Flores and Tikal - 20th to 23rd May

Flores is a cutesy tiny town on an island in a lake, reached by a very short causeway. Virtually every road is currently being dug up, so there's a lot of dust everywhere and not much traffic. After much searching, we'd booked into a nicer-than-average hotel (though still quite cheap), which had a large, air-conditioned room with 3 "matrimonial beds" - luxury after the Rio Dulce jungle hut. We ate at the same restaurant for the first 2 nights, where this picture was taken - the view is of the lake on which Flores stands. Incidentally, apologies for the Wise Owl logo at the bottom right of most photos - I've been doing some work which uses screen captures, and I keep pressing the wrong keys by mistake and creating work images.

We spent the Thursday doing school work, swimming and booking a trip for the next day - these relaxing in-between days are what keep us going.

This morning we got up at 4.30 to catch a 5am bus to Tikal. This is a Mayan site in the jungle about an hour's drive north of Flores. We'd booked an early tour because we'd heard that you got to see more animals that way; what no one had told us is that it meant we'd be virtually the only people at Tikal for the first hour or so. It was a truly eerie experience walking along deserted paths through the jungle, with the background noise of howler monkeys (which are LOUD) and toucans and parrots. Two things made it slightly worrying: one was that all the guidebooks say that Tikal has had a lot of problems with crime in recent years, and the other was that I'd just finished reading Jurassic Park, and was half-expecting a velociraptor ambush at any moment.

How to describe Tikal? It's a huge complex of temples and the like built between about 500 and 900 AD in the middle of the jungle (and abandoned soon after, probably because of overpopulation, warfare and drought). So there are two attractions: the impressive pyramid-like templates with their steep sides, and the wildlife all around you. We (just) saw some howler monkeys - although we certainly heard them, and also a spider monkey, a cute coatmundi (like a raccoon) and hundreds of toucans.

We climbed several of the temples (from memory, temples 2, 4 and 5), which involved climbing near-vertical wooden steps beside the original Mayan stone ones. Nanny, we felt, would not have done this. One of the photos shows the view from the top of temple 4, the first one we climbed - you can just see some of the other temples poking their heads up through the jungle.

All Maya'ed out by about 11, we had lunch (the only guests in a huge restaurant - yet again), failed to see the local crocodile and headed back by bus to Flores. Now it's about 8.15, Pippa is asleep I think, Katy will be soon, and Jenny is washing clothes in the sink while I write this. Off by minibus tomorrow morning to the Belize border, where Nikki (Jenny's friend) and Jerry will meet us - we hope!