Sleeping in a hammock in the jungle is simply a recipe for adventure. While last night it was not as much a of a hammock adventure as I had in Palenque, it was still interesting. (If you are picking up here without having read my currently unavailable previous trablog entries, I was stung by a scorpion.) I got to experiment with new ways to get something resembling comfort in my too-small hammock (I got a pretty good one involving extending it with my sleeping bag). I got to have crazy malaria pill dreams for the first time in a few months, and I got to be woken up by howler monkeys a few times throughout the night. I haven’t seen one yet, but I do hear they’re small from people who have. Nonetheless, what I heard from the monkeys themselves certainly seems to say to me that they’re big, mean, scary, pissed off, and coming my way. And that there’s lots of them. Especially at about 5:00 a.m. Of course, maybe they’re just pissed off that they’ve come all this way to the tropical jungle and it’s still really cold at night. I was ok in my sleeping bag, but the 4 other hammockers next to me were howling in their own somewhat-less-scary way this morning.

It’s only about a 10 minutes walk from the Jaguar Inn, where my hammock hangs, to the closest ruins. Excellent for getting out early and seeing the sunrise over the temples, just as everyone says you should come to Tikal and do. But, when the sun rises at 5:30 and the ruins open at 6:00, it’s a bit difficult. Still, they were amazing at 6:00, almost empty with a beautiful light trickling in at a lazy angle through the canopy, birds chirping from every green tree branch, vine, leaf, and flower.

Tikal has the most beautiful ruins I’ve ever seen. Not just because the ruins themselves are the biggest and most diverse, but because they are spread out over a wide area of amazing pristine jungle, in the middle of a large national park, and protected from the sun by the high canopy. It’s a fusion of history and nature, with miles of trails to explore. I wonder if they cleared all the trees out when this was a bustling metropolis of 100,000+ inhabitants (back when it was the commercial and administrative capital of the region and before they were all killed – a time span from about 700 BC to 700 AD). It seems they didn’t use the pyramids for anything other than ceremony; did the citizens just walk past them everyday, just another part of the old landscape that was there when they were born and would be there after?

One of the signs at the (creatively named) Temple V says there had been some eleven generations of forest cover growing up its slopes. Some of the temples that have not been excavated and restored certainly show signs of being readily reclaimed by the jungle and staying that way for a really long time. They resemble very unnaturally small, steep, tall hills, capped with a small stone structure – the only part too steep for the roots to cling to, even after all these years. The rest of the temples really are truly magnificent, but the few left as the jungle would have them really intrigue me. There’s just a magic in the mystery of imagining that the temple could be there, instead of actually seeing a temple.

I wish I was Indiana Jones, then at a place like this I would surely be doing something *really cool* right now because I’d fall through a trap door and have to figure out all the puzzles, and fight all the snakes, and the scorpions, and the Nazis. I´d get the treasure, and the pretty lady(ies?). Instead of just looking at the big tarantula on a tree, I’d hella EAT it. And I’d have a cool hat. And fly jet planes.

Or I could just be a howler money and throw fruit and be scary and poop from trees.