the casual side of SG

It took until Friday afternoon to book my trip to Tikal. The shuttle was to pick me up at 4am, just 12 hours away. It was critically important that I get to the Mayan ruins… my mild obsession with 2012 and its originations in the Maya calendar required that for this to be a truly transformative experience, I needed to feel the energy of the site where these ancient people made their life from the Heavens.

At 3:45, I awoke to my iPhone alarm and by 4:20, the shuttle had arrived. The reliability of people and processes in Guatemala never ceased to amaze me. The systems were consistently loose and seemingly disorganized, and yet they always worked.

A great example of this was my plane ticket. The only inter-country flight in Guatemala is from Guatemala City to Flores and back. It took Renzo many, many tries to book me a flight, a hotel, all the shuttles and park admission, all together. Many tries. Part of me was doubtful that all the pieces were in place. He was delighted when he got it to work and took a carbon copy book out his drawer to write me my plane ticket. Repeat, he wrote my plane ticket, in his own hand, on a piece of paper.

The shuttle drops everyone in my van at the International Airport. But not me. The driver takes me through the darkness of Guatemala City another few miles to a little door in a warehouse of a building. I take my overstuffed backpack and sit in the empty waiting area and over the next hour, it fills. To bursting. The flight crew arrives and starts directing people, in Spanish. haha. I can’t believe I am managing so well on my own in a country where I don’t speak the language, but always still on edge, wondering when I will screw up and end up in the wrong place at the wrong time, doing exactly the wrong thing.

They take my backpack, send me downstairs and we wait some more. On TV, the first TV I have seen since I arrived in Guatemala that wasn’t for sale on the black market, is news of the earthquake in Chile. It is frightening since just four days earlier we had had two in Guatemala. Small and short-lived, but there is no doubting that the plates in this area of the world are on the move. In fact, in orientation on my first day, I was duly warned by Emmy that volcanic eruptions were not the worry of Antigua, but that they were well overdue for a significant earthquake. In the likely event of this happening, my instructions are to stand in a doorway.

Finally, without any security efforts, the boarding begins and I look out on the tarmak to see three prop planes. As I follow a file of people that have the same number on their ticket as I do, I realize I am on the smallest of the three. We lift off at sunrise and I begin the most terrifying 45 minutes of my life.

Locked inside this tiny tube with 14 people, the child who held the string that dangled my plane would not stop jumping around. We swung and tipped from side to side. Having a nice view through the cockpit to the sky beyond, I would grip my seat every time I saw a cloud approaching that I knew we would enter and bounce through. I wrote an entire will in my head with full awareness that nothing would survive our crash, including my brains.

When we landed in Flores, I was medicated with the one Ativan I found in my purse and more grateful to be alive then any previous Guatemalan experience had left me.

Spotting the Jungle Lodge sign, Carlos put me off to the side and collected two more women. We were off to Tikal. We entered the National Park through a gate that I later learned to be the Mayan arch, a very ineffective angled arch that the ancient Maya used but would invariably collapse over time. We drove through the lush tropical jungle, keeping an eye out for the jaguar that the driver had spotted there some days earlier.

The Jungle Lodge was awesome. Because we were early we couldn’t check in so we dropped our bags and got ready for our walking tour of the park. We picked up this cool older couple who were dressed in a full hiking ensemble like they were straight out of a magazine. Binoculars, bucket hats, and belts with several carabinered attachments. The gentleman had had knee surgery just a few weeks earlier which granted us a truck ride into the jungle to Temple V.

Echoing the attitude that I found elsewhere in Guatemala – that you are responsible for yourself and your safety – visitors are welcome to climb virtually anything they want in Tikal. Besides the one or two temples that were deemed especially crumbly and dangerous, you were invited to journey up the stair-stepped ruins. An exception was Temple IV, the tallest and under restoration. Here, the park had built a switch back wood stair to get to the main plateau. We climbed then stood, well over the top of the rainforest, looking out at the other temples poking out of the canopy and doing our best to not look down over the edge. Oh my god, I am standing on top of an ancient Mayan pyramid!

Semuc Champey is considered a cloud forest but this is a tropical jungle. Dense with trees and vines, the wildlife knows to stay out of the path of people, but were you to venture in just a few feet, you would surely meet something that would scare the bejesus out of you. The view from above the canopy in this protected National Park really gives you a sense of the world gone wild; the world as it was.

As it turns out, Carlos is probably the best guide in all of northern Guatemala. He lived his whole life in this region and was very well read. He studies ancient Mayan civilization and subscribes to the BBC History magazine. He was going to enlighten us on the ways of the Maya and the second most accurate time-keeping system ever created by humans, next to the atomic clock. And not only is he knowledgeable, he is a great story teller and can provide context; he painted a picture of what it was like to live as an ancient Mayan.

After navigating the rocky face of Temple IV, both up and down, we rested under a tree at its base. Carlos started to tell us about the calendar. The Mayan calendar is said to predict the end of the world as we know it, the Apocalype. Countless prophets since them have also seen the date of December 21, 2012 as a moment of Great Change or of Spiritual Transistion, or sometimes simply considered The End.

Carlos demonstrated the counting system of the Maya, that is derived from a base number of 20 (as we use a base of 10 digits). Using lines, dots and shells in specific positions, these three symbols add up to the various numbers. Maya math is actually simple and elegant. These three symbols can even be found, although seldom noticed, on the modern Guatemalan Quetzales.

This exercise in Maya math demonstrated a larger point… the ancient Mayas were NOT prophets. They were mathematicians and astronomers. They studied the sky with incredible detail and devised a remarkably accurate and decidedly complex almanac that described the position of heavenly bodies and their relationships over time. And just as December 31st flips our timekeeping back to January 1st in the modern day Gregorian calendar, the extended movement of entities in the sky forced a very long calendar, called the Long Count, the equivalent of 7,885 solar years. That particular calendar is reaching its flip point in just 2.5 years.

This practical view settled me down some, but I believe (or want to believe) that the end of 2012 will still mark the transition between Ages. There are dozens of theories about what that could mean and I have read about many of them (try The Mystery of 2012: Predictions, Prophecies and Possibilities which is a compilation of essays by experts in the study) but my great hope is that it is an Age of Awakening. A moment we are working toward with the activities and gradual enlightenment of today’s humans toward a more natural and harmonic experience on this Earth.

After a more thorough tour of Tikal, with dozens of stories and revelations about life within this sophisticated civilization, Carlos gave us some options for what we could do next. We three women opted for ziplining. This time we rode wires amongst the leaves and creatures of a tropical rainforest (and much lower than the starting point for my first zipline experience). We chatted with a spyder monkey who looked at us with curiosity and laughed at our guide as he hung upside-down-backwards on his run between trees.

I was awakened the next morning by the very loud jungle life but was so exhausted that not even the real possibility of monkeys outside my door could get me to leave the comfort of my mosquito-net-wrapped bed. Once we were up and fed, Carlos took us on some more adventures before our scheduled 5pm flight. Back in the van, we drove through the sad story of Guatemala ravaged, of politicians giving away land untouched for thousands of years to poor farmers who took away the forest to plant unsuccessful farms. Not yet understanding the necessity to live in balance with the earth that sustains them, we passed mile after mile of stripped land.

Yaxhá-Nakúm-Naranjo National Park or simply Yaxhá, was actually the site of Survivor: Guatemala. Lesser known than Tikal, we virtually had the park to ourselves. On entering, we heard the most hellacious screaming sounds which incited a comical blend of fear and the feeling that Disney put speakers in the bushes to create ambiance. We soon came upon the source – warring tribes of Howler Monkeys. The second loudest animal on Earth after the elephant (although wikipedia says they are the loudest land animal), and said to be heard for 3 miles, the males were growling more than howling in the trees directly above us. It was very unnerving. Check out the video here to hear.

Being relatively alone in this archeological site was very cool. Survivor dropped something to the tune of $4 million to film here and much of that paid for the painstaking excavation of the sites. As in Tikal, you can see hills of earth and trees all around you and only on closer inspection realize that there are pyramids or other structural complexes underneath. It is no surprise these places went undiscovered for so long.

Mayan history is an interesting story of bloodshed and cannibalism and Guatemalans are still hesitant to discuss these details, as if it would somehow reflect badly on them. At the same time, racism against the modern and majority Maya is prevalent and they may have reasons to forget some things of their past. That said, creeping around their homes, seeing where they slept and worshipped and hearing stories of their rise and fall made for a fascinating day.

We found ourselves upon a site where three temples face in at each other in perfect formation and as with all temples, in perfect northern alignment. It was quickly obvious that the one to ascend was the tallest and after the first few dozen feet, I resorted to hands-and-knees climbing. This temple was different than those in Tikal as you could reach the absolute top. The base, at probably 60 feet across narrowed to a 10 foot square at its peak and we were once again well above the trees. I swelled with gratitude for being able to stand in this spot, contemplating the progression of time, of earth, of humanity as well as the possibility of an earthquake shaking me off this precarious perch. I wish I could have stayed there for hours, or infinity. Perhaps I will. I think it can be a place I take myself when I need a reprieve or a remembrance of perspective gained. It was powerful and tranquil; permanent and weathered; a place of long ago and of a newly discovered today. It was and can be home.

This entry was posted by Rachel on Wednesday, May 12th, 2010 at 2:58 pm and is filed under Community, Doing Good, Guatemala, Office News, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.