Guatemala (warning: pictures)

I promised several people pictures, so here they are! Unfortunately I don't have too many as my camera was dead for the second half of the trip, but I'll be getting more from classmates next week to fill in the gaps. Wish I had pictures from the zip-line we went on on the last day before going back to Flores, I'll have to put them up later.

Anyway, we left on Dec. 28th and flew to Guatemala City. Spent about a day and a half there, visiting two museums and the site of an unexcavated Mayan temple structure located right outside a shopping mall. Then we flew to Flores, farther north. Both Guatemala City and Flores are built practically right on old Mayan cities.



That island is where we stayed while in Flores. The picture was taken from on top of another unexcavated Mayan structure, you could actually walk around and pick up Mayan pottery shards around the base of the hill. Pretty crazy thinking about holding something in your hand someone made and used hundreds of years ago.

We also visited a small open-air zoo before leaving Flores on the 31st; saw pumas and jaguars and native deer and several other animals including a scarlet macaw. THIS little guy got himself out of his enclosure and was acting cute until he saw food in Matt's backpack, at which time Matt became a hilarious monkey jungle-gym.



On the 31st we drove to Yaxha (pronounced Yasha), the first of three Mayan cities/archaeological sites we were to visit. We were accompanied for the entire trip by an archaeologist named Dr. Powel, who has been working in the region for well over twenty years. Here we're taking a break in a partially reconstructed ball court.



For comparison, here's another ball court in Yaxha that hasn't been excavated yet:



Reconstruction is painstaking, and they often use the same materials to cement the masonry as the Mayans had at their disposal. We don't know much about Mayan ball playing specifically, except that it's generally like the Aztec version, but probably much less bloody. The Aztecs were nuts, Mayans were more rational.

The stone "hoops" on the walls were either removed by the archaeologists, or they were wooden and simply lost. Either way, there were four major pyramid structures excavated at Yaxha, three of which are below. We were able to climb the center one; hopefully a classmate has pictures of the landscape, it was epic.



Here I'm standing in the remains of an upper-class residential structure. Really all it is is a network of hallways and bedrooms, practically everything else the Mayans did out-of-doors. They also buried people under their houses, so counting all the places we went I probably walked over a few hundred dead people during the trip.



Here are two pictures from the top of the center pyramid, looking at the two flanking:





Dr. Powel's specialization was in Mayan geometry and astronomy-related research, which is a big deal when you find out the Mayans had seven different simultaneous calendars all tracking different things for various real or mystical reasons. He pointed out several structures during our tours that were aligned perfectly with the zenith, equinox, solstice, etc. (both for the sun, moon, and several key planets at times).

After our tour of Yaxha, we drove the rest of the way to Tikal. In terms of known Mayan sites, Tikal is where it's at. The place is huge and people were living there continuously for roughly 1500 years, until 900AD when it's citizens and many others in major cultural centers simply left; nobody is really sure why yet, they're still digging.

On the morning of Jan. 1st we got up at 4AM and trekked through Tikal to the largest pyramid, temple 4, where we got to watch the sun rise on New Year's morning (in the midst of a cacophony of runny-nosed tourists and howler monkeys; I would have traded all the tourists for more monkeys in a heartbeat).

I only have three pictures of Tikal, I'll have to get more from my classmates. The explored areas cover several square miles, and like everywhere we went nobody was quite sure exactly where the city ended and the jungle began. The Maya never used a curved arch, so you can see where the roofs make inverted Vs.



Also, curiously, the Maya used a very strong type of wood in their construction; some of it has been replaced, but in several places the wood we saw was put in by the Maya hundreds of years ago and it's still just sitting there, doing its thing. Ran into a few bees nests too, gladly the bees there have no stingers.



Here's also a picture of temple 38. The huge stonework on top is called a comb, and back when Tikal was a booming civic center it was intricately carved, although there's very little of anything left to it now. I didn't have time to climb this one, but I went up a few others and I know a few classmates went back later to get to the top.



After two days in Tikal we went back to Flores, and the fun really began. Really wish I had pictures for this, but we drove 90 minutes into the country to get to a river, and from there we went upriver for another 90 minutes pretty deep into the jungle. Saw a few crocodiles, and tons of white/gray herons, egrets, and kingfishers.

As soon as we landed we were in Seibal, a site roughly the size of Yaxha but almost entirely unexcavated. Those of us who hadn't been there before walked through the greater part of the city before realizing that all those big mounds around us in the jungle were actually the remains of buildings and other structures.

We weren't really hacking through the jungle or anything, there was a path to where the resident archaeologists and workers lived. We ran into a nauyaca here, thank God it didn't bite anyone. Dr. Powel cleared us all away in a flash and crushed it with a huge limestone block, so we had an eventful walk.

We spent the day walking around Seibal, examining estela (pronounced stella), which were standing stones put up by Mayan rulers to commemorate important events. Some of them were easily 12 feet tall out of the ground, which dwarfed any we saw in Yaxha or Tikal. Also narrowly avoided getting pissed on by an angry howler monkey.

Seibal also boasts a round structure, which is really rare. Most Mayan structures are square, but this one was up on top of a mountain and was most likely used for astronomy purposes (several characteristics lined up exactly with astrological events like the zenith, so it's a pretty safe bet).

That's it pretty much. Packed back to Flores, got up at 6AM on Jan. 4th to fly to Guatemala City and eventually got home at 6:30AM on Jan. 5th (eight hours of layovers between Guatemala City and Maimi; perfectly timed to finish A Game of Thrones with an hour left over on the final flight for some sudoku).



Oh yeah, also did a zip-line through the jungle on Jan. 2nd on the way back from Tikal. Picture above was just out the window driving through the country. It's amazing that most of the rural farming is done just like the old-time Maya, burn off a patch of land and plant corn, beans and squash with a stick to poke holes in the soil.

Looked like a great trip. Hope you had a good time.

Meant December, lol. My bad.

I'm soo jealous, always wanted to go there to see the mayan buildings and st00f.
Looked like you had fun

Wayne that's awesome, I'd love to go somewhere like that. Some of those structures are breathtaking, especially considering how long they've been standing there!

Btw,

Beautiful area, it sounds as if you enjoyed yourself!
Oh, good photos too!