With David, Brie and Esme, my granddaughter, we went for a three day trip to Tikal, in the north of Guatemala. Spectacular!
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Our first day, a flight from Guatemala City (GUA) to Flores (FRS) in the Petén in the north of the country. With David, Brie and Esme, my granddaughter!
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Leaving Guatemala City on TAG Airlines ... Transportes Aereos de Guatemala. A domestic flight.
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Walking into the Tikal national Park at 6 a.m. with a guide, the first thing you see are a lot monkeys in the treetops and this enormous Ceiba tree, the national tree of Guatemala. I think we look a lot taller than we really are. Click on any photo to see a larger image.
The central plaza of Tikal, well worth coming into the park early in the morning, before hundreds of dayrippers come in from Guatemala about 10 a.m. when it gets too hot.
The "Gran Jaguar" pyramid, 47 meters tall, constructed in the central plaza around 732 a.d.
The third day, we got a special permit to drive 23 kilometers to Uaxactun (pronounced almost the same as Washington, near where Dave, Brie and Esme live). While in Tikal, you meet lots of tourists, in Uacactun there are none. Unfortunately, Brie had to stay in the Jungle Lodge hotel that morning, working online from Tikal in Australia. A small world.
I got totally soaked in heavy rain at Tikal, seeing the office where to get a permit to drive on the dirt road to Oaxactun. When we got there, it was sunny. It was discovered in 1916 by the British archaeologist Sylvanus Morley. He gave it the name, which either means "eight stones" or is pun to sound like Washington, the U.S. Capitol and home of the Carnegie Institute which funded Morley's explorations. The roads on which you can drive end in Uaxactun, which is deep in the jungle and there are no more useful roads going north, toward El Mirador on the Mexican border (but that is another story).
Morley's reason for the name was from an inscription of 8th Baktun of the Maya date, corresponding to the then earliest known Maya date, the year 328 a.d.
At Uaxactun there are these huge masks, very similar to what you see in the Bayon temple at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, built a lot later in the 12th century
(but that also is yet another story)
