Big day! We were up early to meet our guide Elias to go visit the Tikal ruins in Guatemala.

While we were doing research for our trip we read about how Guatemalan bandits like to rob tourists at gunpoint on their way to Tikal. This is why we decided to do the trip with a guide. Elias is the only guide licensed to work in both Belize and Guatemala. This makes things very easy crossing the border.

It's about 2 1/2 hours from San Ignacio to Tikal. We arrived about 10 o'clock and started our tour of Tikal. The site is immense. The ruins themselves are huge. Unbelievable to imagine that these structures were built by hand without the use of domesticated animals so long ago. The structures are pretty much solid, with maybe a small room at the top. The biggest structures were built as a spectacle of Maya power, shamanistic rituals and also for astronomical observation. The Maya people abandoned Tikal over 1000 years ago. The lost city lay hidden until the 1800s. Modern excavation began in the 1950s...and continues today!

We learned a lot about the ancient Maya civilizations, their culture and even the Mayan calendar. 2012 marks the end of the Mayan cycle and that's why you see all the tabloids with headlines of 2012 being the end of the world. The Maya actually believe that it is a time of renewal and reflection on our relationship with our environment and our place in humanity. A time for great change. I think we're already seeing some of that change!

We also saw a bunch of wildlife! Agouti, Spider monkeys, Coati mundi, Aracari toucans and Oropandola birds. And correction it was agouti we saw yesterday not tapirs!

On to the ATM cave tomorrow!