everyone else who was in the area noticed him and tried to approach for photos, he wasn’t having any of it and ran off into the forest again. How lucky was I?!



(Since Airek's evil twin brother Steve broke Airek's digital camera the week before our trip one night while Airek was drunk, my camera was actually pretty high-end: Airek and Alice had disposables. Which means all these photos are courtesy of strangers I don't know who've published their photos online and who I hope won't mind me borrowing a few of their pics to illustrate my own adventures.)