Day 22: Tikal

As I mentioned before, a group of us headed to Tikal this weekend and it was amazing! Tikal is one of the most famous Ancient Maya sites, and features hugely tall temples, palaces, and the like. In the time of the Ancient Maya, Tikal was one of the most powerful city-states, and its influence is evident throughout the Maya area. It is definitely a huge point of pride in Guatemala, and we barely went into a room without an image of it the whole time we were there! Apparently Tikal is also featured in one of the original Star Wars movies. Something to do with Ewoks...

The Guatemalan border is only about half an hour or 45 minutes west of where I'm living, so we were able to spend the majority of Saturday exploring the site after leaving Belize at about 7am. I always love visiting sites that have been worked on for so long (Tikal has actually been being excavated since before the turn of the twentieth century) because they're such a departure from our site. As you've seen from earlier pictures, we're still trying to find the staircases of structures that are otherwise giant mounds of dirt. At sites like Tikal, however, entire plaza groups have been cleared, and you can climb the temples and explore the palaces. It's crazy to think that one day our site could be like that.We kept saying that Tikal is like Guatemalan Disneyland--it's huge (huge!), mazelike, and there are even occasional kiosks selling drinks and snacks. There are paths and walkways that can be really confusing but also really fun. They've even built ladders and stairways beside the largest temples so that you can climb them (the actual temple steps are WAY hard to climb, and far too dangerous)!

See how civilized it is? They have paths through their jungle!

And stairs! Zena demonstrates how to avoid falling through the broken ones...These are the steps built alongside of Temple V. They are soooo steep and so much fun to climb! Trust me though, the actual steps would have been much scarier.

We spent the day climbing temples and exploring the ruins. We even found some ongoing excavation units to examine with our expert eye! The whole thing was just so huge and amazing! I loved it.

Examining the other archaeologists' work
Zena, Marisa, myself, and Melody on top of Temple IV. The view is spectacular!
On top of Temple IV again! I'm pretty sure that's Temple V in the distance.
We all made our signature archaeologist poses. I chose to emulate the candid note-taking pose.

Love you!
Elise