Nothing says Legs Day like a 2:30 wake up call and 85% humidity, right?! ...right? Even if you don't agree with me (or perhaps you don't know what Legs Day is), this was the day I had at Tikal National Park.
Tikal is an old Mayan civilization but mainly known for being featured in a movie that you might have heard of -- it's a movie about Harrison Ford and his dogs and some fighting stars. Maybe you haven't heard of the movie! I don't know, but for those of you who have, Tikal stands in for Yavin in Episode IV.
Side note: I believe that all Mayan civilizations are "old" but I could be wrong so I wanted to give the Mayans the benefit of the doubt.
We wanted to hike Tikal at sunrise which meant getting there BEFORE sunrise, which meant leaving at 3am. It had already been a long day by the time we arrived at the park... Now a few of our hostel mates went on this trip with us, including a group of five Brits who we (unfortunately) met yesterday coming from Belize City. They are not the type of people who you want to be with at 3am; they seem like the type who voted for the UK to leave the EU without knowing what either of those abbreviations stood for. They were also loud at 3am, which is not a time for people to be loud, even if they must be awake. And one of them spent a portion of the hour long ride from Flores to the park doing her makeup. You know that it's pitch black, right?! *face palm*
It was still dark when we arrived but Whitney decided she'd put on her Go Pro chest piece. The chest piece, as you might have guessed, straps the camera to her chest, allowing her to go hands free (when we went snorkeling, she used her floating handle). The logic behind wearing the chest piece was not to get great footage but that she didn't want to carry it around. Brilliant. At one point, she said "I think it's fashionable," and my response was a simple "I think you're wrong, but whatever." To each their own!
So we get to the park and we're going to climb to the top of Temple 4, the tallest temple, for the sunrise. This was also where they shot the establishing shots of "Yavin" for Fighting Stars #1 from so I was basically George Lucas this morning. There were a lot of stairs to get to the top of this thing. They weren't the steep, stone steps that the Mayans would have used but there were still a ton! And when we got to the top... It was cloudy. You couldn't see a thing. You could hear a lot though; the entire rainforest was waking up. Howler monkeys were screaming! The Brita were screaming too but everyone shssssed them to our satisfaction. It was unfortunate that we didn't get to see a brilliant sunrise but eventually we went back to the top of Temple 4 after the clouds had cleared and did get to see the view of the three other major temples.
After we'd climbed back down the many, many, many stairs, we walked through the rainforest. I keep wanting to say jungle for elegant variation but our guide made it clear that this was a rainforest so I will use the proper terminology. We set off on a figurative hunt for the monkeys. We'd heard a lot of them during our non-sunrise, early morning meditation so we knew they were close and we ended up seeing both spider AND howler monkeys before 7:30am. We also saw two toucan! So I can add some more animals to my list of "animals that people have seen in zoos but I have seen out in the wild" otherwise know as the "wild animal stories" that I tell the kids I work with (it's a mini-contest to see who has the coolest animal story and I usually win because I have the trump card of seeing penguins on the beach in Africa but monkeys in Central America are probably my new road to victory).
Tikal is big. Whitney logged her daily goal of 10,000 steps on her Fitbit before 8:30am and we were at the park until 11! We got to visit Temples 1, 2 and 3 along with "the lost world." I don't know how the temples in the lost world were anymore lost or found than the other temples at Tikal considering that it was all lost for a time and wasn't rediscovered until the 1840s but no one asked me before they named it. On top of the sheer size of the place, every temple had a crap ton of stairs to climb and these things were steep. At one point, I seriously considered going down on my bum because I was worried that I might fall as I tried to maneuver the stairs without any handrail. Like I said, it was definitely legs day and I am going to remember Tikal in my quads for a while.
Oh, by the way, we did all of this wearing yoga pants and long sleeve shirts. We were trying to protect ourselves from the bugs and it appears to have worked but holy hell were we hot!
In all, Whitney and my combined effort to find puns/perfect instagram captions summed up the experience wonderfully:
Whitney: Waking up at 2:30 am left me in ruins.
Me: Guatemala has ruined me.
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