Day 71-72 Flores, Guatemala - Tikal

We safely crossed the border from Belize and made our way to a little town in the North of Guatemala called Flores, which sits on an island in a lake. We checked into a great little hostel which was super clean and very quiet. We then thought we might explore for alittle while. 20mins later we had circled the whole island. It was a great little place, with nice restaurants on the water, small jetties to go swimming and fishing off and lots of friendly locals. We booked our tour to Tikal for the next day and then relaxed and watched some of the World Cup.

Tikal is one of the largest Mayan Ruins in Guatemala and Central America and dates back to 700BC. It contains thousands of separate ruins within a 550 square km national park. It is set deep in the jungle and takes many hours to explore, with over 10kms of trails between all the temples, plazas and ruins.

The bus picked us up at 5am for the hour drive out there. It was a little drizzly but not cold. We had our poncho's ready and our cameras charged. We arrived and met our guide, Ceasar, who was a Guatemalan guy who had lived in the USA for a few years and so had adopted many American sayings which were sometimes not used in the right context but entertaining none the less.

We started our walk through the thick jungle, along slippery limestone paths, spotting spider monkeys and following the small signs directing us to the many different ruin sites. This place was huge and so beautiful. Not all of the ruins had been excavated so we passed many that just looked like very large mounds of dirt or hills but underneath lay the interesting stone ruins. Ceasar talked about the many human sacrifices that occurred on particular stones, how the Mayan's lived as well as the theories behind why the world is going to end on December 21st 2012. Keep that one in your diary kids.

We arrived at some of the larger temples which you could climb, very carefully, using the stone stairs or sometimes the very steep wooden stairs/ladders they had built for tourists. The tallest was just over 60m high and once up the top you could see right across the jungle canopy, you couldn't tell where the National Park of Tikal started or finished. Off in the distance the tips of the other high temples rose out of the jungle and looked amazing. We headed to the others and climbed them all too. Some of them were very Tomb Raider-ish. The stone looked great with the green jungle as a backdrop. This was one of the most impressive ruins we had seen in Central America and they were giving our quads a good workout too.

We spent half the day out there and probably could have spent more just wandering through the jungle, laying on the green grass staring up at these enormous stone structures but the rain was not kind again. So we saw everything we wanted to and then headed back to Flores for a relaxing afternoon on the lake.

Off to Semuc Champey the next day, a little place further south into Guatemala.