The Blue Monkey Review

I'd hoped to take in the landscape as we flew, to see how the highlands near Guatemala City turn into the lowlands of El Petén, the largest department in Guatemala. Clouds obscured the ground, however, soon after we took off and only as we landed did we break through the cloud cover. Then I could see jungle everywhere but occasionally broken by long, straight roads. El Peten, unlike the Yucatan, is hilly, though some of those hills include the 250 arecheological sites in the region.

Jose, the guide, found me pretty quickly at the airport, and we set off in an ugly drizzle for the hour's trip to Tikal. The road passes through dense forest. I've seen at least one map that classifies this region as tropical rainforest, and that seems to fit. Along the way we saw plenty of pigs and horses, gifts of the Spanish to the Americas, and the small fields where farmers scratch out a living here. Chicle, the chewy ingredient in chewing gum, used to be a major export. We tried some at a stop along the way. It tasted like nothing in particular, but had the dense chewiness of a piece of gum chewed out of all its flavor. Now artificial ingredients have replaced chicle, so it has only left its name on an American brand and in the Spanish word for chewing gum.

We also passed quite a few evangelical churches. In fact, as we went on, I noticed only evangelical churches, and no Catholic ones at all. The evangelicals have built sturdy buildings, and pretty big ones too. They stand out in these villages where most buildings are the two room thatched huts where the local Maya live. And they are colorful--orange, purple, yellow--with colorful names like Tabernaculo Agua Viva. I aksed Jose about this and he said that in the region evangelical churches claimed half the population.

It might surprise some readers that I'd arranged to go with a tour for this trip. Usually, I'm happy making stuff up for myself. But I took a Spanish tour, and had the fortune of being with only two other people, Walter and Gloria. It wasn't exactly a Spanish-only day--Walter and Gloria both live in L.A., but are Guatemalan by birth. Jose spoke only Spanish, and my only translation question of the day (what's the English for "cal," the substance that Maya used in the mixture they used in their roads?) had to wait until we found a guide who spoke English (as I suspected, it's lime). I was impressed by Jose's knolwedge of the region, of the Maya culture, and of the site. When Jose talked about topics I was fairly well informed about, it became clear that he really provided sound information.

By about 9 we had arrived at the park, parked, and prepared ourselves for the hike. The first thing to note is that the park is huge. Tikal was the most extensive Mayan city, as far as I know, and one of the most populous. Surveys have discovered 3500 structures there, only a small per centage of which have been excavated, let alone restored. The second thing to note is, nature went to work reclaiming the area even as Mayan people began abandoning the city, about 900 A.D. The Spanish may have stumbled across a stone building or two on their way to and from the business of subduing the local people, but they did not know a city was sitting in part of their wildnerness. The site was only identified in the 1840s. The point, though, is that most of the walk is through thick jungle, broken by areas of restoration. Many of the known temples still sit under ground and overgrowth, looking exactly like small (and not-so-small) hills.

And the last point is that the minute we stepped on the the Mayan footpath known as sacbe to begin our hike, the rain started in earnest. It continued to rain steadily for the next two or two and a half hours. In fact, steady doesn't quite do justice to this rain. It varied from a hard steady rain to a torrential downpour. Shortcut paths turned into small streams. The sacbe held up well (pretty good for 1300 year-old pavement) but in places where erosion had made holes, serious obstacles formed in our path.

We soldiered on. The only thing I can compare it to is one of those jungle movies, where people are in some desperate situation in a tropical rain forest and struggling through a torrential rain. Think of the scene from King Kong, except that our rain at Tikal was much heavier. I won't mention it again except to say that all this rain worked on me. I won't say it depressed me, but it colored my appreciation of the artifacts we saw. Taking a picture of a pyramid or stela proved very tricky, tryiing to balance my umbrella and camera and keep the camera from getting wet. Still, the place worked on us. The "acropolis," one the the plazas with two large pyramids facing each other, impressed me even with water splattering all over my pants and soaking into my socks. We climbed one of the pyramids there but could not see very far because the clouds had closed around us so tightly.

By the time "Templo IV" came into sight I was resigned to some kind of perfunctory nod to the rest of the edifices and squishing my way back to the park entrance with as much dignity and deliberation as possible. In fact, I almost passed up the opportunity to go the pyramid/temple, but Walter gave me a valuable nudge. "If you go, I'll go," he said. That's guy talk--done deal.

The first inkling that I had that this might not go into my diary as "ho-hum, another pyramid" was as we continued along and I thought we'd passed the path to take to the ascent. No, it's ahead, he told me. In other words, the temple was so large that my distance perception had been mistaken. Even now much of it is covered with earth, but it clearly pokes up above the treeline. And just about the time that Walter and I agreed to take the trip up the pyramdi, the rain stopped. Almost like someone turning off a faucet. So, as we climbed, we climbed toward a clearing sky.

When I reached the top, I'm not sure what I did. No phsyical response seemed adequate. I looked and looked. I gawked! I could see for miles and miles in every direction except in an arc of about 270 degrees. Jungle covered everything, all the way to the horizon, and the only breaks in the canopy were Mayan buildings rising above the treeline. Some of them, partially excavated, lloked like temples growing out of the ground. It's the kind of sight that big budget movies try for, but I don't know how anything could do justice to it. Certainly no photo I took will make it look the way it felt to look at it. [In fact, back at the airport, I saw a photo of the scene that covered an entire wall (!) and it didn't give anything like the same impression.]

The rest of the day? We slowly dried, climbed another pyramid, and took our time completing our tour. As the rain went away, spider monkey ventured out into the trees and the local variety of pheasant, with shocking bright colors, appeared in the forest. IN the distance, forg exercised their voices making sounds like tractor pull getting revved up. By the time we sat down to lunch, we had spent four hours in the jungle.