3 Days Trekking in the Jungle

I’ve fallen far enough behind in my blogging that I’m going to skip ahead to the present and then maybe I’ll fill in the gap later. Part of the problem was my week-long boycott of the two Internet cafes on Ambergris Caye Island in Belize. One charged $10 per hour and the other charged $5 per 15 minutes but included a mixed drink with each period. Now, I’m in Guatemala where the cost is back around a dollar an hour.

Shannon and I are currently in Flores, an island on Lake Peten Itza in the North of Guatemala. The island is a tourist haven amongst the hot, poor jungle villages surrounding the lake. From here I left four days ago on a three-day 35-mile hike to the Mayan ruins sites of El Zotz and Tikal and just got back yesterday evening.

The first day started with breakfast in Flores at 7AM, and then a two hour taxi ride down a gravel road to the village of El Cruce. Since it was Saturday, the town children didn’t have school and about a dozen of them came out to watch us prepare for the trip. Two of the smaller children ran away as soon as I smiled at them and never returned, but the others surrounded us and just stared silently at us as we waited for our guides to prepare the horses for the trek. The children got especially excited when showed them pictures and small video clips of themselves on our digital cameras. After traveling through all of the tourist towns of Mexico where it seems that every child asks for a peso, it was refreshing to meet these kids who were just around us out of curiosity.

I was accompanied by an Israeli student (Igal, 26 years-old) taking a break between finishing his Bachelor’s degree and beginning his Master’s, and a French girl (Sonya, 28 years-old) who is a comptroller for a German bank in England. Shannon had decided to sit this adventure out in Flores. Starting the trek with us were two guides and a helper who maintained the two horses carrying camping equipment, food, and water. Our primary guide, Eduardo, is 17 years-old and is finishing his final year of high-school before he goes to a nearby university next year. He proved to be very knowledgeable about the local plants and animals, and he has a great eye for spotting birds and other animals hidden in the jungle. He spoke only Spanish, but slowly enough that I never had a problem communicating with him and understanding his descriptions of birds and traditional medicinal uses of the plants.

This first day of hiking started with a 13-mile hike taking us 6 hours along a dirt road under the intense sun. In this part of the trek, Eduardo spotted and pointed out several birds in the nearby trees. The most spectacular was the toucan, a large black bird with green tipped feathers and a giant banana-yellow beak – it strongly resembles the Fruit-Loops bird. In the Belize zoo, I had gotten a better up-close view of a toucan, but it was much more exciting to see the big bird flying free in its natural habitat.

We finally arrived at camp around five o’clock in the afternoon, where the guides prepared our dinner of pepper tea from leaves that we had picked on the hike and vegetable soup, and they set up hammocks covered by personal mosquito nets for us to sleep in. If you’ve never seen a mosquito net, it’s something like a mesh tent that ties onto the hammock ropes and then hangs over the hammock to the ground. A picture will describe it much better than my words.
That evening, we took a short hike to a cave entrance where some medium size insect-eating bats were coming and going. We waited about five minutes until suddenly thousands and thousands of tiny fruit-eating bats burst out of a higher cave entrance. It took them about 5 minutes to exit, making giant black clouds of bats in the sky, and then it was all over. We were told that they would all return in the same fashion early the next morning.

When we returned from the bat caves, we ate our soup, played a few rounds of cards by candlelight, and then around 9PM went to climb into our hammocks for the night. When we got to our beds, there was the most giant cockroach I’ve ever imagined climbing the outside of Sonya’s mosquito net. It was nearly four inches long and two inches across. It was much more of a small animal than a bug, so that when Sonya insisted that I kill it, I only chased it away instead. Throughout the night we could hear the amazing screams of the howler monkeys. Their yells are so deep and resonating that the first time Shannon and I had heard them back in Palenque, Mexico, we were certain that they must be coming from an animal as big as a hippopotamus. I never slept too well that night, and I was woken up around 11PM when Sonya was again disturbed by a giant cockroach that had managed to get under her mosquito net, attached itself on the underside of her hammock, and started fluttering its wings. Knowing that otherwise I’d have no chance of sleeping, I killed this one for her.

The next morning, Sunday, was an early one. At 5AM, Eduardo woke us up and took us to the ruins of El Zotz, two grand temples, around 5 stories in height, in the middle of nothing but jungle. The temples have not been excavated, so the past two thousand years have left them looking like unusually steep hills of dirt with grass, trees, and exposed rocks here and there. We climbed to the top of one of the towers with the hopes that we’d have a clear view of the temples of Tikal some 25 miles away when the sun rose. ¡Que lástima! What a pity! The clouds where too heavy that morning, and the view never happened. But, from the top of the temple, we got our first close up visit by the spider monkeys. They’re about the size of a three year old child, black with white bellies, and expressive little faces. This family of about five monkeys approached us from the treetops just higher than the temples. They never got too close, no less than about 30 feet away, and as they moved in the treetops circling us, they never took their eyes off of us. They were clearly as intrigued by people as we were them. I’m quite certain that if they had cameras, they would have taken our pictures to show their friends!
We returned to the campsite by about 8AM, ate some fresh pineapple and cantaloupe for breakfast, and then went back to rest until noon. Sonya didn’t have time for the entire three day journey, so at this point, she returned by horse with the second guide, leaving me, Igal, Eduardo, the horse helper, and one horse for the next stage of the trip.

After lunch of scrambled eggs, refried black beans, and tortillas, we set off for an 8 mile, 4 hour hike through jungle brush, over and under fallen trees to the second campsite. Along the way, we encountered dozens more little spider monkeys. Now, we were down on the ground far below the treetops where the monkeys are born and live their entire lives. But apparently, they found us quite threatening and did their best to scare us away. They would spread out eagle facing straight down at us holding four branches with their arms and legs and a fifth branch with their tails and begin to shake violently in an attempt to scare us away. The sights of this ridiculous, non-threatening behavior by these cute little monkeys only made us want to stay longer and watch. One group of monkeys even resorted to breaking off sticks and throwing them down at us to try to make us go away. This was my favorite experience of the trip.

That first campsite was rather sophisticated compared to what we found the second night. The first site was inhabited by three park rangers, who alternately lived 15 days onsite and 15 at their homes. It had a covered kitchen, a clean lawn, wooden benches and a table, and water tanks to catch the rain. I even got to use a small bucket of water to wash myself in the morning. The second site was nothing but two palm-thatched roofs – one to sleep under and one for the kitchen. The kitchen palapa was infested by giant mud termite nests and the roof was half eaten away. Our guides prepared spaghetti for dinner and served us on the dirt floor. I was exhausted and fell asleep in my hammock by 7:30PM, and didn’t wake once until 4:30 the next morning when the guides were up and preparing hot milk for our corn flakes. All of these hot foods – tea, soup, hot cereal – were in no way refreshing in the 100% humidity and heat of the jungle. This morning, the man with the horse headed back home, leaving just me, Igal, and Eduardo to finish the final stage.

The last day was a tough one for me with another 13 mile, 7-hour hike through thick jungle brush to our final destination of the fantastic ruins of the Mayan city of Tikal. Along the way, we saw more birds, butterflies, insects, tarantulas, lizards, snakes, and one sighting of the easily heard, but seldom seen Howler Monkey. The one I saw was a bit smaller than me and he was just lying on a branch, seemingly effortlessly making his incredible scream for no apparent reason.

Around 1PM, we finally arrived at Tikal. Eduardo departed at this point and left me and Igal to explore the ruins before catching a bus back to Flores. It started to rain, which I welcomed, being that I hadn’t had any shower that day, and no real shower for almost three days. So as the other visitors ran for cover, Igal and I started our tour. The ruins are quite different than the pyramids that I had visited in Mexico. Tikal is a vast city spread out under the jungle canopy, consisting of high temples and a pair of relatively small, steep pyramids. From the top of the temple, I could look across the jungle and see other temples poking up out of the trees.

This trip pushed me physically pretty close to my limits, but now that I’m back in the comfort of the city, I already remember it well.