So our adventure continues! After a long night of driving we ended up...
in Flores Island. It is a tiny island (when I say tiny, I mean you can drive around the whole island in 5 minutes) and beautiful! We got here kind of late and left early so went did not get to spend as much time there as we would have liked. This picture is a view from our hotel! This island is in the middle of a giant lake in northeast Guatemala. After an early breakfast we were off to..
Tikal!!! These ancient Mayan ruins were incredible!! This is Noah, our guide. He was full of fascinating facts and spoke excellent English. This doorway we are standing in symbolized trinity. The majority of the doorways throughout Tikal looked like this. Here is...
the main section of temples. We spent a good chunk of time there because there was so much to see. What I found to be interesting was that these people were able to survive off of rain water. There were no lakes or rivers in this area. It is suspected that the water source is one of the main reasons that eventually the people abandoned the place (and because of numerous wars).
This is a giant mask in one of the temples. It was in great condition compared to most of the others.
As you can see, some of the structures are still partly underground. There are many structures that are in the process of being uncovered and numerous that are still completely buried.
This was one of my favorite stuctures to explore. There were many twists and turns, almost like a maze. I wish so badly that I could take a time machine back in time to see the people in action. While in Tikal, we saw numerous...
Monkeys! Man those suckers can jump! The howler monkeys make a freaky noise that you can hear for miles away. We also saw...
turkeys!! These look nothing like the ones back in the states. They were so colorful and big. They reminded us of a peacock. There were also other animals but we saw the monkeys and turkeys the most. At the end of our Tikal trek, we climbed to the top of the highest temple, almost 300 feet high.
It was incredible-so worth it! We were above all the trees and could see for miles and miles of jungle with temples peaking through the trees. Awesome. After Tikal, we had another long drive ahead of us. We ended up at...
The Rio Dulce. We had to take a boat across the river to get to our bungalows. It (like everwhere else) was beautiful! This is what our...
bungalows look like. It was a swampy area, being that we were right on the river and all but it was fun because you could watch fish and lizards doing their thing. It was the hottest place I have ever attempted sleeping in. I slept in my swimsuit because it was so hot. After breakfast, we took off on a boat tour. First stop was...
The Castle of San Philip. This castle dates back to 1554. Back in the day, it sat as a fortress on the entrance to Port Mahòn. There were two main battles that took place here, both were unsuccesful. It was facinating to see how the soilders lived there (most interesting was the bathrooms!). It was a beautiful little island....
as you can see. In the basement of the castle is where...
they kept their prisoners. Ben is siiting in one of the cells. Not alot of room to stretch your legs. There were numerous cells around the room. The guide said that the castle basement used to flood time to time due to the rising water . When that would happen, the water would sometimes rise up to the prisoners knees. The majoity of the prisoners died from malaria or dengue. Here is...
Ben and Mike pretending to defeat the competition. Our boat ride continued..
for another 2 hours. Along the way there were little islands covered in colorful birds and patches of lilypads, like these. They were fun to see because there were birds that liked to hang out on them. We continued on to the...
town of Livingston. This sunken ship is on the shore of Livingston. We didn´t get too many pics of this place but we should have. It was like we were in a completely different country. Livingston is totally secluded. There are no roads to get here, you must take a boat. The majority of the people here are black and have a Jamacian feel to them. It was beautiful and we ate fresh fish right out of the ocean. One of the most unusual things here were the aligators in the park. Uh, creepy!
We headed back on the boat and then had a long car ride back to Xela. It was an incredible trip and left us with smiles on our faces!!
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