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Tikal Ruins

Tikal Travel Blog › entry 107 of 426 › view trip summary

So this is our 2.5 year trip!! One year on the long and bumpy road of South and Central America. Our second year started off with 12 weeks in New Zealand, then we headed to Australia! Eagerly clutching our working holiday visas we stayed in Australia for one year for work and travel. The last leg of our 30-month trip was 3.5 months in SE Asia. (We are home now and oh how we miss travelling!)

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World › Central America › Guatemala › Tikal

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Tikal Ruins

May 3, 2007

We saw some incredible ruins at Palenque so we thought Tikal would be just another bunch of similar ruins. How wrong we were!!! Tikal ruins are just amazing, and so very different from Palenque (OK so they look very similar on the pics but in real life they are different!!).

We got up early and caught the 530am bus to Tikal. We arrived at 615am and then walked for about 40 minutes through the jungle until we reached the first set of ruins. As we were there so early, the monkeys and birds were out in force and we saw parrots, toucans and lots of other birds that I don`t know the name of but that were very colourful. The monkeys thought it would be fun to throw things at us from the trees, the little buggers.

We got to the first set of ruins and were just amazed by the sheer size of the temples.

I am still convinced the Mayans had a JCB and a crane to lift all those rock boulder things so high. We clambered to the top of the first temple and enjoyed a snack from the top with an amazing view. At about 7am we still hadn`t seen a single other person so we enjoyed the views all to ourselves.

We spent 4 hours wandering around the ruins and the temples are situated far apart from each other. On several of the temples that we climbed, we had great views across the jungle and could see various temple tops poking out of the jungle in the distance.

We got the bus back at 11am, by which time it was boiling hot and we felt very sorry for the few tourists who were then arriving. So our advice to anyone visiting Tikal - get there early!!!! Earlier the better to enjoy the wildlife, the less extreme heat, and the lack of other tourists!!!