Tikal

Oh, I didn’t tell you about the guy stealing my gas cap, did I?

Au contraire. I got out of the ATM with my Lemps and procured some fruit in bags from girls who didn’t know that when I asked for four bags of fruit that the price multiplied four times. I could see my bike clearly from the fruit stand and noticed some guys looking at me. They were doing more than looking; calculating, it seemed, but I was enjoying my pineapple too much to be worried about anything.

A Jeep Cherokee pulled into the line of sight between myself and the bike. Five minutes pass and I am finished with the fruit and get back to the bike to find my keys missing. Yes, I had absent-mindedly left the keys in the ignition. I had an extra ignition key but not an extra gas tank key because my ignition had been replaced in the crash and I had left my second ignition key in Costa with Eve.

I get on the bike after telling the woman in the store these guys were hanging out in front of to let the bendejos know that they can go puta themselves because they were not getting my bike. I went to the nearest hardware store, and after borrowing every tool in the place to mangle the lock on my gas cap, the son of the owner runs to get the town locksmith, even though it was Sunday (he went and picked him up by taxi at his house – such hospitality!). The locksmith gets the cap off, but can give me no way to consistently open and close the tank, so I trash it and strap a rubber on that bad boy.

Everyone laughs, and the credits roll.

Tikal is one of the largest archaeological sites and urban centers of the Pre-Columbian Maya civilization. It is located in the archaeological region of the Petén Basin in what is now modern-day northern Guatemala. Situated in the department of El Petén, the site is part of Guatemala’s Tikal National Park and in 1979 was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The closest large modern settlements are Flores and Santa Elena, approximately 64 kilometres (40 mi) by road to the southwest.

Tikal was one of the major cultural and population centers of the Maya civilization. Though monumental architecture at the site dates to the 4th century BC, Tikal reached its apogee during the Classic Period, ca. 200 to 900 AD, during which time the site dominated the Maya region politically, economically, and militarily while interacting with areas throughout Mesoamerica, such as central Mexican center of Teotihuacan. There is also evidence that Tikal was even conquered by Teotihuacan in the 4th century. Following the end of the Late Classic Period, no new major monuments were built at Tikal and there is evidence that elite palaces were burned. These events were coupled with a gradual population decline, culminating with the site’s abandonment by the end of the 10th century.

I’m still stuck with a bad case of the Lemps, and no one will come near me with this horrible disease. The cost of admission is $15 US or so, but I don’t have it. They’d accept USD if I had it, but not currency from their neighboring country, Honduras. At this point in time, I am not about to turn around and miss the splendor that is Tikal.

They say no. They tell me to go change it at the resort. I go to the resort, they say no. The resort tells me to go to the bank near the tourist trap shops at the visitor’s center. I get there, they won’t change the money. The bank tells me to go buy something from one of the shops, and they won’t take the money.

I go back to the restaurant and they say, “Oh well, guess we’ll give you free breakfast.” Damn. I have the money for the breakfast in Quetzales, but I don’t have enough Quetzales to get into the park.

I look at the map and see that there looks like a way around the alligator swamp. I figure, how bad could going through this alligator swamp be anyway if they just let alligators hang out in it without a fence around it? It’s worth a look around.

Turns out the map is purposely incorrect in one place and you can just waltz right in the wrong way up a drainage channel. No worries.

I have saved $25 this way and it is promptly taken from me when I get to the next town – details to follow.

It was a pretty awesome site. I keep wondering what we have that is akin to these sites today. Some megalomaniacal guy who needs a monument to his achievements/being puts up gargantuan and ornate structures at great expense.

Trump?

Those were the names of the larger structures, and then the smaller areas had more intricate sounding names, like “Valley of the Seven Temples.”

Yeah. Real original.

Even French accents from old ladies sound hot. I think I need to pursue that and take up residence in France for a while.

Now French accents of African women, not so hot.

I had asked a German girl to give me a southern American accent vs. a northern American accent – she couldn’t. I can recognize the difference between the French accents and slight differences in Spanish accents, but I couldn’t demonstrate them. I guess with a bit more practice . . .

I always envision my kids living in a neighborhood with tall trees. Not one of those suburban mcmansion neighborhoods that keep popping up these days, but one of the old ones with the tall trees. I constantly wondered why the mcmansion neighborhoods had been clear-cut before construction before a builder I knew told me it was so much cheaper.

Obviously, the tall trees in this mini-valley reminded me of that type of neighborhood.

At this one, I split up one of the trails by spitting on the ground and wiping my spittle around in the dirt. That got the ants to stop going that direction, but when I started to do the same thing on a closely connected trail, the ants seemed to get around the spittle a lot easier. I didn’t really have too much spit the second time, though, so I am not drawing any conclusions from this.

I missed a bunch of this place – I needed to get to Belize City by nightfall and I was kind of done with the ruins for the day after three hours, so I peaced. I don’t think I missed much, but whatever those things are in the dead center of the picture, I definitely didn’t see.

I was going about 85Kph on my bike, because I was on a road that was pretty well maintained, and I figured that I would be blowin’ and goin’ the whole way from Tikal to the border. Without warning, I came upon a rut in the road that threw my bike into the air a good foot and a half. Barely sticking the landing, I dropped my speed down to about 60Kph and there was it to stay for the next hour’s ride to the border. I would say that this was the worst road that I encountered in Central America, but it was consistently awful, so I am still going to rank the Honduran road from the southernmost border in Nicaragua as the worst (http://bit.ly/kOs6G). This picture shows that the battery and the license plate have literally shaken off on this ride.

The border town in Guatemala . . . it didn’t look that bad, but it was a haven of thieves. There is absolutely no reason to stop there. It’s called Los Achiotes and you should avoid this place like the swine flu.

So here is the part of the day where I give all the money I stole by sneaking into Tikal back to the local economy. Instant Karma. I’m going to keep this short and in bullet form, because I don’t like writing about my bad experiences in Central America:

-Met this guy who offered to help me out, seemed like a nice guy
-Brought my bike to a place where I thought the guy would pinpoint the problem
-Went and had a beer with guy who seemed like a nice guy, turns out he’s a convicted felon, beats his sister, and is drunk most of the day
-Went to try to change money my Lempiras in the town, the guy brought me to all of his crooked friends who wanted to screw me over on the exchange rate
-Went back to the guy who was fixing my bike, it looked like he hadn’t done a thing to it. I am convinced today that he didn’t
-Watched him put in the oil after I said I wanted an oil change
-Paid him $25 because he said he ‘couldn’t charge me any less,’ and I didn’t want my nuts cut off
-Guy didn’t actually fix what was wrong with my bike

I leave, go to the border, the Guatemala is pretty much the easiest exit I had to do (before Mexico) and they speak English on the Belize border, so I spent a little less than 20 minutes here.

Technically, this isn’t a picture at the border . . .