Friday, March 17, 2006

Drop the fruit, lady, and step away from the bag!

Tikal, Guatemala

Utterly exhausted by the relentless pace of our extended holiday and the daunting lifestyle we struggle to cope with everyday, Cara and I decided we needed some beach time to kick back and relax for a while. I'm sure you can all sympathize. We thought we should head over to Honduras and have a few weeks on a Caribbean island for some sun, scuba and shellfish. The downside of this was we needed to chop a couple of weeks of our planned time in Guatemala, but we still wanted to see Tikal, the famous ruins in the north close to the border with Belize. We compromised and booked a quick, whistle-stop tour with a local agent in Antigua.

We were picked up from our hotel at 4am and ferried to the airport in Guatemala City. I say airport, but it was really just a small hangar on the opposite side of the runway from the main terminal. We were only to be away for 2 days, so we only had hand luggage. This was lucky as the airline had a baggage limit of 14 ounces. At check-in we were asked if we were carrying any firearms, ammunition or explosives. We said no, and thereby completed the security measures for our airline. There was no x-ray machine, metal detector or stern faced security personnel frisking us for concealed fruit. To be fair, none were necessary. What potential plane hijacker could possibly have bluffed their way past the clever and subtle questions at check-in.
"Do you have any firearms in your luggage, sir?"
"Yes I have an AK-47 in my bag and a...damn, no, no. I mean I'm a tupperware salesman from Peru. Shit, caught out again". See, no chance.

We sat ourselves down in the little room and stared blankly at the huge plasma screen on the wall, along with the rest of the semi-catatonic passengers. It really was a very impressive TV. It looked to be worth about 3 metal detectors and an x-ray conveyor. Unfortunately it was tuned in to the Discovery channel and we were treated to CCTV footage of Columbine high school students having their chests blown open by shotgun toting maniacs. Classy bit of scheduling from the Discovery people, I thought! I helped myself to a cup of coffee from the urn in the corner. I have no idea what it tasted like as the first sip of the molten lava seared all the taste buds from the inside of my mouth and blew smoke out of my ears. I drained my cup and helped myself to another. Excruciating pain is nothing when weighed against the need for caffeine at 5.30 in the morning. 5.30am is an ugly time of day, and I like it less each time I see it, which seems to be happening too often at the moment.

Just as the sun began to make its presence felt on the horizon, we were ushered out of the hangar to the plane. It was a twin propeller Fokker from about 1935 and looked smaller than the minibus that drove us to the airport. I could see a mechanic sitting on the wing with a tube of superglue and a torn up cornflakes box and it didn't make me feel any better. Once we were all strapped in to our folding garden chairs, the young flight attendant entertained us with her speed reading skills by reading aloud an entire novel in 47 seconds. At that speed, we obviously couldn't work out a bloody word she was saying and tourists and locals alike asked each other which language she was speaking. It was only at the end of her recital when she held up an oxygen mask that we realised she was giving us the pre-flight safety instructions. Apparently, if the plane were to unexpectedly embed itself into the side of a mountain like a 400mph javelin, we should all read the booklet under our seat and follow the correct evacuation procedures. Either that or she was reading out her shopping list for a laugh. None of us had the faintest idea, really. The plane taxied to the runway and started to crawl along at a snails pace for what seemed like forever. Suddenly, the throttle opened and we lurched down the last few yards or tarmac. The pilot pulled the plane into the air by sheer wrist power alone and seconds later the runway fell away and we could see the city a few hundred feet below us at the bottom of a big cliff. I imagined the co-pilot handing over his $20 to the captain after losing the bet to see how little runway he could use and still get the plane off the ground. I'm glad the captain won, otherwise some poor unsuspecting Guatemalan would have been wearing a Fokker out of the back of his skull that morning.

An hour later, we landed at Santa Elena airport, about 60km from the Tikal ruins. Bizarrely, our bags were checked by security staff as we got off the airplane. I noticed this airport didn't have a big plasma TV so that might explain it. I passed through without any troubles but Cara was caught red-handed with a contraband banana in her bag. The security guy was furious that she was trying to smuggle illegal fruit into his airport and was ready to drag Cara out back to the waiting firing squad until we pointed out that we were on an internal flight and hadn't broken any international banana importation regulations. He slipped the offending banana into his lunchbox and told us to get out of his airport.

We were put into another minibus with an American family who would be on the same tour as us, and ferried off to our hotel inside the Tikal national park. The family, a young girl in Guatemala to study Spanish, her mother, granddad and grandma, seemed to have faulty volume dials and could only communicate in shouts. It's quite funny listening to someone trying to whisper at a volume I can only achieve after catching my scrotum on a rusty nail. They were a very pleasant bunch though, so we didn't mind. Grandpa was fantastic. He sounded exactly like Robert Mitchum and even looked a bit like him. He had retired after spending 25 years as a Californian homicide cop and he was huge with hands like bunches of bananas (I don't know how he got them past security at the airport). I could have listened to his stories all day, which was fortunate as he could have told his stories all day.

To get the details out of the way so I can continue with my pointless ramble, let me fill you in on Tikal (or copy it straight out of my guidebook to be more accurate). Tikal is an ancient Mayan city in northeast Guatemala, founded in the 8th century BC and occupied until around 1000AD. It was one of the most prosperous cities of the Mayan civilization, with wealth built on the manufacture and export of flint tools and weapons quarried in abundance from the surrounding area (although ironically, if you try and buy a new flint for your cigarette lighter nowadays they just look at you like you're an idiot, at least in my experience). At the height of its wealth and influence in the 7th and 8th centuries AD, Tikal boasted a population of nearly 100,000 and the city covered over 30 square km. You could get pizza delivered until well after midnight and the postmen didn't dip your mail in a puddle before pushing it through the letterbox (or maybe I read those hieroglyphs wrong). As Mayan culture declined the city was abandoned and eventually reclaimed by the surrounding jungle. Many of the pyramids and structures are still completely covered and look for all the world like an innocent hill amongst the trees and vines. Some of the larger structures have now been excavated and it is these you can see when you visit the ruins.

According to most history books, Tikal was a "lost" city until its recent rediscovery. Of course, as with all historical sites in the Americas, this means found by a rich, white fella. The locals who knew it was there all along don't count, not being rich or white (this reminds me of our Spanish teacher in Bolivia, who had been taught at school that Columbus discovered the Americas, ignoring the double whammy that he had never stepped foot on the continent and that her ancestors had already been there for 10,000 years. Curious, no?). Now, the ruins are a spectacular sight, with enormous pyramids rising up out of the thick jungle, and they also offer a great chance to see some of the local wildlife, being in a protected national park. Anyway, enough of the boring history and back to my charming anecdotes about monkeys.

We arrived at the hotel and ditched our bags in reception. It was still just after 8am and we couldn't check in 'til after lunch. No problem, our guide Julio told us. We would have a 4 hour tour around the ruins, come back for lunch and the rest of the day was free to spend as we wished. Cara perked up at this news as the hotel had a big swimming pool and plenty of sun loungers. Robert Mitchum asked where he could get a cold beer. Grandma Mitchum put on her best leopard print cardigan over her shell suit and we were ready to go. We spent the next four and a half hours wandering around the huge temple complexes and climbing the various pyramids, Julio filling us in on the details of what everything was and when it was built, in between singing Beatles tunes and practicing his American slang with Grandpa Mitchum. Every time we climbed a pyramid, Robert Mitchum sat himself down at the bottom and bought a beer from one of the vendors dotted around the site. On top of all the architectural sites, Tikal also has some great wildlife inhabiting the jungle that was all around us. We watched parrots, toucans and woodpeckers up in the trees and at one point we had to dodge rocks that had been hurled down the side of a half buried pyramid by a small furry thing which looks like the bastard offspring of a squirrel and an aardvark. Apparently they are called white-nosed coatis. We heard a group of spider monkeys up in the trees who sounded like they were arguing over whose turn it was to throw fruit at the tourists, so we went over to investigate. They appeared overhead, bouncing up and down in the branches, and I took a few steps back to give them some room. The last time I stood underneath a group of monkeys they tried to piss on my head and I wasn't eager to repeat the experience, at least not without my hat.

When we had finished the tour we headed back to the hotel for lunch, after which Cara made a beeline straight for the pool and I sat outside our room watching families of monkeys swinging their way through the canopy and screeching at each other for whatever monkey misdemeanors they were perpetrating. After a while, Cara and I decided to head back into the ruins so we stocked up on water and mozzy spray and set off. We wandered around some of the places we hadn't visited that morning and enjoyed the peace and quiet as most people had buggered off by this time. As the sun started to get low in the sky, we wanted to head over to the Lost World Pyramid as we had heard this was the best place to see the sunset. I had left the map back at the hotel so we had only our memory to find our way around. I spotted a narrow track through the jungle and told Cara it was a shortcut to where we wanted to go. With the immortal words "trust me, I know exactly where we are" we set off up the path. 20 minutes later we were hopelessly lost. The sun was by now very low and the canopy floor was getting quite dark. We heard some unsettling growling noises and for once it wasn't my stomach. We picked up the pace and set off down another track that we hoped would lead us back to the main path. We scrambled under fallen trees and over rivers of busy leaf cutter ants. After finding ourselves in several temple complexes we had never seen before, we finally made it back to the main path. The exact same path we had left 30 minutes earlier, in fact.
"Right," I said," now I know exactly where we are".
But I'd blown my chance. It was painfully obvious to both of us that I couldn't find my way out of an empty barn even if it had a 10 foot sign over the door that said "This way out of the barn". Cara took charge and headed off in what she thought was the right direction. 2 minutes later we were at the foot of the pyramid we'd been searching for. Nobody likes a clever dick, Cara!

We climbed the pyramid and watched the sun setting over the jungle. Enormous pyramids and temples jutted out of the canopy in every direction and were lit up by the deep orange glow of the sun. Parrots and toucans flew across the treetops below us and brachiating spider monkeys swung from tree to tree looking for a pasty white guy to piss on. It was a special romantic moment just for me, Cara and the 20 birdwatchers from Oregon who had set up their tripods beside us. They whispered loudly to each other about what rare treat they had just photographed and bragged about the size of their zoom lenses. Their guide told us all he could recognize any bird just by it's silhouette and jumped up and down excitedly whenever he spotted something new.
"HEY BIRDERS, BIRDERS, COME AND CHECK THIS OUT" he would squeal, "I'VE GOT A LESSER SPOTTED, GREATER CRESTED GHOST WHARBLER" or words to that effect.
"THAT'S A SPARROW!" one of his colleagues would correct him.
"OH, YEAH. SORRY BIRDERS, MY MISTAKE". And so it went on.

Once the sun was well and truly gone we climbed down the pyramid, or inched down slowly with eyes closed if you're Cara, and headed out of the ruins. After a few minutes it was pitch black and all we had was a small head torch to show us the way. Every now and then I would confidently claim that we should turn right or left down various paths. But my days as Compass Mik were well and truly over and Cara just kept going down the path she thought would lead us out. I would have argued a bit more but she had the torch and was clearly calling all the shots. It was at this point that we slipped into another dimension where the dinosaurs still ruled the earth. It was the only reason I could think of to explain the hideous growls and roars that echoed around us. The air was filled the deafening sound of a T-Rex and I don't mean Marc Bolan singing about the children of the revolution. We soon located the culprits up in the tree canopy, a group of male howler monkeys singing their songs of love and devotion to any female within 30 miles. The male howler monkey has a hollow, bony box in his throat that he uses to amplify his calls, but I never expected it to sound like this. How could something so loud come out of an animal the size of a rolled up sleeping bag? It was just like what I imagine a 75 foot lizard would sound like if he tried to castrate himself with a couple of house bricks. Only louder. We watched them for a few minutes as a full moon was rising into a cloudless sky and the jungle was lit up by a bright, silvery light. By the time we made it back to the hotel we were exhausted and hungry enough to scrape the meat off a couple of house bricks we'd found in the jungle. A park guide tried to sell us on the idea of taking another tour of the ruins to see the sunrise the next morning. As neither of us could face another 3.30am start, we decided against it and we felt even better the next morning when we dragged ourselves out of bed to see a cloudy, grey sky. Chalk one up for the lazy English gits.

Our trip back to Antigua that afternoon was fairly uneventful, although it did appear to be my turn to fall foul of the humourless airport security. They confiscated my can of mosquito repellent fearing I might use it to fashion a crude flameflower and hijack the plane.
"Take me to Guatemala City or I'll singe your eyebrows off!"
The exact same thing happened to me in the Galapagos Islands, but for some reason on both occasions it was on the return flight. I'm still trying to figure that one out.

Once back in Antigua, we bought a couple of bus tickets to Copan in Honduras. We were politely asked to be ready at our hotel to be picked up the next morning at 3.30am. What the hell is wrong with these people?

Mik

p.s. I have to admit I pinched the monkey photo off the internet. The buggers wouldn't stay still long enough

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