Flores & Tikal - Guatemala

Flores

We left Mexico by taking a boat upstream for 30 minutes and we were soon in Guatemala. We were hoping to have a shuttle bus waiting for us but we were soon informed that we would be catching a chicken bus for the journey to Flores.

It was a hot and dusty 5 hours in the rickety old bus which appeared to stop every 100 metres, much to our frustration.

When we finally arrived in the small town Flores we were feeling tired and dirty and ready for a couple of drinks. The evening didn't turn out to be as relaxing as we were hoping. We ended up having a disagreement which resulted in Rich storming off leaving me to pay. I then managed to leave our wallet (with all our credit cards) by the computer in the hostel...we were not aware of this until the following morning.

The following day resulted in us running around trying desperately to find it. It was long gone. Thankfully some nice backpackers lent us a bit of money and from there we were able to get our lovely relatives to help transfer some money and send out our credit cards. It would mean surviving on bread and bananas for a few days until the banks opened and also staying in the small town Flores for a week while a new credit cards arrived.

Despite this we made the most of our time there. Flores is a small town built on an artifical island in the middle of a lake. It is a very attractive and colourful town and serves as the stopping of place for the Mayan ruins Tikal.

Chilling at a colourful, local restaurant

The credit cards arrive!

Tikal

The Mayans were reputed to have settled in this site around 700BC. It is set on a low hill, surrounded by thick jungle. The site is said to have more than 4000 structures and at it's most succesful supported a population of around 100,000 people. The most interesting buildings are set around the central Plaza, the pyramid structures tower over the canopy of trees. We spent half of a day wandering around the site admiring the architecture in awe of the amount of hours it took to build.

Rich was especially interested in taking a photo from the top of Temple 4 as the view from here was featured in Star Wars - Episode 4. For all you geeks out there this is the rebel base.

The scene from Star Wars (cough...'Nerd!')

The same scene overlooking Tikal. Minus nice weather.

The main plaza at Tikal