...
We finally arrived in Flores and went onto Tikal, putting our travel
time to a slightly less impressive time of 6 1/2 hours. We ended up
staying on the campgrounds in hammocks...ADVENTURE #7. Our hammocks
were arranged as such that we were under a palm roof, but otherwise it
was open air and we locked our stuff to the pole. We got tickets for
the 4:45am tour of Tikal (an ancient Mayan city) and thus got about 5
hours of sleep that night...but the early tour was definately worth
it. We climbed Temple IV, the tallest of the temples, in the dark,
and waited for the jungle to awake and the sun to rise. As there is
so much mist from the rainforesty jungle, there isn't a sunrise so
much as it gradually gets lighter. The really impressive part though
was the waking of the jungle. From the left we started to hear howler
monkeys howling away, and then right in front of us they started
howling, and then the birds started chirping and cawing, before the
insects really came abuz
and there was a loud chorus of animals, making a beautiful racket. At
7:00 we got on with our tour and were told all the fauna and floral
and of course we were taken to some of the ruins and the guide
explained some things. We had our pan dulce breakfast on top of
Temple II and once we finished we did some exploring of our own. By
12:30 we were absolutely exhausted from climing a bunch of ruins and
walking ALL over the place, and we retired to our hammocks to sleep a
little and read, walking past all the crowds that were just coming in
to see Tikal.
At 3:00 we bussed back to Flores and stayed at a cute but super
touristy hostel, Los Amigos, where I am actually right now. It's been
actually quite uneventful here though Flores is beautiful and Amelia
and I had all our lasts...our last evening together, our last
dinner...our last ice cream (sooo tasty).
Early this morning Amelia
headed out to Belize and I'm hopefully going to Coban, though I have
to check with another bus company because the gravel bridge we crossed
over before (from the previous email)...is now completely gone and you
have to boat across.
Such is life keeping things adventurous.
annemary
ps-I've also officially watched a whole World Cup game, England vs
Portugal...everybody was highly disappointed at the outcome
