VISIT TO TIKAL

Moira went with the taxi to meet Arthur and he was early so we had dinner together.  We had to get up at 5.30 to take the 30km ride to the gates of Tikal to meet our guide.  It was just getting light when we arrived and the walk to the central plaza is quite a long windy affair in order to keep modern contamination from the site.  As we walked the sky was alive with birdsong and we met our guide Roxy who had just completed the sunrise tour with another group.  Despite that she enthusiastically took us round the various pyramids, also identifying the many birds - parrots, toucans, and my favourite - the displaying ocellated turkey.  We also saw a troupe of spider monkeys.  Roxy explained the development of the Mayan culture from pre-classic times through to the Spanish conquest.  She certainly knew her stuff and was also able to explain the creation stories of the Popol Vuh and put each of the ruins we have visited in their context.

The pyramids are huge towering structures above the canopy - basically designed to allow the elite to calculate time and work out the best time to plant corn for the rising population.

We also heard of the loss of understanding of the ruins by later generations and how this led to crop failure, starvation and abandonment of cities as well as the darker side of the conquest of rival cities and finally the open cannibalism of desperate warlike tribes who no longer could trust anyone.  Roxy had the theory that the early Maya realised the importance of knowledge and wisdom to understand how and why it works - but then subsequent generations misinterpreted the temples which were a means to read the seasons -eg solstices and equinoxes.  Finally they lost all knowledge of how the structures help them to plant seed at the right time and the people blame the elite for their hunger and eventually turn on their rulers and kill them.

We have spent the last two afternoons wandering around the hotel after a tasty lunch and John and I have swum in the lake twice, which was very refreshing - except that the receptionist tonight decided to tell us a few stories tonight of the sightings of crocodiles in our lake- which rather put us off!

We were going to go for a ride into Flores town today but couldn't be bothered because of the heat.  Tomorrow we head off not too far to Yaxha which is certainly on a crocodile lake, so we won't be swimming there.  We stay there for 2 nights before we leave Guatemala for Belize.  We are a little concerned that rumours circulate here which point to not such a nice experience in Yaxha as we have had in la Casa de Don david- mind you, John did have to fight a giant man eating spider in our shower last night