From Lanquin, we made our way to a pleasant little island of a town called Flores, giving us just enough time to have a walk around and eat some food. We spent one night before hitting the Mayan temples at Tikal the following day.

Imagine Tikal, a large site with huge, impressive Mayan temples, surrounded by tropical jungle, buzzing with all kinds of tropical birds, and monkeys and wild cats (although we didnt see any cats sadly :(...).....it was a pretty cool day.

We managed to have a couple of hours to check out a few temples before the park closed on the first day. We finished off with Temple 5, and this temple is HUGE. You can climb to the very top of this temple, although the climb was so so steep. So steep that they had to build another set of stairs to climb, which were bad enough!! To make it worse, there was only a metre wide ledge at the top, with no safety railing whatsover! Mik raced up the steps and I took a bit longer lol. Im not scared of heights but the sheer steepness of the temple made me slightly queezy, even mike admitted he felt dizzy haha! Not for the faint hearted!!!!

Amazingly, we were the only ones at this temple, so we had it all to ourselves, and the veiws from up top were brilliant (although i couldn't stay up there for that long lol!!)

The following day we managed to see the rest of the sight including some cool wildlife; Spider monkey, a Coati (or Pizote in Spanish), and many colourful birds, including Ocellated Turkeys.

We watched the sunrise from Temple 4 which is of a similar height to temple 5 but unfortunately it was a bit of a cloudy morning. The Grand Plaza had some pretty steep temples too, one of the main focal points of the park, and you really get an idea of the Mayan way of life. Some of the temples date back to 700 BC. One of the temples here was closed to the public, due to a couple of people tumbling down the steps...gives you a good idea of just how steep some of these are!!!