Woke up early again. *sigh*

The alarm clock was set for 3.30am for a 5am pickup outside the hotel but we woke at 2.30am when Julie rang us on the mobile! Lovely to hear from you Julie. Jill & Alex and Beau had rung the afternoon before so it was nice to talk with family.

Reason we were getting up early of this day was that we were taking the bus to the ruins of Tikal, a once great Mayan city abandoned around 850AD located an hour and a half drive from Flores. Bus picked us up first as we were the closest hotel to the Island’s causeway, then travelled around the island picking up more passengers. Off into the dark for the drive and most people went back to sleep.

When we arrived at Tikal we were able to get a welcome coffee at a shop before we got our entry tickets and headed into the park. We had a guide called Cesar who was very entertaining and had lots of wild ‘conspiracy’ theories about everything. Told us about the city as we first walked through thick rainforest then emerged in a clearing with a restored temple which was a pair of pyramids 20 metres high. We climbed the stairs to the top and admired the view before walking through more jungle with Spider Monkeys swinging through the trees above to another temple which we first saw the top of protruding up high above the jungle canopy. This temple hadn’t been restored and was basically a tree covered mountain with only the top of the temple visible around 40 metres high. There was a wooden stairway climbing the side to the top which we of course went up. It was very impressive up top but unfortunately the morning was a bit misty and we couldn’t see the nearby temples.
We spent another couple of hours going through the main temple buildings and saw Toucans in the trees as well as more monkeys as some funny looking badger like creatures.
The temples and structures were pretty amazing. Incredible to think there was a large city of people living there from around 2000BC until 800 years ago. The jungle has done a good job of reclaiming the area.

At 12.30pm we took a return bus back to Flores.