Giveaways
AFTER Quetzaltenango, I returned to Guatemala City and checked out the Miraflores Museum. This is a museum of Mayan Art on a site called Kaminaljuyu, a Mayan settlement that grew into Guatemala City.
Here is a photo of a colourful map I saw in the museum. It shows the departments of Guatemala and some of the Mayan sites in the region.
“The map shows Guatemala City as Kaminaljuyu, and, in the northern, Petén Department west of Belice (Belize), Tikal — the famous Mayan temple complex that I was planning to visit, along with another one close to it but not on that map, called Uaxactún.
The Maya, who have dwelt for centuries in Guatemala and the states of Mexico that are close to Guatemala, are one of several groups of indigenous peoples in Mexico and Central America, and one of the two indigenous cultures from that region that are the best known to outsiders today. The areas where Mayan languages are widely spoken are shown in yellow on the following map.
The other especially famous culture from the region is that of the Aztecs or Mexica, whose modern-day distribution is shown in red on the same map. The Mexica have been based in central Mexico since around the year 600 CE, and Mexico is named after them.
Strictly speaking, ‘Aztec’ refers to the empire built by the Mexica. The languages they speak are known as Nahuatl, and the people themselves are also known today as Nahua, probably to avoid confusion with other sorts of Mexicans. On the other hand, Maya is used to refer to the Mayan people, their languages, and their civilisation.
(Neither Nahuatl nor Mayan is just one language: they are each a family of languages or dialects, tending to differ a little as you go from one town to the next, the differences accumulating to the point that, only a few towns down the road, the people would no longer understand the indigenous language of the first town.)
While the Aztecs built an empire, the Mayans spent most of their pre-colonial history in independent city-states, whose rulers’ most important task was the collecting and storing of rainwater.
The region the Maya inhabit has clearly defined wet seasons and dry seasons and, at the same time, few permanent sources of water.
It is thought that the decline of the ‘classical’ Mayan civilisation — the abandonment of many cities and temple complexes around the year 900 CE — was mainly caused by a long period of rainfall that wasn’t sufficient to keep the water tanks filled through the dry season in many places.
The Mayans possessed a system of hieroglyphic writing which they had inherited from an earlier local culture called the Olmecs, elaborate carving, painted wall murals, and a complicated understanding of astronomy, mathematics, and the calendar.
Mayan mathematical understanding included the concept of zero: this was long before the Europeans acquired the zero, and their other present numerals from 1 to 9, from the Arabs.
(Without zero, numbers have to be written Roman-style: LXVII, and so on. That makes it incredibly hard to do any advanced form of calculation.)
Here is a short National Geographic video, from a wider story about the Mayan civilisation:
The knowledge of how to read Mayan hieroglyphics was lost under Spanish colonial rule, and it only became possible to read the hieroglyphics once again in the twentieth century, after they were slowly deciphered by archaeologists.
Most of the time, the Spanish authorities did not try to suppress the indigenous languages completely. Indeed, for a time, the Spanish promoted classical Nahuatl, the dialect spoken by the rulers of the Aztec empire, as a language of administration.
That is why so many towns in Guatemala have names ending in -tenango, a Nahuatl suffix meaning the same as -ville or -town, even though hardly anyone in Guatemala has ever spoken Nahuatl.
But the Spanish did encourage the forgetting of much of the old indigenous culture. And the Mayan hieroglyphics and the civilisation that they encoded were casualties of that policy.
Here is a Miraflores Museum display about one of the hieroglyphics, and what it means, one of a group of symbols called Nawals.
After swotting up on Mayan culture at the museum, I then flew to the town of Flores, the gateway to Tikal and Uaxactún as well as other Mayan temple sites in that part of the country.
Although Flores is only a comparatively small city, with a total metropolitan population of probably about 30,000 these days, its airport, Mundo Maya International Airport, is the second-busiest in Guatemala. Its name means ‘Mayan World’.
The oldest part of Flores is on Flores Island in Lake Petén Itzá, the third-largest lake in Guatemala, while the rest of the city is on the southern shore.
In the following relief map of Guatemala, Lake Petén Itzá is the long, thin, inland lake in the northern part of the country.
Here is a map which also shows Lake Petén Itzá and Flores, along with the Mayan temple complexes of Tikal and Uaxactún, accessible via a road which heads northward from the eastern end of the lake.
The island on which the old town of Flores is located is also the site of the last Mayan stronghold in Guatemala to be conquered by the Spanish, in 1697.
In Flores, I stayed at the Los Amigos Hostel, which was pretty cool. From there I booked my tour to Tikal, and a night at Jungle Lodge in Tikal as well, for $70.
Here’s a photo of the sunrise over Lake Petén Itzá, from my hostel window.
The lake was up a bit, and had flooded over the street on the waterfront, as you can see from this short video.
The next photo shows another view out over the lake in the daytime.
Here are some houses on an even smaller island! There were a lot of very ramshackle buildings in Flores, but on the other hand, satellite dishes were clearly a must-have.
Here was a colourful, two-level roof pavilion on more modern buildings.
This is what the streets were like, with tuktuks for the tourists.
There seemed to be a lot of pharmacies. Do tourists trekking through the local jungles often fall ill, I wonder?
And a restaurant with an interesting frontage, Mijaro.
A Spanish church with a rotunda in front, close to the town hall.
And a statue of a dignitary, coloured in the way that the Romans are supposed to have coloured their statues in real life. He seemed to be due for the renewal of his paint.
As in other towns in Guatemala, there are many vividly coloured buildings in Flores. If I had spent more time there, I would have got more photos of them. But I was mainly planning to get out and see Tikal and Uaxactún.
Here is a plan of Tikal, Uaxactún, and other sites of what the plan calls the ‘Southeast Maya Biosphere’. The leaflet containing the plan is by INGUAT, the Guatemalan tourist authority.
I had a really good English-speaking guide from Los Amigos. We were welcomed to Tikal at an information kiosk.
There were a lot of animals there, as well as ruins. We saw monkeys, coatimundis — relatives of the raccoon —and five or six bird species.
There was a dried-up waterhole with signs warning of crocodiles, though I think the crocodiles had left. I was there toward the end of March and as such toward the end of the dry season, which normally lasts from November to early May in this part of Central America.
We did not see any snakes, but I did see the carcass of a rare duck that had been partly eaten by something.
Because of climate change (most probably), the dry season was becoming longer than usual: a bit like the megadrought that led to the decline of the ‘classic’ Mayan civilisation of more than a thousand years ago.
Here’s a short video I made of the wildlife, with commentary. The thumbnail is of the coatimundis, which forage in social groups and sniff the earth with flattened, pig-like snouts.
And so, on to the monuments!
The next photo shows an information panel, by which you can find your way around.
We spent four hours in the Acropolis area and the Gran Plaza.
One of the most impressive temples is called Temple I. You can see from the people how big it is. It is not actually the biggest, but it is perhaps the most prominent in the sense of not being cloaked in trees.
According to a 2008 article in the Smithsonian magazine, called ‘The Mystery of Tikal’, Tikal was founded in 200 BCE and inhabited until 900 CE, at which point it was abandoned and swallowed up by the forest until it was officially rediscovered in 1848 (though in reality the local Mayans had always known it was there). The article said that only 15 per cent of the site has been excavated, even then.
I prepared myself for the visit by buying and reading a book called Jungle of Stone: The Extraordinary Journey of John L. Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, and the Discovery of the Lost Civilization of the Maya, by William Carlsen.
It really is an amazing tale. The civilisation of the Maya was all but unknown to the wider world until Stephens and Catherwood hacked their way through the jungle, Indiana Jones-style, to gaze on Tikal.
And that was despite the fact that there are many thousands of Mayan architectural sites in Guatemala alone. The great majority are still cloaked in jungle, just like Tikal in the days of Stephens and Catherwood. The suppression of much of the remaining Mayan culture by Spanish colonialists was also partly to blame for this great forgetting.
Tikal is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and has its own national park, Tikal National Park.
Tikal is also a modern name, applied after its official rediscovery: the temple complex was apparently known as Yax Mutal, or Yax Mutul, in its day.
Here is another colossal pyramid, Temple IV, which is even taller than Temple I, with people on top for scale this time.
You can climb up with wooden steps and a railing. I think the original stone steps would be pretty terrifying.
You can see the tops of more temples in the distance as you hike up.
I think the next photo is from Temple II, which is also known as the Temple of the Masks.
I really liked the part of Tikal called the Lost World as well. This was the first part of Tikal to be built, and the last to be abandoned.
You can do sunrise and sunset tours. I tried to get on a sunset tour, but found that I had to book in advance.
I made a long video about this place, by my standards: a bit over three minutes. Check out the tiny humans at the bottom left!
And then I spent the night at the Jungle Lodge. The Jungle Lodge was used by archaeologists and later became a hotel: here are three photos of it.
Anyway, the next morning, I was able to wander around the Gran Plaza all by myself at dawn, so that was just as good. I’ve got footage of my dawn wanderings in the video just above.
At the Jungle Lodge, I booked a private tour of nearby Uaxactún for $80. I was to leave at 10 am and come back at 2 pm. It was 40 degrees and 80% humidity or felt so anyway. And I went with a guide whose English was not so great this time.
We took an unpaved road through the jungle to get there. The distance is not great, but the journey can take up to two hours all the same.
Until, finally, we arrived.
At the bottom right, the sign says ‘Don’t consume bushmeat’.
The animal, which looks far too cute to eat anyway, would seem to be a kinkajou: the most adorable member of the raccoon family.
The archaeologists have removed a lot of hieroglyphics at this site, which is actually older than Tikal. Its layout was based on astronomy and sacred geometry.
The ruins at Uaxactún are lower and more modest than the later ones at Tikal.
Uaxactún also has a temple with masks.
There was a small town there. In the shops, they were cooking off wood, and the shops had wooden floors. It was a lot more impoverished than Flores.
I came across a woman who was walking around with maize. I still have not had any traditional maize products.
Also, Uaxactún does environmental tourism. To try and stop the forest degradation and chopping down of the trees, you can spend a night in the forest with the locals.
I had a look at the colourful local graveyard as well. It seems that the people are buried in boxy above-ground tombs. Perhaps the ground is of limestone with only thin soil on top (this would be typical of the region, if so).
Uaxactún, including its village, gets very positive reviews on Tripadvisor.
Though you can get authentic local food (cooked over wood fires) at Uaxactún, on the way back to Flores, I got hungry once more and stopped in at the Jungle Lodge for a restaurant-type meal. This was quite good and only cost about 100 quetzals.
Next, I do the tourist thing and head for the Mexican resort of Cancún!
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